Posted July 25th, 2012

The Garden of 2012

It has been a very cool, dull and wet summer here, at least until very recently, but that has allowed the wildflowers to flourish and endure. The open hillsides and fields are masses of blooms. However, these mostly are not colourful and showy flowers and the terrain tends to be cluttered with random other vegetation and dead debris. I have struggled to capture the sense of floral abundance in a photograph and achieve a pleasing composition. Those challenges were present in this scene but I saw some potential for an image against the forest backdrop in the soft light at the edge of dusk. I could not achieve the front to back sharpness I wanted by setting a small aperture at the required focal length so I took 6 shots focused at different points to cover the range and combined them in Photoshop with focus stacking. The result was not satisfying even after much tonal manipulation. André Gallant’s digital “dreamscape” technique to the rescue! The blurring subdued the clutter and, more importantly, the profusion of blossoms was brought into prominence as I had perceived when I was inspired to make the photograph.
Pentax K-5, Tamron AF 18-250mm f/3.5-6.3 DiII LD IF Macro @ 47.5mm, f/9.5