Skip to main content

52 Week Challenge – Week 3: Artistic – Red

This week’s challenge was an artistic challenge that stated the focus of the image should be red.  Therefore, this week I shot a red rose using macro lens, which filled whole frame with red producing a bit of an abstract image.   For this shoot, I used red roses that I misted with water set in a tabletop studio box.  I used a 60mm macro lens on my camera, which was mounted on a tripod.  I also used two external 430EX II speed lights.   I used an aperture of F2.8, with a shutter speed of 1/2 second and an aperture of F4 with a shutter speed of 1/100s both at ISO 400.

After taking the images I imported them into light room and adjusted the them because Cannon occasionally have issues with red. In this case, the red was too bright and was not the actual color of the rose.  Thus, I darkened the image, increased the clarity a bit, and increased contrasted.  I then did a creative edit on the image that faded it to give it a more antique look. 
 
Original Image Straight Out of Camera
First Edit Round
Antique Look
The second image was also a bit washed out so I adjusted it by darkening it a bit. I then cropped the image using the rule of thirds placing the center on a sweet spot.  I then upped the clarity and slightly sharpened the image. I then darkened the edges a bit to draw the eye to the center of the rose. 

Original Image Straight Out of Camera

Edited Image

I ended up taking 95 images and keeping 18 images.  I noticed I was being more selective since the images were very similar, which is normal for a still life.  Overall, I’m happy with the final images. Next week the challenge goes back to portrait, this time of another person. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2025 Year in Review and Looking Forward to 2026

This year was a bit interesting especially since during the day, I’m a government employee, which resulted in a lot of stress and a 42-day furlough.  I didn’t attend as many cosplay events with the D.C Cosplay group, now Costume and Camera, as I normally would have, due to schedule conflicts.  However, I traveled up to Poughkeepsie, New York for two photo events, one of which I was a featured photographer.  I attended two conventions, one of which didn’t turn out as expected and the other just confirmed my decision to take a break from it.  Though happily I did a lot of studio work this year, which I enjoyed.  But on the other hand, I lost my dear “studio supervisor”, my dog Teddy.  He liked to great clients and then “supervise” while lying/sleeping in his bed. I also started to work on the business side of my photography work, by investing in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) site to manage bookings, schedules, and payments. No more trying to juggle...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cyber Blue

On October 11 th , I worked with Dayvon on a cyber concept shoot. This shoot was designed around a pair of contact lens with a circuit board pattern. This inspired me to think about things like “Blade Runner”, “Tron” and cyber punk in general.    For this shoot I used: Canon 80D 2 Speed lights 2 Phottix strobes 2 Phottix Rectangular Softboxes with a grid 2 C-stands Blue gels Silver garage insulation Backdrop stand Black backdrop Connectable foam workout mats For this shoot I started out using four lights. The first two were small speed lights with blue gels attached placed on the floor aimed at the backdrop.  The backdrop was silver garage insulation, which looks like silver bubble wrap. The backdrop reflected the blue light forward providing a bit of rim light.  My main two lights were the strobes is rectangular soft boxes with grids attached. For this shoot I kept the lighting very low key, styled along that of a photo of Ryan Gosling i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Return to the National Portrait Gallery

On February 28th, I attended the  Costume & Camera  (previously DC Cosplay Photoshoots) event at the National Portrait Gallery in DC.  I have a love/hate relationship with shooting at the National Portrait Gallery; it is a beautiful location due to its architecture, especially on the third floor, and I’m thankful that you are allowed to do portrait photography there as long as you don’t use flash.  What I get frustrated with is the varying colors of light throughout the building and the need to use natural or continuous light.  (I’m a flash girly.)  For this event, I used: Canon R6 24 - 105mm lens Neewer 12-inch LED light Assistant Camera Settings: This shoot was inside the Portrait Gallery, which has a no flash policy, thus I was using a mix of natural and continuous lighting, which affects settings. My ISO ranged from 100 ISO to 3200 ISO with the most common ISO being ISO 1000.  My aperture stayed between F4 and F5, with the most c...
Post a Comment
Read more