Posted September 17th, 2009

Genie in a Tendril

One recent rainy day when I felt inclined to do some photography, I put a macro lens on my camera and went to work on a cucumber plant that I have growing in my sunroom. I made a lot of bad colour photos that day but I also exposed a few with an infrared filter on the lens and the monochrome results from these were more interesting, even though the infrared technique really had little effect on the tonalities. That prompted me to do this black and white conversion of an unfiltered image. I liked the composition and the possibilities for abstraction with the shallow depth of field, but the green hues of the plant defied abstraction and really looked rather ugly. It took some channel remixing, curves adjustments and application of a noise filter to get what I wanted. I generally have little use for black and white photography of natural subjects, but in this case going monochrome turned a reject into a satisfying and intriguing image.
Pentax K10D, Sigma AF 70mm f/2.8 EX DG Macro @ f/2.8