Julian Köpke

Changing colors in flowers are attractive, especially if you approach them closely. A group of 3 flowers looks like a communicative group. With targeted overexposure and instant images on the laptop, the compositional decision is easier and the colors become more picturesque, without too much processing with the computer.

A curtain over the illuminated background behind the focal plane creates an effect reminiscent of nebulae in the night sky.

Photography of flowers in a vase in an exposure series (HDR) is complicated by their light sensitivity, which causes a change of position in short time scales. Plants constantly rearrange their leaves and blossoms. This results in blurring, which can be compensated for e. g. by repeating the shot series, shorter exposure time series or tools for aligning the images. Or you can do your image without HDR, because the dynamic range of the camera data is sufficient.

The center of a Gerbera blossom is richly structured. Due to the high resolution of the camera back (150 MP), it is possible to crop out the center still in good resolution.

The transparent representation of the petals is achieved by using a light box. The light should be relatively bright, but does not have to be fully homogeneous. The heat of the light does not matter, it is adjusted using RAW format in post-processing. More informations about this method see web-pages of Harold Davis, who invented this method.

For the first composition today I started with cornflowers on a lightbox. I always have liked cornflowers with their typical cornflower blue. With this composition I wanted to show different stages of cornflower development in one image.

I also liked very much the yellow of a craspedia globosa that Christa bought this morning. To bring out the colors I decided to install them in my „darkroom studio„. I made the image as a frame average of some 15 exposures, 3s each at f/16 and ISO 800.

I developed a combination of colours that the garden offered me with the craspedia globosa to create this picture, in which red, blue, yellow and green play a leading role.