Читать книгу Collins Complete Photography Projects - John Garrett - Страница 50

The great outdoors can be closer than you think, so don’t feel you have to go traipsing over the countryside to find some satisfying pictures – they may be right around the corner.

Keep your eyes peeled when you are out and about, since there will be images to be had close by; familiarity often blinds us to possibilities. You may have a garden of your own that you find quite mundane, but a set of three pictures taken at different times of day and framed together may give a more interesting look than you could easily obtain from a single shot; alternatively, try a single plant photographed at three stages from bud to full bloom and then skeletal seedhead.

For this project, see how many different approaches you can take to a single planting of flowers, trying close ups and more straightforward views. Secondly, shoot a garden in the evening and try to capture that magic time when the flowers glow in the dusk. Take a series as the light falls, using a stable surface such as a table on which to rest your camera if you don’t have a tripod. Choose the best, and if it lacks the colour and glow you are looking for, make some digital adjustments (see Hue and Saturation).

FINDING THE SUBJECT

Walking in my neighbourhood, I found myself in an unfamiliar street and passed this beautiful display of poppies. Here was a neat suburban house, but when I looked into the garden I was able to find pictures that could have been made in the countryside. A portrait of the owner leaning out of the window would have looked great, but unfortunately there was no one at home. Keeping your eyes peeled for a shot always brings rewards, even if you are in apparently unpromising surroundings. 1/500 second at f5.6, 22mm, 400 ISO. GH

ISOLATING A FLOWER

Here I zoomed to telephoto and placed a flower in the centre of the frame. I used a wide aperture to isolate it, with the flowers in the foreground and background thrown out of focus. When you focus on a particular flower in this way, make sure it’s an undamaged one – it’s surprising how the eye can overlook signs of caterpillar damage, for example, which will be the first thing the viewer sees in the photograph. 1/250 second at f5.3, 95mm, 400 ISO. GH

POST-PRODUCTION ADJUSTMENT

This is my interpretation of the poppies – as you can see from the other pictures, they were actually bright red. A botanist would probably hate this, but I was after an artistic impression rather than reality. I cropped the photograph into a square then played about with the Hue and Saturation sliders in the Lightroom Develop module, decreasing the red, green and yellow to make a more muted picture. If you’re photographing flowers for identification they obviously have to look like they do in reality, but for your own creative purposes you can choose to influence their colour. 1/160 second at f6.7, 65mm, 400 ISO. GH

MIDDAY GARDEN

This picture shows how my garden looks in the middle of the day, with soft, cloudy light, normal colour and tones as you would expect in the middle of the summer. 1/125 second at f8, 5.2mm compact camera, 200 ISO. GH

THE GARDEN AT DUSK

As the daylight faded and was replaced by the soft light just before dark, everything seemed to have a bluish-purple glow. I set my camera on the tripod to try to capture that. The pictures certainly look different to the daylight one – they are darker, with more contrast, and look like an evening shot, but they don’t have that magic glow. 1 second at f6.7, 5.2mm compact camera, 400 ISO. GH