Blue (close enough) Iris.

[Ysarex122]

True blue flowers are rather rare so the use of "blue" in naming flowers is liberally applied. From my wife's garden.

Joe

 

[tirediron]

Very nice.

 

[Ysarex122]

Very nice.

Thanks, my wife has many showier irises, but I'm partial to this one.

Joe

 

[DarkShadow]

Thats a gorgeous shot.I love water drops on plants,flowers even a simple leaf makes it more dramatic I think.I don't know what it is about flower shots,but I have seen on other forums that people crank the colors so much, there is no detail left in the flowers at all.Not here, this is nicely done.

 

[weepete]

Very nice Joe, great colour on that plant!

 

[Gary A.]

Nice.

 

[Derrel]

We have some large iris growers here in the Willamette Valley...Schreiner's has been at it for 90 years now...the city of Keizer has an annual Iris Festival, which is concluding today. My grandfather was in the commercial iris growing business during WW II and for a few years afterwards, when the Dutch bulb and cut flower trade was basically inaccessible to North America. You iris pic is so pretty it makes me consider going to Schreiner's before the show garden closes on May 31 and shooting some iris images.

Shop Iris Iris Varieties A - C

 

[Ysarex122]

We have some large iris growers here in the Willamette Valley...Schreiner's has been at it for 90 years now...the city of Keizer has an annual Iris Festival, which is concluding today. My grandfather was in the commercial iris growing business during WW II and for a few years afterwards, when the Dutch bulb and cut flower trade was basically inaccessible to North America. You iris pic is so pretty it makes me consider going to Schreiner's before the show garden closes on May 31 and shooting some iris images.

Shop Iris Iris Varieties A - C

Yep, my wife knows Schreiner's real well. She's transplanting tomatoes right now and I yelled, "heard of Schriener's," and she started in with a description of what they sell and where they are -- said they're probably the biggest if not best known bulb seller in the US.

Irises are one of my favorites.

In this photo I was actually doing a little experimenting. I have a 60mm Rodagon I use as a macro and close-up lens on my Fuji for this kind of photo, but that sometimes makes me get down on my knees or do a lot of bending and twisting to avoid the other flowers etc. So I rarely shoot long lenses but just in case the need would arise I bought an old 150mm Pentax M42 lens dirt cheap. So I used that for this photo. It got me real far away from the flower and I didn't have to trample the tulips. It's not as sharp as the Rodagon and I had some CA that caused me a little trouble, but I got a couple decent photos.

Joe

 

[Ysarex122]

Very nice Joe, great colour on that plant!

Thanks -- getting the color right took a little finagling.

Nice.

Thanks,

Joe

 

[Derrel]

Yeah...I went to the Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival this year and took my 50-135/3.5 manual focus + polarizer as my "general lens", and a 24 as a wide and a 90mm macro...tulips, everywhere...I found the 90mm macro was just too wide, and I'd have to get down on my still-kind-of-bad left knee to get the kind of isolation I wanted...I know what you mean...looooong lens for closeups makes backgrounds narrower in angle, easier to control, "tidier" with less effort dodging the other flowers. if I go to Schreiner's, I think I will go with my 300/4, which focuses down to about 4 feet on its own, and add a 12mm extension tube if needed, so I can get some nice "isolation shots" of blooms without needing to be super-close.

 

[Ysarex122]

Thats a gorgeous shot.I love water drops on plants,flowers even a simple leaf makes it more dramatic I think.I don't know what it is about flower shots,but I have seen on other forums that people crank the colors so much, there is no detail left in the flowers at all.Not here, this is nicely done.

We've been getting a lot of rain -- fine by me, and I often run out with the camera after a shower.

Highly saturated colors are very common with flowers and they're difficult. Highly saturated red in particular is a problem. I don't think it's so much a case of people manipulating the photos as it is they don't know what to do. In many cases they're shooting JPEGs. I don't know any camera image processor that can handle the red in a common Knock Out rose. Here's an example:

That's the JPEG straight out of my Fuji XE-2, all I did was size it down. The red channel is nuked into oblivion. People get this all the time from every major camera brand and there's no good solution if you're shooting camera JPEGs because the camera JPEG software can't NOT screw this up.

With a photo like the above people will commonly be told it's overexposed and they should try reducing the exposure. The raw file exposure for this photo is a textbook example of nailed. If you reduce exposure because of the reds you reduce exposure for everything.

Setting a custom white balance will help and the camera software will do better but not better enough. This is case where knowing how to process the raw file is really the only good solution. You need to keep the red highly saturated because it was, but you need to keep the detail as well and not clip the red channel.

Joe