A pair of flowers; one white, one deep red. I shot this at the garden section at Wal-Mart; the flowers were already close together, but I moved them closer. It’s a good combination. I got as close as my lens would focus to cut out the background.
I under-exposed compared to my camera’s meter on purpose, as it was blowing out the whites in the auto-exposure mode. In Photoshop, I desaturated everything, but left color in the red flower and a bit of green in the leaves. I didn’t go all the way to black and white, as I feel the green adds to the mood. Then, it was just a matter of darkening everything and adding in some contrast. I also cloned out distracting highlights at the top and burned the corners slightly.
Canon Rebel XTi, EF 50mm 1:1.4, 1/125, F3.5, 50mm, ISO400, 2008-05-04T18:54:55-04, 20080504-225455rxt
Download the high-res JPEG or download the source image (Canon Rebel XTi RAW file).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp and link here.
Richard X. Thripp at 2009-11-23T23:52:42.Hello Dave! I don’t get any business from this, but I’ve seen a few people use my photos. The “perfected high-res JPEG” just means I’ve done editing in Photoshop such as dodging, burning, cloning, etc. The RAW file is like a digital negative; you can edit it a million different ways and both the RAW file and the JPEG (or TIFF) final is important just like a 35mm negative and your 8*10 enlargement are equally important.
As for taking photos in JPEG mode, that’s fine if you know you won’t edit them. The strength of RAW is when you want to do major contrast edits or bring out dark sections of the photo.
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