Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com


A   S C R A P B O O K   O F   S O L U T I O N S   F O R   T H E   P H O T O G R A P H E R

Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.

Friday Slide Show: Apples, Lemons, Irises Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

10 June 2022

We had been working up our nerve to spring for an M1 laptop when Apple dropped the M2 on the world this week. We've been patiently waiting since 2010 to upgrade, so we were quite relieved to have escaped the M1 with the M2 in the wings. Even if we're still on a 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7.

Instead we concentrated on some other apples we have been avoiding.

There were not many blossoms on our apple tree this spring. With the drought, we figured we were just not going to have much of a harvest. So we picked lemons instead. We've got a lot of Improved Meyer Lemons on the tree now.

One day the morning was surprisingly bathed in sunlight (instead of being drenched in fog). So we grabbed the Nikon D300 (no puppy itself) and stepped out to the garden to take a few photos.

To our surprise the apple tree was full of apples.

To our surprise the apple tree was full of apples. And even a few more blossoms. Two varieties, in fact.

We shot the apples, then took a look at the lemons. From blossoms to baby lemons to green lemons to the full yellow ones.

And then, before we came back inside, we saw the irises in bloom, so we lined up a few shots of those, too.

All natural light. All ISO 200 at f8 with a slow shutter around 1/60 second.

When we took a quick look at the pictures in Photo Mechanic, we were disappointed (that's our theme today apparently). We really didn't think we had a slide show.

But then we worked on them in Lightroom, as we do for each slide show.

We started with more judicious crops. We'd used an 18-200mm Nikkor but it didn't get us close enough to these small apples with the diameter of a quarter.

Then we enhanced the microcontrast with the Dehaze sliders while pulling up the Shadows. And where there were high-key petals, we pushed the Texture slider up and dropped the Highlights slider down a bit.

One image, which was much too warm, required color correction, but that was it.

We whittled the selection down to the 12 favorites you see here. We hope they don't disappoint.


BackBack to Photo Corners