Promise of red berries next winter

Our holly tree was flowering profusely last week. I could not resist trying to capture the feel of it in the afternoon sunshine - even though I rate myself incompetent as a creative 'art' photographer.




I am slowly getting to grips with the facilities available in digital photography. The camera is a Pentax K-x, newly acquired as a Christmas present. The lens is the default DAL 18-55. Exposure details: focal length 40mm, Av f/6.7, shutter 1/90 sec, ISO 400, AWB, exposure center-weighted. The K-x has a facility for taking 3 bracketing exposures, which I used for some of my attempts to capture these flowers, but this image was taken with a simple 1/2 stop underexposure, to avoid bleaching out the white flower detail. The RAW (DNG) file has been cropped and otherwise fiddled about with in Photoshop Elements.

There is still a lot to learn! How am I doing so far?

Martin

Doing well, Martin! Show us other images from that shoot at different angels, if you have them!

Asher

Martin Evans said:

Our holly tree was flowering profusely last week. I could not resist trying to capture the feel of it in the afternoon sunshine - even though I rate myself incompetent as a creative 'art' photographer.

Click to expand...

Martin,

The picture is very clear and sharp. I like the varied but sharp appearance of the edges of the leaves as that works well for cards. I might, myself, wipe the dirt of the leaves. BTW, you do not need to wait till winter. As you are using digital, the white can be simply converted to your favorite red! Try it for fun!

Also, it's worthwhile to have a variety of directions for the leaves. Here it goes from right to left and that is counterintuitive for having positive progress in the idiom of Western writings.

Cheers!

Asher

Asher Kelman said:

The picture is very clear and sharp. I like the varied but sharp appearance of the edges of the leaves as that works well for cards. I might, myself, wipe the dirt of the leaves.

Also, it's worthwhile to have a variety of directions for the leaves. Here it goes from right to left and that is counterintuitive for having positive progress in the idiom of Western writings.

Cheers!

Asher

Click to expand...

Thanks, Asher, for the comments. It is curious that only a few branches on this 30+ year old tree have developed the full holly-leaf form. Most are plain, with just 3 in this frame beginning to develop spines. It was lucky that the afternoon sun emphasized the edge of the upper leaf.

I did wipe the dirt off - but overlooked the lowest one! You should have seen it before I fiddled about with the clone tool in photoshop

I hadn't thought about the intuitive left-to-right progression of an image. Can I claim that it is a Hebrew holly tree? I did take many different viewpoints of this branch full of flowers, but many viewpoints resulted in undesireable background or unwanted elements that prevented satisfactory cropping. Isn't nature awkward at times?

Thanks for your encouragement, and the ideas.

Martin