Dark Flower

Here's a photo from way back in 2005. This was in Idaho before I moved out to New Jersey after college. The flowers in this photo are just the run-of-the-mill weeds that grow everywhere. I'm not sure what prompted me to take this photo, but I do know that it was well before I started getting into the technical side of things. This photo sat untouched for a really long time, until I started on one of my black & white kicks. I went through a ton of old photos looking for things that would work as black & white, and this one just happened to turn out.

This is another photo that applies to the Blown Away photography project. The overexposure was created in Photoshop rather than in the camera, but it still has the blown-out characteristics.

The original JPEG (1) really wasn't anything special and the composition was poor due to the blatant centering of the main subject. So I toyed around with some ideas and I decided that leaving it at center and using a square crop (2) would do it justice. I knew I wanted this one to be black & white, so I tried some different things and I found that the “Infrared” setting in CS3's Black & White adjustment layer (3) got the photo pretty close to where I wanted it. It's basically strong yellows and greens with toned down blues and reds. Then I applied a curves adjustment layer (4) to add contrast and give it a little “harder” look. The last step was the addition of vignette and sharpening (5). The noise you see in the photo is all natural — it tends to come out of the works when doing extreme black & white adjustments.

** You can also see this photo on Zooomr and Flickr **

Photo by Brian Auer
06/05/05 Post Falls, ID
Dark Flower
Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z3
62mm equiv * f/3.5 * 1/60s * ISO50