I enjoy taking pictures of spring wildflowers. I have been doing it a long time, though. It can be challenging to capture the flowers some way that brings something new. Standard, straight-on shots of these flowers are common, and I have plenty in my catalog already. I enjoy them. Technical perfection is always a worthy goal, so I continue to take the straight shots. But I’m always looking for something that brings a new perspective.
Bloodroot
One avenue I have pursued is images taken in ultraviolet light. However, that is not what I have done here. Yet somehow it looks a lot like what a UV shot converted to black and white would look like. In this case, I simply applied a blue-filter black-and-white preset. This preset is a standard preset that comes pre-installed in Aperture. Normally the effect is subtle between the various colored filter presets. But today it really made a big difference. It turned the normally yellow-orange central part of the bloodroot flower, especially the anthers which hold the pollen, to a bold black. Small specks that appear on the petals are more pollen grains. It’s quite a change, even more striking to someone like myself who is very familiar with this particular flower. It is probably just the interacting of the very bold, almost primary colors of the anthers with the contrasting color of the filter, effectively canceling each other out to produce the black. Nevertheless, it makes you take a second look at the image, which is what gets every photographer excited. And this filter preset was a heck of a lot cheaper than a UV pass filter.
The camera was a Nikon D90. The lens was the Micro-Nikkor 60mm AF. I keep a 1B haze filter on the lens all the time, mainly for protection. All post-processing is done in Aperture.
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