Photo Of The Week (Only The Red)

Now this picture is one of my favorites! I know it's just another flower, yippee! But this flower is something more to me. This is the flower that changed things for me as far as photography goes. Now understand, I have taken many pictures before this one. Nice pictures too. But when I saw this one I thought, "I took that?"

I had just bought my Canon 70-300mm 4.0-5.6 IS and was looking for an excuse to use it. Unfortunately it was raining out and my house is not big enough for that lens. As I was about to put my camera away and sulk, I looked outside just one more time and to my surprise the rain had stopped and the sun was shining.  I went outside to look for something to shoot and only fired off a few until I came across the flowers hanging off our front porch. Now getting this shot was somewhat tricky. I did not want the red brick background of our house to washout the flower. The Canon 70-300mm has a minimal focus distance of about five feet and standing up against our house was not enough distance. So here I am, dangling off the porch railing and almost falling off a few times!  (Hey, anything for the shot!)

You can never underestimate the light after a good rain and an even better light after a good rain at/or around sunset. So after I was done, I put my camera back into my bag and didn’t think about the shots until a few days later when I downloaded the CF card to my iMac and was amazed to see what I had captured. I had many nice images from this shoot, but this one stood out for me. The colors are so vivid, the depth of field and the water droplets are so crisp. I usually get the same reaction from people when I show them this image and they say "you took that – wow!"

Around the same time I took this image I had been trying out some new Lightroom presets from Matt Kloskowski. I decided to try a few with this image. After two or three different ones I then tried the Matt's 300 Look - Strong preset which gave me a great starting point for an interesting image. I played with some of the settings (clarity, saturation, etc.)to come up with this next image - Only The Red.

Several months later, a friend of mine was thinking of having an art showing at his home and had asked me if I would put up some of my work. This was one of the particular images he thought would be good to display.  I thought, I’m not sure if I have anything good enough to bring to the show, but what the hell. The day of the show came and everyone loved this image. I have to thank my friend  (we'll call him Justin) for pushing me to put some of my work in his show, otherwise I don't think I would have sent out for an 11x14 print of this image, which by the way, is now hanging in my living room. I realized that holding a print in your hand gives you the satisfaction you can't get from looking at them on your computer screen. (Canon 70-300mm 4.0-5.6 IS     190mm  ISO400  1/160  f 9.0)