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A Blossom Blooms Share This on LinkedIn   Share This on Google   Tweet This   Forward This

18 March 2014

Sunlight doesn't reach this side of the house for more than a few minutes each day, so we were surprised to see this bush bud and bloom. So surprised, we dashed into the house to get a camera to document the miracle.

Spring Foreshadowed. Even in the shade.

But it turns out to be a difficult shot. The shade isn't flattering and the red flower falls in that part of the spectrum sensors oversaturate. A few frames into this we realized we were not doing the flower justice.

ACR. General Settings.

Lucky for us we were reviewing the Flashpoint 180 Monolight. It's a lightweight, battery-powered unit with a Bowens-compatible mount. So we carried it outside on one finger, opened a Photoflex softbox (talk about blooming), added the diffusers to the softbox and mounted it to the monolight.

Using a FlashFire radio trigger on the camera and a receiver of the monolight, we were able to flood the flower with soft light. We captured the image as a Raw file at f5.6, 1/125 second and ISO 250.

The NEF files were converted to DNG files on import to our hard disk to keep things compact and incorporate our edits (and copyright) in the Raw file.

But we weren't done.

There was still the problem of red saturation to deal with. So we opened the image in Camera Raw 8.3 and worked the sliders until we had good detail in the highlights and the dark background was subdued.

Then we just nudged the Saturation slide down a little until the color look natural.

Those are our final settings in the screen capture above.

Now if only we could bring the monolight with us tomorrow night when we visit Bouquets to Arts at the de Young Museum. "Photography is allowed in the exhibition," the Bouquets page notes. But "No tripods or commercial photography allowed."


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