Several months ago I put together a very detailed plan for a month-long road trip to Baja California, Mexico that included stops on the return to some of southern California’s best wildflower locations. I avoided the madness of last year’s super bloom, but this year hoped to find some good photo ops and without the crowds.
As the saying goes, “the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry”. Half-way through my planned time in Baja, the threat of a closed border crossing, plus the necessity of closing down my wife’s business due to the COVID-19 virus, we decided it would be best if I hurried home. So, after six long days of driving from southern Baja to Oregon, with almost no time for much more than a couple of iPhone snaps along the way, I’m very happy to be back home in western Oregon.
On the plus side, I now have time to revisit many untouched photo files from past trips. Which is doubly nice because my photo processing skills are much more advanced now from when I originally made many of those images. Plus, the photo editing apps themselves have hugely improved in the past few years.
The photo above was made while on an extended photo trip in some of southern California’s best wildflower locations, during which I had the great pleasure of hanging out and shooting with several friends and fellow nature photography pros including Terry Donnelly, Mary Liz Austin, Jeff Foote, and Tom Bean.
Landscape photographers are accustomed to thinking that the best time of day for photography is at sunrise and sunset, but these California Poppies close their blooms at night and don’t open again until they see a good amount of sunshine in the morning. Which often coincides with the time of day when the wind picks up. I laid on a bare patch of dirt next to this group of flowers for quite some time, hoping for the breeze to calm momentarily, and with thumb poised expectantly on the camera’s remote release. As frustration with the near-constant wind set in, I remembered the technique of using a slow shutter speed and just let the flowers blow in the wind for a more impressionistic look.
Fortunately, this was after I had gone to a digital SLR and no longer had to worry about the cost of each frame, so I made many exposures at various shutter speeds. All I wanted was at least one frame to capture the color and the mood.
When I first looked at the images I captured that morning, I was disappointed and didn’t see anything that I thought was really worth processing. Fast forward to this week and I happened to notice this one frame that had some potential. With a combination of my increased personal skill in Lightroom and Photoshop, and the improvements in both of those apps, I was able to produce an image that I’m quite happy with.
Here’s the important steps in producing the above photo:
- Open the RAW file in Lightroom Classic’s Develop module
- View the starting point Profiles and choose the best (Camera Standard in this case)
- Crop tool to eliminate some distracting elements on the edges of the frame
- Click on Auto Tone. One or two LR versions ago, I would not have even bothered with this step, but now I find that Adobe does a very good job with this in many cases, at least as a starting point.
- Finesse the global adjustments like Color Balance, White Point, and Black Point, Vibrance, and Saturation.
- Check for sensor dust spots, and correct if necessary.
- Go to Edit In > Photoshop and use Content Aware Fill to clean up a couple of minor annoyances on the edges of the frame.
- Finish up in Lightroom with some basic capture sharpening.
- Export with the LR preset I’ve made to generate my Master PSD file.
- Go to Bridge, select the Master file and apply my custom Photoshop Action to generate multiple JPG files for my website, stock agent submissions, and social media posting.
For those interested in the EXIF data for the original capture: Nikon D2X (top of the pro line at that time with a whopping 12 megapixel capture), 300mm ƒ/4 Nikkor lens at ƒ/32, shutter speed of 1/6 second and ISO 100.
I really enjoy doing close-ups and wildflower photos with telephoto lenses and crop factor cameras provide even more magnification.
If you have the opportunity during these trying times of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, I encourage you to review older files from past shoots and evaluate the images you captured with the increased knowledge and skills you now have plus the amazing advances in our processing apps. Please share what have you found most beneficial, how you’re coping, and any ideas you’d like to share in the Comments below, and feel free to link to your own blog posts and social media channels.
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