272 - La Flor Azul



Today I have nothing but a flower for you. Not the worst of flowers though. I have no idea what it is. It’s actually more of a brush with blossoms than a proper flower. I tried to find it via Google’s image search, had no success, and therefore I come back to Flo’s offer: Please tell me what it is 🙂

I am still learning to work with my new Sigma 20/1.8. This is one of those images where I come very near, effectively a macro shot, but in this case I wanted most of the flower sharp, therefore I used f5.6.

You see the shadow? Well, that’s me, and I am very unsatisfied that I didn’t see it when I was there. Had I recognized it, I would have taken another image without shadow. Afterwards I probably would still have taken this image though. I like the shadow. It lends the image a certain quality, a quality of passing time, the quality of a precious moment fleeting, a quality that makes this image dear to me. I guess this is one of my more fortunate mistakes 🙂

The Song of the Day is Mercedes Sosa’s “La Flor Azul”, the blue flower, from her live album “Mercedes Sosa en Argentina”.


There are 6 comments

Yunga   (2007-07-12)

Nice Shot Andreas,

I like the shadow, it adds interest, colours are beautiful.

Alan(Yunga)

💬 Reply 💬

Corey Bienert   (2007-07-12)

I use photoshop cs2 for my editing.

I noticed the errors as well in the halo effect, but I liked the way it turned out.

I thought that it made the picture look surreal.

Also, the image naturally had a halo effect even before post-processing.

💬 Reply 💬

andreas   (2007-07-12)

OK, we're talking about the first image of July, 9th on Corey's blog, the one with the stairs. I have criticized the halo that he produced when darkening the sky, and that's why:

It may well be that there was a halo in the original exposure, but the halo has long since been so tightly associated with sloppy editing, that I would do everything to get rid of it, even if it was there in the first place.

The problem is, that people only see the result, and they don't care if there was a halo originally, they will always blame it to you.

At least that's what I think

Andreas

💬 Reply 💬

Bill   (2007-07-12)

The unwanted shadow. It's inevitable, methinks, that it will turn up on occasion and sometimes it works as it does here. The angle and colour also work.

Flo may have to correct me but I believe this is a hibiscus, commonly known as Rose of Sharon in my neck of the woods.

💬 Reply 💬

tonebytone   (2007-07-13)

Yes, this is a hibiscus, rose mallow or marsh mallow. A very lovely flower, that pale lilac hue. The shadow doesn't bother me at all - it adds interest.

BTW, okra is also a mallow - Hibiscus esculentus. It has lovely white flowers with dark maroonish-red on the petals at their bases around the pistil/stamen area.

The brilliant red hibiscus is Hawaii's state flower.

And I do believe that hollyhocks are also hibiscus. I used to "breed" my own when I was a teen. I'd select flowers of certain colors and polinate them with flowers of another color, then put a bag over the flower to prevent further polination by bees.

I even developed double flowers long before they hit the market as something new.

Then I'd collect the seeds and carefully label and store them until planting time the following spring. It was lots of fun.

Flo

💬 Reply 💬

pnfphotography   (2007-07-13)

Great color and shapes...this would make an excellent BW flower too. Nice shadow as well....

💬 Reply 💬