Spring draba

Image Critiques Flora Critiques
1

Spring draba
Spring draba1800×1200 252 KB

Spring draba is a new wildflower for me, identified with Picture This iPhone app. A line of these flowers, < 1" tall, appeared today in the crevasse between the concrete of the garage threshold and the paving stones of the driveway. These are tiny. The large blossom is just under 5mm diameter.

Spring draba is considered a weed and is native to southern Oregon where we now live. I guess “weed” means a plant which is not valued. I value its interesting form and that it is a late winter / early spring flower, indeed our first blossoms of 2023.

Type of Critique Requested

  • Aesthetic: Feedback on the overall visual appeal of the image, including its color, lighting, cropping, and composition.
  • Technical: Feedback on the technical aspects of the image, such as exposure, color, focus and reproduction of colors and details, post-processing, and print quality.

Specific Feedback and Self-Critique

To get this low the camera was placed on the driveway surface. The 90mm macro was manually focused, while viewing on the tilt screen, at just before MFD so this is nearly 1:1 reproduction, and then it was cropped.

Focusing was challenging. Using focus magnification and red peaking the focus point was the center of the largest flower atop the right hand stalk. To improve focus of the other blossoms I used Topaz Sharpen AI. I’d intended to shoot at f/16 but must have bumped my front control wheel to f/13. Focus stacking was tried but there was too much wind motion. Global and regional luninosity adjustments were in LrC. Color profile is Adobe Color which I did not alter. Light was late afternoon late winter sun from over my left shoulder. Background is the concrete ramp into our garage.

Technical Details

Sony a7Riv w/ Sony 2.8/90 macro, f/13 1/100" ISO=1250

2 Likes
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Richard: A new flower for me as well. Really like your POV and the steps you took to get proper positioning. Exceptionally good plane of focus management at this f stop as well. Fascinating subject and a nicely crafted image. >=))>

3

Bill, thanks.

Alongside the driveway there was a larger group of the same flowers. I had to shoot quickly between puffs of light wind, and handle a complicated background. After several compositions I didn’t like, I got this one composed of 20 frames with my Laowa 15mm Zero-D stacked in Helicon Focus. For scale, in the focus stack note the pine needle mid-right on the 4" x 8".

But I prefer seeing the details of these tiny flowers with the 90 macro.

2023-02-19_SpringDrabaFocusStack.jpg
2023-02-19_SpringDrabaFocusStack.jpg2133×1200 988 KB

1 Like
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Oh what a lovely find! So glad you noticed and then paid them attention with your camera. When I lived in NH we had this or a similar flower in the yard and I remember getting right down there with my own 90mm macro for the same thing - for a tiny plant, the smell was heavenly and quite strong. Reminded me of tulips. My ID book calls it Whitlow grass and the stems are dark red and the flowers identical to these. Bees love them. Really lovely details and isolation of the various blossoms - the driveway cement worked well for that.

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Picture This has Whitlow grass as an alternative name (among quite a few). Also it shows that the northeast also has this flower as a native species. However as a northeasterner (and Adirondacks guy) I’d never noticed them. Very small and easy to overlook. I’ll check the fragrance today.

Thanks for the reply!

6

I have never heard of this flower either but you managed to capture them beautifully. Thank you for sharing!

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Thank you!