I love this forum

[bvi steve]

I shot this with my new 20D . I did a little PS3 just to blur the back- ground a little. I used my 28-105 usm and i'm not sure of the exposure.
Any help is appreciated.

thanx

bvi steve

[sageone]

How did you blur the background? Sorry...rookie here.

[bvi steve]

I'm new to digital also. As my girlfriend says I just gnaw away at it 'till I figure it out. But in this case I selected the flower with the magnetic lasso then inverted the selection. Then used gaussian blur. After that I touched up some of the spots that did not select well with the clone tool. It wasn't to hard except for the selection part. It took several times to get it right.

bvi steve

[rammy]

Wouldn't it have been better to use the long end of the lens to zoom into the flower and using a wide aperture F5.6 or less to provide DOF to the image?

Better to capture the image you want instead of post processing to make what you tried to acheive. Never learn techniques and technical stuff otherwise.

Go back and try again.

[reidr]

Great detail in that 20D shot....

[bvi steve]

Dear rammy,

I shot this photo at the following exif:
f/4.5 [the largest]
105mm [the longest]
iso 100
1/400
I sure miss using my old Pellix sometimes. I have a 58mm f/1.2 for that. Maybe I should get some Velvia for it and use it for flowers?
thanx
bvi steve

[DavidEB]

Lovely shot.

It looks like some of the color from the flower bled into your background when you applied the gaussian blur. The blur only effects pixels within the selection area, but it's calculated from all the pixels in the image (active layer), including flower pixels, so near the flower there's a faint orange rim.

One way around that is as follows (using photoshop elements):
select the flower, invert selection
optional: feather edge of selection, about 2-3 pixels.
create a duplicate layer
in the duplicate layer, delete the flower
deselect
key step: lock transparent pixels (there's an icon for this in the layers panel)
now apply the gaussian blur
optional: add gaussian color noise.
fiddle with noise setting to match the ambient noise in the flower part of the image.
otherwise the background looks "smoother" than the subject.
optional: use the opacity slider to allow some of the non-blurred background to show thru.

nice work overall.

[Paul Gerrard]

I Like it. But dont give up the day job just yet. If you trawl the internet youll find milions of Photos just like this one, thats because flowers just like still life are
1 Colorful
2 They dont run away..

Too shoot Flowers well you really need to know your stuff about light.
A good flower shot should blind you with the light emminating from the subject. Your not far off in this picture.

And who cares what i say anyway its just art???

[rammy]

Dear rammy,

I shot this photo at the following exif:
f/4.5 [the largest]
105mm [the longest]
iso 100
1/400
I sure miss using my old Pellix sometimes. I have a 58mm f/1.2 for that. Maybe I should get some Velvia for it and use it for flowers?
thanx
bvi steve

Interesting, indeed. Surprised that the 105mm at F4.5 did not give you the DOF you where looking for.