Magnolia

[Barefoot]

It's a Southern Thing. Sorta like white mansions, live oaks, and velvet lawns.

[Iguanasan]

Very cool....apparently they like hammocks too!

[MoinMoin]

I like it - did you worked over the saturation?

[kat]

Very pretty! Great idea!

[Marko]

I like this shot, and I'd LOVE to see a macro of just the foreground petal cupping the flower parts. For me that's the bee's knees.

[Barefoot]

I like it - did you worked over the saturation?

Actually, the saturation is a result of an in camera “picture control” recommended by Ken Rockwell. He doesn’t suggest it being used 100% of the time, but lately I’ve been shooting everything with it. If it doesn’t work for the subject at hand, I simply turn it off in Capture NX.

Using Capture NX, I took the raw image and made a modest adjustment for WB and curves and then applied the unsharp mask that Jason O’Dell uses for the D90 in his Capture NX users guide. After adjustments are made in Capture NX, I drop the image in PSE 7 and use an action I built to further develop the highlights and shadows and add a bit of gaussian blur.

Thanks for the positive comments. I wasn’t sure if the effect would work for anyone else but me. The hardest part is standing on the ladder to clip one of the blooms and getting it back inside without spilling the little pieces resting in the “hammock”. The macro suggested by Marko is rather cool, too.

[JAS_Photo]

Cool image. Magnolias remind me of The Grateful Dead, my favorite song of theirs.

[Barefoot]

Cool image. Magnolias remind me of The Grateful Dead, my favorite song of theirs.

Sugar Magnolia! "jump like a Willys in four wheel drive"

For all of us ‘ol timers that were at one time or another “Dead Heads”, that sounds like a great idea for a challenge. Take an album or song title by the GD and interpret in an image.

"A friend of the devil is a friend of mine"

[JAS_Photo]

Lol, that might not be a bad idea.