“It is true that in the natural progress of the seasons we have certain colours predominating at certain periods. The earliest colour scheme of the garden, as of the world beyond its walls, is yellow and white; this is followed by the rose colors of late spring and early summer when fruit blossoms and then Roses adorn the world. Next come the blue and yellow of midsummer which deepen to scarlet, gold, and purple…..
“This natural scheme of colour we may modify or accentuate as much as we like, but to choose it as sort a sort of underlying theme much simplifies our work, since there are always plenty of good and willing flowers decked in the prevailing colours of the season.
“No occupation known to me is so absorbing as distributing and arranging flowers in the garden with a view to creating beautiful pictures….”
“I’m actively working on a number of themes these days. Some involve a specific subject matter, others result from a fascination with specific locations… and some that at this time can only be described as abstract or immature concepts….
“I realized that I need a new word to describe these ongoing efforts and decided on ‘explorations.’ An exploration is sparked by a desire to understand something, to learn about it, to spend time with it, to tell its story (or mine) without defining a specific outcome in advance. Like a project, I know it will often result in something useful (images, portfolios, books, ideas, personal satisfaction, etc.), but until I know what it is, I find ample and sustained reward in merely being engaged in something that interests and fascinates me: a journey that is more important than any preconceived destination.”
“With legions of yellow and orange lilies available, the dedicated lily lover might consider themselves well served by both plant and colour.”
Hello!
If you’ve come around here now and then, you’ve seen that I often use Lightroom brushes on my photos to paint the backgrounds black as a way of accentuating each image’s main subject. I usually do that as an after-thought; that is, when I’m working through my images in post-processing, I decide that the background is a distraction and opt to get rid of it — sometimes partially, most of the time entirely. There are, of course, different ways to create dark backgrounds when shooting; but many of them aren’t really suitable for outdoor photography using natural light… especially for a shooter like me who likes to take only one lens on each shoot, and leave my flash gear or other supplemental lighting at home.
While working on the white lily photos I featured in two previous posts (see White Lilies (1 of 2) and White Lilies (2 of 2), though, I started wondering if I would have taken the photos differently if I was shooting them with the intention of removing the backgrounds afterward in Lightroom. Would I, for example, use different camera settings? think of lighting in a different way? compose the subjects differently?
To produce pitch-black backgrounds in Lightroom, I reuse a brush preset I created with these settings…
… which will change all brushed areas in the image to their darkest possible values, with saturation and noise set as shown to blur and soften any blips of light or color that still want to peek through the darkened background elements. After completing a “first draft” on a set of photos — adjusting exposure and colors, removing spots, and sometimes cropping — I use a Lightroom brush to outline around the edges of the subject like this:
The outline brush is feathered — as you can see above from the soft edges of the fluorescent green masking — since the shape of the subject varies throughout and its boundaries consist of curved lines and contours. Think of this like painting a wall where there is floor molding of a different color: one of the first things you might do is pick a small brush of suitable size (and bristle density) to paint a thin line of the wall color just above the molding. If you use a brush that’s too large, you’ll likely slop paint onto the molding you’re trying to protect, and have to remove it. If I zoom into a section of the photo I’m working on, you can see something similar near the top of the bloom…
… where the green mask covers part of the petal. I remove that with Lightroom’s Erase brush, and zoom in along all the edges of the flower to remove the mask from any other areas where it’s bled onto the subject.
I then use the same sized brush but without feathering to outline the subject one more time…
… and finally use a larger brush — also without feathering — to paint the rest of the background, effectively converting it to all-black. Turning off the feathering for these last two steps is like using a wider paintbrush in our wall-painting metaphor: you can cover a larger area quickly with more paint and fewer strokes (or mouse movements!).
Here’s the transition through the three steps, first with the mask showing and then with the mask turned off. Turning the mask off and on repeatedly as I apply it lets me see my progress and make sure that I’ve covered everything behind the flower.
The most time-consuming part of this workflow is the first step — outlining the subject with the feathered brush — so I tackle that right off the bat and then finish the rest of the background like a guy slinging finger-paint on poster paper. I’ve experimented a little with doing the same thing in Photoshop instead of Lightroom; and while it’s sometimes easier to mask the subject then flip the background black in Photoshop — the most detailed masking in Photoshop or Lightroom seem to require about the same amount of effort. So I stick with Lightroom, and don’t have to add Photoshop to my workflow to get these results.
With all this in mind, I altered how I took the photos for this series of posts to allow for what I’ve learned about making it easier and more accurate to convert their backgrounds to all-black. Selecting and masking around the subject works best when it’s as in-focus as possible, with good contrast and sharpness between the foreground and background. Since the amount of light and color that reaches the camera’s sensor is determined by a combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings — the exposure triangle — I wanted to figure out if different exposure settings would improve my ability to remove the backgrounds.
So I started with an assumption that a higher ISO setting would give me more flexibility in choosing shutter speed and aperture, and experimented with ISOs in the range of 800 to 3200 to see what worked best. ISO 3200 introduced a bit too much grain into the photos; and while I could remove a lot of it in Lightroom, the images ended out softer than I wanted with porous edges around the subject that were difficult to mask. ISO 800 or 1600 provided a good balance between sharpness and grain, so I took about half of the photos at ISO 800 and half at ISO 1600. Either setting gave me what I wanted: a few extra stops of available light with an aperture setting that increased depth of field so that the flower blossoms were well-focused from front to back. Shutter speed settings didn’t matter that much; I only needed a high enough shutter speed to eliminate camera shake and stop the flowers from dancing in a light summer breeze. Any shutter speed greater than 100 worked good enough.
I took all of the photos with the same lens — a Sony 18-250mm zoom lens — whose great advantage is that (though it’s not technically a macro lens) I can get as close as 18 inches from a subject, and get decent focus even when zoomed to 250 millimeters. This lens works well at Oakland cemetery’s gardens since many of the planted areas are set two or three feet above ground level, or the flowers are blooming where I can’t get close enough to use a macro lens. Finally, since I was going to remove the backgrounds anyway, I could take the photographs from different angles, and could disregard random plants, trees, sticks, or stones that might distract from the subject.
There will be about 100 photos in this project, which is why this post is “1 of 10”. Over the past few weeks, I’ve tried to take a few pictures of ever lily variety I could find at the gardens and ended out with photos of a couple dozen different kinds — colors ranging from yellow to orange, pink to red, and magenta to purple. As I overheard someone telling her friends as they passed me hunched over a batch of lilies: “There’s so many flowers here! It’s like going to the botanical garden, but it’s free!”
🙂
If you read this far: bless you! Below are the first ten photos; more soon!
“In America… revolution has taken place by means of a peculiar process, that of absorption through selection — of people, of ideas, of images, of experiences, of things. Europe was at first an obvious source of inspiration because of its antique heritage, which made American history seem to be part of European, or ‘world,’ history. Very quickly, thanks to the sea traders of the Atlantic coastline, America’s inspiration became global, and the world itself acted as a gigantic museum from which Americans derived their education in self-identity. This process… requiring constant redefinition of America’s physical orientation in terms of changing concepts of global geography and a multitudinous observation of world lifestyles and values, has never ceased….
“Lacking a history and a character, Americans almost inadvertently created them early in the nineteenth century out of world history, world lifestyles, and world ideas…. America’s unity and national character arose, from a generous, indeed limitless, cosmopolitanism that embraced men and ideas from all nations.”
“You have each come to America from different circumstances and different reasons and 16 different nationalities.
“But like previous generations of immigrants, there is one trait you all share in common: courage. It takes courage to get up and leave everything you know… for a new start in the United States of America.
“So I want to thank you all for choosing us, and I mean that sincerely. Thank you for choosing the United States of America, believing that America is worthy of your aspirations, worthy of your dreams.
“Making this journey, you have done more than move to a new place. I’ve often said that America is the only nation in the world founded on an idea. Every other nation in the world is founded on the basis of… geography or ethnicity or religion. You can define… almost everyone else based on those characteristics, but you can’t define America…. We’re an incredibly diverse democracy.
“But there is one thing that does define us a country: We were founded on an idea that, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights… Life, Liberty, [and] the pursuit of Happiness.’ It sounds corny to Americans, as we learn this in grade school and high school. We’ve never fully lived up to it, but we’ve never, ever, ever walked away from it….
“Every generation opens that aperture a little bit wider.”
Hello!
I had never seen a Naturalization Ceremony — from which I excerpted part of President Biden’s speech above — before, but caught yesterday’s just as it was starting. It was quite moving to watch, especially given Biden’s characteristic style, describing everyone there — every new American citizen — as an equal to every other citizen, including the President of the United States. If you would like to read his remarks, click the link above the quotation; or, you can watch the entire ceremony here: President Biden Holds Naturalization Ceremony at White House.
As has become my habit, I’ve assembled a few photos — in red, white, and blue… and this time, with a pair of bees gathering pollen from a freshly opened blue Rose of Sharon bloom — and presented them in the galleries below.
Thanks for taking a look! and Happy Independence Day!
“The greater number of the Lilies look their best when seen among shrubs and green growths of handsome foliage. Their forms are so distinct as well as beautiful that they are much best in separate groups among quiet greenery — not combined with other flowers. This general rule is offered for consideration as applicable to Lilies of white, pink, lemon-yellow, or other tender colourings…. The White Lily, also, which loves sunlight, is so old a garden flower, and seems so naturally to accompany the Cabbage Roses and late Dutch Honeysuckle and other old garden flowers of the early days of July, that one must allow that its place in our gardens is in combination with the other old favourites.”
Hello!
This is the second of two posts featuring white lilies only, from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. I took most of these photos from behind each lily or from a side view, to intentionally emphasize each bloom’s emergence from its long, curved stem. Quite elegant, no? 🙂
“If one might have only one Lily in the garden, it would have to be the beautiful old White Lily that has been with us since the end of the sixteenth century. Although we may take it to be the oldest of its kind in cultivation, we do not by any means know all about its wants and ways. For of all Lilies known in gardens it is what is called the most capricious. When we say a plant is capricious, it is, of course, a veiled confession of ignorance, for whereas we may well believe that the laws that govern the well-being of any plant are more or less fixed, and with most plants we can make sure of the right way of culture; in the case of this Lily we cannot find out what those laws are; and though it has been more than three hundred years in our gardens, we can only give general advice as to where and how it will do well.
“A plant so lovely should be tried in every garden.”
From a multi-day lily hunting expedition at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, I separated out photos of white lilies and “painted” their backgrounds black. Below is the first to two batches.
