Pointy reds and creamy pinks

[ELAY]

Purple coneflower, taken today with my reversing-ring macro setup. Sorry for the vignetting -- that's what happens when you go cheap. I don't think I want to crop any more from the left, and i am nowhere near gifted enough with the clone brush to fill in. I fooled around a bit with perspective control to bend the corners of the photo around, but I ended up with very visible joins. Oh well.



I put a couple more up, with a bit of commentary, over in the macro forum.

Cheers,

EL

[Todd]

nature is so amazing I think it is nice even with the thing to the left.

[ELAY]

Vignette was bugging me.

Bit of cutting and pasting, cloning, smoothing, a gradient or two -- an hour or so later this is what I get. Not bad but not perfect:



When I go to upload it, I see my original posted shot, but cropped square in the way Flickr does with thumbnails -- it actually looks alright cropped:



Should have saved myself some time and aggravation.

EL

[trelaflip]

I like the first one but seriously an hour for that other edit.
I don't think I ever spent more then 10 minutes on a photo in post processing.

[ELAY]

Alright, maybe not an hour straight -- I may have been interrupted from time to time. But it was a while -- the vignette was bugging me, the work is picky, and I'm not very good at it.

EL

[jiminyClickit]

ELAY,

Your end result is all that matters, haste making waste and all that.

Saw these earlier in Technique: fascinating. The square crop can eliminate repetitive detail (the pink) while allowing you to keep a stronger part (the orange/yellow). Well done, effort rewarded.

[kunaldaswani]

I really like the first one a lot! Great shot!!

[ELAY]

Jim --

Thanks for your thoughts. I was trying to get a shot with both the pointy bits and petal in it; I appreciate your views on their relative interestingness (if that's a word). Always nice to have you weigh in.

Kunal --

Thanks for the kind words.

EL

[Teewinot]

ELAY, beautiful color juxtaposition...bunnies ate my purple cone flowers before they even budded, so I'm glad you got to enjoy photographing yours! I really like the pattern details and sharp/soft contrast. Nice work! I prefer your square crop, btw. Just wondering, how exactly did the vignette happen? I guess I'm not totally clear on what you mean by reverse-ring macro...is it an extender that invades your frame because it sticks out too much? Just curious...

Nice work!

EDIT: just read your explanation in the macro photography section...no need to explain again here! very interesting indeed.

[ELAY]

Hi Teewinot --

The reversing ring is a bit of a cumbersome apparatus -- basically I mount a zoom and then, using the ring, reverse mount my 50 to it. The ring goes into the filter threads on the fronts of both lenses.

Here's a quick and undistinguished pic of the thing sitting on my desk (sorry I couldn't show it on the camera -- had to shoot with something).



The ring is in between the two lenses, joining them front to front. I mount the zoom (lower lens) to my D40, and the mounting end of the 50 is actually out front.

The vignetting is caused, I think, by the fact that the back elements of the 50 are narrower than the front elements, so the lens limits the field of the light coming into the zoom. We end up sort of seeing the silhouette of the 50 around the edges of the photo -- kind of the effect you would expect if you were shooting through a narrowish tube.

I have a couple more shots and some commentary over in the Macros forum.

EL

EDIT -- Just saw your edit -- that's too funny. One stop shopping in Critique now.