PAD 118 - Orchid

[Mike Farley]

Day 118 and after a hiatus, I am back to posting again. The images are taken, but I have quite a backlog of processing to catch up on.

This is an orchid, which I thought looked equally attractive from the back as well as the front.

Canon EOS 7D
EF 100 f/2.8 macro
1 sec
f/5.6
ISO 100
Tripod

[Paul Heester]

Great composition in just focusing on a small part of the orchid. That sets it above a lot of other orchid shots Ive seen. Im liking the borders you have been using recently as well.

[davidc]

Are the borders from Lightroom or the Nik software plugins?
I've been wondering about an easy way to add borders to dpi images, judges seem to prefer that.

[Mike Farley]

Thanks for the feedback.

The borders are made using Nik software. Initially I was using Silver Efex Pro and then using Simon Clarkson's luminosity layer blending method for a faux HDR effect. Courtesy of Google, which gave me a free upgrade as an existing SEP2 user when it reduced the price of the entire suite, I now have the full set of Nik plugins and the border controls are also available in Color Efex Pro 4. There are ways of adding borders using layers in Photoshop, but the Nik controls are definitely easier.

For this orchid shot, I used SEP2 and lowered the opacity so that the effect was not so strong. As a bonus, some of the colour from the lower layer came through in the border and you can see the stem of the flower showing through in the bottom edge. It was an effect I liked, so I left it.

When it comes to judges, the usual caveats apply. Borders might all be very well for prints, but as a breed they all seem to dislike large borders for projected images, especially if they are white. A plain edge of one, or possibly two pixels is about all they will generally accept before the complaints start.