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Late Rose
16 November 2022
Returning from our daily constitutional yesterday, our gaze fell on this rose blooming late in the season. It's our popcorn rose spotlit by the afternoon sun against the shaded yard.
Late Rose. Nikon D300 with 18-200mm Nikkor at 60mm (90mm equivalent), f8, 1/125 second and ISO 400. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
We mentioned this popcorn rose earlier this year when it was blooming in the full summer sun (which is kind of joke if you know how foggy San Francisco summers are).
The exposure is all wrong. Instead of ISO 400, we should have slipped back to ISO 200. There was no need for 400. And instead of f8, we could have used f3.5 to minimize the background detail, which isn't important. The shutter speed is irrelevant for this image. Nothing was moving.
But we made up for our sins in post production.
After our usual tweaks (with a preset) for our Nikon D300 shots, we dropped the Exposure and darkened the Shadows but we lifted the Luminance of the Reds, Greens and Yellows so the rose itself didn't fall into darkness.
Camera Raw Adjustments. These are the Basic (left) and Color Mixer adjustments we made to the image.
It's not at all what the camera saw, but it is what we saw.
Which was the strong sunlight hitting the roses at a low angle while the yard was deep in shade.
Any more fooling around, though, and it would have looked like a velvet painting in some cheap motel room.