Drama Queen

While I was in Chile I saw some absolutely beautiful flowers. This columbine was blooming in the garden on one of ranches ("estancias", as they are called) where we stayed. The flower was perfect and beautiful, but the surroundings not so much.

So I used the LensBaby Sol 45 to add a creative blur which certainly helped. But as you can see in this Before version, even that was not enough to make the flower the star of the show.

BEFORE

So Lightroom came to the rescue. I wanted the flower to stand out, but I also wanted the tall stem behind it and the mottled background to add to the story.

The strong sunlight caused the leaves in the background to appear almost white, and they needed to be toned down in order to not take attention away from the flower.

And overall, the background competed with the flower and also needed to be toned down.

Here are the tools used in Lightroom to change this image into a more dramatic rendition of the scene. But first a word of caution - this degree of drama changes the look of the actual scene and might not be allowed in certain photo competitions. So if you plan to enter nature competitions, be sure to check the rules and make sure that these sorts of major changes are allowed. Note that nothing in this image was actually changed or eliminated, but even so, it does render the scene completely differently from the original. In this case I was going for a dramatic look, and not a standard shot of the scene itself.

Steps used in Lightroom:
- reduced Whites and Highlights to tone down the bright leaves in the background
- used the Green luminance slider in the HSL box to tone down the greens in the background
- used the Purple luminance slider in the HSL box to brighten the tone of the flower
- used the Graduated Filter tool to tone down the background even more
- used the Brush Tool to darken small areas in the background that the Graduated Filter tool missed
- reduced Noise to 30
- increased Clarity to 30

That's it. It doesn't sound like much, but those few steps in Lightroom helped to turn this image into a much more dramatic scene.

TECH SPECS
1/320 sec., f/3.5 (fixed aperture on LensBaby Sol 45), ISO 400. LensBaby Sol 45 lens on Canon 5D Mark III body. Handheld.

TODAY'S QUOTE: "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."  --Henry David Thoreau