Travel Theme: Delicate

I really enjoy the changing seasons.  The other week I was hiking at Babler State Park and I took some pictures of wildflowers.  I love to see the changes and imperfections in their petals as the weather is getting cooler.  When I saw that delicate was the theme at Where’s My Backpack?  I thought that these photos would fit nicely:

ISO 640 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/250

Here is the original photo that has been cropped but not really edited much.  I have the f-stop set at 5.6 because I wanted to get the two blooms in front in focus but I was OK with the ones in the back being out of focus.  If those back buds had been in focus I think the surrounding greenery would have been distracting.  I chose a fairly high shutter speed because it was a bit breezy and I was bracketing my exposures as well.  I bumped up the ISO a bit to help the exposure as it was a bit dark.

Since I had a bracketed exposure I decided to make an HDR image using Photomatix.  This shot below is with the “creative setting”.

ISO 640 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/250

I like the detail in the petals but it wan’t really what I was going for.  Since there is also a HDR setting in Photoshop, I gave that a try:

ISO 640 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/250

I’m using the “regular” setting for this image. I then had to use the burn tool to bring in more detail in the petals.  I’m not crazy about the way the background flowers turned out in this one though.

It’s funny because there are elements of each photo that I like, but I don’t really have a favorite.  How about you? Does one appeal to you more than the others?  My other photos from Babler State Park are here and here.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Delicate

For this week’s photo challenge from WordPress I picked photos of the Eurasian Eagle Owl to represent the theme delicate.  Despite being one of the larger owls, it’s individual feathers are quite delicate.  I found one on the path at World Bird Sanctuary and took the photo just to show how delicate it is.  If you click on that photo you can see the wood chips through the feather in several places.  I have included a couple of pictures of the owl too, just to give you a feel for its size and beauty, if you are not familiar with this particular bird. Just for your information it is against US Federal Law to possess feathers (and the like) of birds of prey.  If you see the feather, take a picture, not the feather 🙂

ISO 160 95mm 0.33 f/5.6 1/25

ISO 160 95mm 0.33ev f/5.6 1/25

ISO 160 95mm 0.33ev f/5.6 1/25

Cheers!