It was literally a jumble. This is a huge hedge about 5 ft tall and 20 ft long, and I went nuts trying to find the best cluster of these tiny blossoms. There was a breeze,too, and I had to wait for the brief quiet spells and try to block it with the diffusion screen.
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All comments welcome!
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
Canon R5, 100mm macro, f/8, 1/250 sec, ISO 250. (No idea how that came up, but I had been shooting video and maybe it was left over from that?) Focus bracket of about a dozen – I had it set to 20 but didn’t need the whole stack. Thanks to @Kris_Smith’s tutorial, I finally tried editing in Zerene to choose some areas to make softer. Then I found more after I got into PS so did them by hand by masking from a blurred layer. Then a little Clarity added to the center areas. Slight crop from the right.
Wow, nice. The subtle deterioration of the individual blossoms is interesting. I bet that it’s harder to detect on the whole flower head. The shades of blue to purple are also really nice here. Hydrangea isn’t a favorite of mine, but this is a terrific little slice of it.
Diane, you have that knack of discovering beauty in imperfections. The image is delicate with colour and form. I think you’ve found the perfect cluster of flowers. Of course, wonderful post processing.
I have never seen a hydrangea hedge 5’ tall and 20’ long!
Thanks @glennie! I need to do a wide angle shot of it. It grows alongside the house of our younger son-in-law’s parents, along with a wonderful group of succulents. They have a jade that has been over 6 ft tall, but they keep cutting it back. I did some stacks of some of the jades that are in pots – will try to post soon. They are on the coast in the village of Bolinas, in an incredibly mild climate area.
Hydrangeas have such interesting flowers, and your time searching was well spent. You found a congregation from youth, with fresh, nearly perfect petals, to elderly showing their age.
I like the pivotal placement of one senior citizen with a young adult ready to take center stage. Vignetting with soft-focus instead of +/- exposure works very well.
Diane, I know I would have passed this over if I had come across it. I just prefer “floral peak” and that’s my bad. Because this is really a great image showing the lifecycle of flowers in glorious fashion. I think you used just the right amount of images for the stack. Any more and you might have lost the focus on the subject. Nice work.