Macro Flower PhotographyTutorial using the Nik Collection 3 by DxO

[Music] hello everyone and welcome kathleen clemens is an award-winning new england-based professional photographer who has a passion for both photography and teaching she's best known for her beautiful creative use of natural light and artistic photographs her images of flowers are just incredible and you'll be able to get a chance to see her work today and how she uses faveza and some of her favorite filters in color effects pro we hope that you enjoy the presentation and thank you kathleen for being our special guest today thank you lori thanks for having me um i'm going to show you how i use viveza and color effects with my flower photos but before i do that i wanted to just give you a quick run through some flower photography general tips just to make your images stronger i mean the more you can do in camera the better so let's have a look so first thing that i want you to know is that it's not about the gear okay i don't want you to get hung up thinking you have to have the perfect lens for flower photography that you know you need to use exactly what i do you really really need to experiment with what you have there is not just one lens that's perfect for flower photography i shot this with my canon 24 to 70 millimeter lens it's not one that i use often for flowers but i can get close and it captures beautiful beautiful detail so i can use that i often will use my canon 180 millimeter lens i love the um working distance with that lens i love the compression that it brings to my scene and by that i mean it brings the background forward creates beautiful background blur the lensbaby velvet 85 is indeed one of my favorites the image you're looking at now is straight out of my camera i've done no adjustments at all so you don't have to have a lens baby but if you were going to pick one this is my very favorite my other favorite lens baby to use for flowers is the composer pro with the sweet 50 optic with a plus four macro filter because you can't get close with that optic minimum focus distance is about 17 inches away so if i add a macro filter i can get in close also something to think about if you have a lens that doesn't let you get close think about adding something for macro canon 70 to 200 i don't think of as a flower photography lens but i have used it um i shot this in dublin and there was a large wrought iron gate and i needed something with a long focal length uh recently i've been shooting with a helios 44 258 millimeter lens which is a 60 lens you don't have to have an expensive lens for flower photography i shoot flowers with my iphone and i encourage my students to use their iphone to shoot as well it really helps you work on composition you can't do a whole lot with aperture but you can still work on your lighting and work on your compositions so if that's all you have shoot flowers with your phone i have a whole instagram page dedicated to just my iphone flowers the second tip for you is to learn your equipment you need to know what the minimum focus distance is of each of your lenses if you don't how you know if you are closer than the lens can focus you're going to have blurry photos so you need to figure out how close you can get with the lenses that you have will the lens that you have allow you to blur the background i find that very important in flower photography can you get the shallow or the deep depth of field that you want for a subject also need to know here's a deep depth of field okay the third tip is to pay attention to light that is the the biggest tip that i can give you and it's the first thing that i look at with a flower is the light you need to train your eye to see the difference between soft shadows like we have here on the right and dark shadow lines and shapes that you see on the left flowers are all about color shape line and texture and really harsh light will affect every one of those so train your eye shadows aren't bad shadows add depth but you don't want a hard edged shadow line okay the fourth tip is that clouds are your friend a cloudy day is the best light for flower photography add a little drizzle or a little fog and i'm in heaven um but you don't always have cloudy days so i bring my own cloud i have a 12 inch diffuser and a wimberly clamp that i attach to my tripod and i can shoot in soft light all day long doesn't matter how bright it is make my own cloud the fifth tip is that you need to get to know your subject from all sides really look at your subject to look from straight on from the side view just is the side view a better choice to show the structure of the flower does it look better from the back side some flowers look great from the back like a cosmos check the side view the back view it's a gladiola i found it much more attractive than the front the sixth tip is to simplify simplify simplify and i'm saying that three times because it's that important the simpler your compositions are the stronger your photos will be okay just have what you feel you need in focus really look at your backgrounds look for any distracting elements be sure that what you found most interesting is emphasized okay just simplify here's a a little peony that uh i sh that i found and i found that it was it was still pretty busy the flower itself is beautiful but look how busy the bottom half of this is but if i shoot it in closer as a horizontal i get the simplicity that i'm looking for that's what you need to do tip number eight is to choose the aperture that tells the story of what you see you need you know people will say to me how much do i need in focus you need enough in focus to tell the story of what you see okay if you only see a pedal edge you want to put a strong emphasis on that then you're going to shoot with a more shallow aperture i shot this at f4 i believe with 180 millimeter you know if you want to emphasize all of these lines you'd have to use a smaller aperture you want to have no doubt what it is you wanted to show the viewer what what you found special about your subject they should know immediately tip number nine is that your background is as important as your subject i love to find masses of color and find something to line up in front of those which is what i did here the background is a mass planting of rudbeckia or black eyed susan's next to my dahlia garden so i'll do that often but really really look at your background look for distractions look for photobombers sneaking into the edge of the frame you really want a simple background to really show off your subject okay and the last tip is work it work your subjects shoot horizontals shoot verticals shoot from the front shoot from the side try different lenses really really work your subject you wouldn't go to the grand canyon and get out of the car and take one shot i want you to do that with flowers work your subjects okay here's a a beautiful sunflower you wouldn't take just this one shot take move in closer moving closer still really really work your subjects you don't want to get home and say ah why didn't i shoot a vertical of that or why didn't i try moving in closer okay you can see more of my work on my website kathleenclemens.com but now let's talk about post-processing so i'm going to get photoshop open and i'm going to start by showing you viveza okay there's a cosmos that i shot in my yard and um i i like the shot let me get my pointer sorry but i didn't have my reflector with me and i was a little too lazy to go in the house and this area is a little darker than i would like to see normally i would take a reflector at the time bounce a little light under there but i also know that i have the vasa and i could fix this in just seconds so there are two ways to get to viveza you can go from the filter menu or you can come over here to this list and click on viveza all right you see my subject here all right so with viveza i'm not going to get too much into all the aspects of it because nick has some wonderful webinars i'm just going to show you basically how i use it these adjustments here are global adjustments where you would adjust the whole subject i rarely use those i'm more adjusting selectively if i wanted to brighten up the whole thing i could do that you know i could warm it up and that that comes in handy but most of the time i'm making selective edits in this area in shadow here i'd like to see that a little bit brighter so i'm going to come over here and click on add control point okay and then i'm going to place that control point right here and i don't need it that big so with this little slider i can pull it down to the size that i need okay so um that control point means that whatever adjustments that i choose from here will only um affect pixels that closely match the color the hue the brightness the saturation of the pixels under that point and if i want to see what will be affected i can come over here to the control point list click this little box and anything really bright will be affected gray will be affected slightly okay so let's go back and let's just brighten that spot up right and you don't don't go crazy i i really really move the sliders very slowly the good thing about nick also is that it's going to put anything any changes you make on a new layer and you can always if you get back into photoshop and you think it's too much you can reduce the opacity as well okay so let's look at the before and after with that see how dark that was and how quickly i could selectively lighten that up so while i'm in here i think this area here is a little darker than i would like so i can add another control point you can group your control points it's nothing that i do very often because i'm just fussy enough to want to do them individually but let's brighten this area up as well very slowly that's too much all right and i think it's a little dark in this lower corner let's put a control point there all right so here is your before and after things are much more even okay i could if i wanted to click brush and apply the effect with a brush if i didn't want any of this area affected i wanted to be certain but it wasn't an issue in this case most of the time with the vaso the control point does just what i want it to do and i don't have to use the brush but it is an option so let's cancel that and show you something that needs a little more editing than that well let's do actually one more with a simple edit then i want to show you something more complex so in the beginning maybe just making simple edits so let's grab the vasa and once again i need a larger screen okay so again this needs more light i'm going to click add control point place that right there i don't need it quite that large i want to see what will be affected i can come over and have a look it's great it's just going to be the center i'm going to brighten this up a little bit very slowly and i'm going to add a little structure um structure when i see structure i think texture when i want to enhance texture so let's just add a little bit there okay while i'm in there i'd like to see a little more color here not have that quite so bright so i'm going to put a control point here as well and i'm going to reduce the brightness a little and i'm going to add a little bit of blue i love that you can add color to areas just give that a little more a little more saturation so let's look at my before and after okay let's do a more complicated edit those of you who have done in-person workshops with me have seen this flower a lot because it is just a prime example of for me of the power of the vasa so i shot this at my friend megan's farm and i was so enthralled with this curve that i did not pay attention to my background can you see that i have a light background almost gray over here and a beautiful green over there i probably could have chosen a different point of view or dealt with this at the time if i wasn't so crazy about this girl but it happens okay and i know that i can go into viveza and i can either choose to make this side match this side or vice versa i love the green not crazy about this color so i'm going to make the lighter color match so let's grab the vesa so i'm going to click add control point i'm going to make that large enough to take all of that gray okay so let's go over and see what's going to be affected here all right so all of this will be affected but if you look this is also affected and i did not want that to happen but i can deal with that i'm going to click add control point again i'm going to put a control point here and that basically says tube evasive don't touch this okay so let's go back and look at that first whoops sorry there's the second one the first control point again you see now that this is not bright it's going to be just fine all right so let's go back all right back to this control point all right so let's first decrease the brightness let's pull that down you can see that it's still quite blue but it's getting tone wise closer and let's warm it up and let's add some green all right i think that's a little too bright all right so how long did that take me let's look at the before and after i showed this with a group of students last week and one of the students said that i should be certified as a magician it's not me it's the nik software okay so and looking at this i think this area is a little bright so let's go to this control point and let's pull the brightness down on this just a little bit and let's add a little more green all right so if i was going to try and do this with the clone tool it would just be a nightmare um you know trying to get that around the edges i just love how effortless it is for me to to do this instead in neck it takes seconds and um and really really simple let's just do one more let's cancel that and i want to show you one more that has sort of a um a difficult background so this is with the helios 44-2 you get incredible bokeh but i've got this really bright spot here that um you know i could try and clone but i i'd like to see what i could do instead with a viveza so let's open that back up all right so i'm going to put a control point on this almost a neon area not sure what was back there okay so let's reduce the brightness first and let's reduce the saturation and really you know when you're new to this you're just experimenting and playing with the sliders and just watching what happens that's getting better take it down even more let's try that and let's reduce the warmth a bit and let's add some red because if you look there are some pink tones i think adding a little red i think like that and let's go and add some green now all right not too much all right so let's look at the before see that's screaming neon and afterwards very very simple edit i want to show you a couple of more before and afters okay my layers so here is the without viveza you can see that i had a light area here i've got a really really area here that it's a cool green rather than a warm green and can you imagine if i had to try and clone around these tiny tiny little lines i also had a bit of a brighter area here and this area here needed to be brightened up so but with the vasa look at the difference okay you see how how this area now blends in with the colors around it all right and there's one more i want to show you it's a recent dahlia from my garden and this petal right here was a different color um it has a cool pinks and it's bright and i you know if i leave that like that this is where your eyes going to go because it's an area of contrast and think about it your eye is always drawn to contrast to a brighter area when everything else is dark or a dark spot when everything else is light or something in focus when everything else is blurred so i didn't want that contrast but with the single control point in viveza now it blends in and now i keep your eye on the curves and the areas where i wanted it to go all right questions on viveza before i move on to color effects yes um there's quite a few people wanting to know how you see the mask if you just show them where to click to show control point yeah sure let's sell let's open the visa so let's add a control point you're not going to be able to see it if i don't add one okay see this control point list box in your control panel right here and the control points control point one is the first one i added if you add more they'll be below and there's a little box right here to the right if you click on that you get to see what would be affected with any of these adjustments that you make okay oh yes there is another one here are you working in raw or jpegs for your uh for this presentation jpegs only because they load quicker um but i i would start with a raw file and open it in um in bridge and do my basic adjustments there and then i would take it into nick and if you if i save as a tiff um i can my layer my nick layer will still be there and i can go in and um and lessen the opacity if i want to afterwards so i don't save as jpeg unless i'm uploading to the web okay great and i did want to mention too you're using photoshop as your host application yeah but you can use lightroom and people wanted to know if you ever use lightroom yeah i i don't um okay i i like to be able to use the brush yes and that's in photoshop that's great yes yeah right yeah especially with color effects i i use the brush a lot most of the time not so much in vivesa okay great and then for you folks also you can use that with the photo lab program as well with dxo to use both the visa all the nic plugins within that program great all right okay um i think um yeah let's go into color effects and see what kind of questions we have for that thanks okay all right so let's see where will would we start with color effects let's do a simple one okay so i'm going to go into into color of fix there it is i still laurie don't know these colors yet because you know you can minimize it and just have those but i don't i still have to look at this point still have to read it let's go to uh get to okay so i'm in color effects now and like if you break your leg you could spend all of your time going through all of these filters on color effects because it is the the most powerful wonderful software um so what it is it's it's a whole series of different presets that you can you know if you don't know what direction to take a photo in it's really nice to just go through and and have a look at the different effects and you know sometimes i end up taking a photo in a totally different direction it's you know now and then you get a photo that you just ah you just don't know what to do with it um and i encourage you to try to try nick for that for um color effects and each one of these presets if you click on this little part right here this little stack each one of those presets has sort of sub presets where things have already been adjusted um over on the other side so you can choose to look at these if that's overwhelming for you there's too many you can look at a subcategory of just nature what they suggest you use for nature you can go through and click on the star and make a preset your favorite and then you could just look at your favorites which you know if it gets overwhelming but when you're new to it i really encourage you to go through all of those and and see what they do and see what works for you all right so let's um go to dark enlightened center which is one of my very favorites so i shot this with my 180 millimeter lens with um a filter on the end a uv filter that had vaseline around the edges and that's what created this beautiful softness one of my favorite presets here is darken light and center and i use it a lot i think darkening the edges of the frame often with a flower can really sort of hold the eye into the frame and it will more direct the eye just where i want it so i use it a lot so the first thing you're going to look at over here in the menu is the shape all right this is a horizontal i don't always use horizontal for horizontal fixtures pictures it really depends on what's going on in the scene the the composition but for this one i'm going to go with the second option okay now next thing i need to do is place the center i'm going to put the center in the center of the frame okay now i can choose the center size how big i want the center i think that's pretty good where it is all right so let's brighten up the center a little bit don't go crazy and again you're moving the sliders slowly and let's darken the edges a little bit to really make that center pop and let's pull that up a little bit so let's compare all right you see the difference okay that that that is one of my favorites the other thing that i'm let's see what else did i want to show you oh let me show you high key because it is another favorite look how beautiful this looks in high key okay so this is a direction i might not have thought to take this this flower into and of course there are four different varieties of variations of that look at that i i might keep this one or strong or washed out okay let's say that i went with this and i wanted to go back in and play with uh dark and light and center i can add filter you can stack these up okay you don't have to just do one go back into photoshop you can add multiple uh filters together all right and remember that nick is putting this on a new layer for you so if the effect is too strong when you get back into photoshop you can pull the opacity down okay there's also a brush feature if you wanted to be fussy and apply the effect only where you wanted it let's say you didn't want high key in the center you only wanted it around the edges you could do that with your brush let's look at another photo let's cancel that i'll show you one more with the dark and light and center let's get my color effects all right went to black and white so i'm going to i'm go even though this is a horizontal image i'm going to leave this one in this orientation i'm going to place my center you know it's pretty bright here i want to even that out so i'm going to place the center more up here i think that took there we go all right so let's brighten up that center a little and let's darken the edges i mean you could this is lighter and then darken those edges up so that this area really pops so let's look at the before and after can you see that your eye is now directed in the center where it wasn't before okay so this filter really allows you to draw attention just where you want it and i will often do that as one of my last steps when i have finished processing a photo take it in and and have a look at light and dark and center to see if it it helps to draw the eye if it finishes off the image very simple simple one to use let's look at one of my other favorites okay going to go to remove color cast all right so here's here's the image so for me um this white flower has a bit of a color cast i can see a little bit of blue a little bit of greenish almost and that can happen sometimes if you don't have your white balance set or you're shooting flowers in shade sometimes the light actually has a lot of blue in it so i can come in and use remove color cast and really pull that blue out okay just move the slider all right starting to get warmer now can you see how that blue went away so i'm controlling the color and the strength okay there's another way to do this in the same program i want to show you that one as well the other one that i i love is white neutralizer i use this a lot with white flowers so with this one there's a little eyedropper tool so you click on that eyedropper and then you're going to click on the color that you want changed so this part right here is pretty gray all right so already it's gone warmer and you can choose to neutralize only the whites or adjust the whole image so let's let's play with that a little bit and let's see what happens with this right there are no blue tones now totally gone all right so that that can really really be handy for for white flowers or areas of your image that have white maybe just the white center has a little issue very very simple to fix white balance issues that way i want to show you my let's do let's do this one nope changed my mind i want to show you this one first all right my all-time most favorite of any preset filter in colorfx pro is the vignette filter so let's grab color effects again all right let's make it larger okay so the vignette filter so i was playing around in in nick one day and i encourage you to do that to see what's available and you know i'm not a big fan of black vignettes and i'm also not a fan of white vignettes but i happened to notice that there was an eyedropper tool up here around the vignette so i pulled the opacity down i took that eyedropper tool and i sampled an area from the background of the image that i was using now i'm usually sampling for this technique a mid color not too dark not too light and there look at all these greens okay my goal here is to simplify this image a bit you know i don't want to have to clone all of these out i don't mind their shapes but i just want to reduce their effect a little bit and putting a light vignette over this will do that right so let's grab a color um i think i got that there we go sort of a mid green let me see like that you can see now that the color is showing green okay and you're going to unplace the center i'm going to put it on my flower because i don't want anything over that now let's start very slowly increasing the opacity can you see how this image is getting simpler by the second how it tones down those areas i'm actually going to move my cont center point a little bit lower okay and you can do that you're not stuck with the first one so i think the opacity i need more size less opacity here okay don't do this because after i teach this i see this on facebook don't do that okay you really want to keep the opacity so that it's just adding all right i'm going to up the size on this and i don't care if it's going over my flower because i want to show you how i would apply this with a brush which is what i'm doing mostly when i'm using this all right first let's look at before and after okay i'm going to pull the opacity down a little bit now i'm going to click brush all right i've got this new little panel that's open it says brush the selection and hit apply okay so the brush is already highlighted and if you come over to my tools palette you can see that nick has already highlighted my brush tool all i need to do is to choose the opacity i do not do this at a hundred percent because some areas are going to need more and i go over them twice some areas will just need a single coat as uh so to speak so now i'm just going to brush this on just where i want it i can avoid the flower that's why i wasn't too concerned this is a bright area i'm going to go over it again okay let's do this one let's up the opacity a little bit alright so just going to fill that in like that all right and now i'm going to come over and hit apply now if there um i could also um put it on completely and mask it off here but i prefer to i guess be more proactive than reactive i like to layer and sort of lay it on at different opacity so i'm going to say apply i can go into history all right there's your before and there's your after those elements were important i just didn't want them taking over all right but let me show you how i use it most often on a close-up flower let's get rid of the history well let's do this one all right so sometimes when you're shooting a a large flower you cannot eliminate the background because if you do you end up you would have to cut off petals that you feel are important to the composition but if you know in the back of your mind that you can use the vasa and you can deal with that i mean sorry you can use color effects and you can deal with that in post then you don't worry about it you don't stress about that composition am i trying to get all i can write in camera yes i am but this really really helps so let's get color effects open again okay and it stayed large all right so it's still it remembered that last color and the last filter i opened came up so i'm going to click on that eyedropper tool now i'm going to use that vignette to paint over these dark areas so i'm going to select a color near the edge okay and let's we can place the center here it's not going to matter because we're going to add this with a brush so let's just start pulling this in and again don't do this okay just to go just because you can push a slider all the way to the right does not mean that you should and i should have t-shirts made that say that but you know if just look at these areas see how they don't stand out as much now they blend right in okay if i wanted to i could go in and add another filter as well i could brighten this area up or i could add a little bit of of more definition i could go to detail extractor and make that pop but we're just going to show you how to add the vignette so i'm going to click on brush okay this is already ready that brush tool is highlighted over here my brush tool is highlighted i'm going to choose uh it's too small and the opacity again i like to build it up so i'm just going to paint over the green areas and the black areas okay now what i will often do also is go down to about 15 to 20 percent and do the areas around that just to help blend that in i'm just adding a little bit okay or if i want to push this petal more into the background i'll add a little bit on that to this area let's do this all right and so in seconds you can um you can really deal with those issues all right you know you might not i shot this in my garden but if i shot it inside i don't have backgrounds that are just the right color but i know i can add them in post i want to do one more of those because it is the most actual the most popular thing i guess when i do workshops that people want to learn and it really finishes off a flower photograph beautifully all right let's go back to color effects reduce the opacity remember to do that so you can see your subject and you can choose the color i'm going to grab the eyedropper tool so if i look at the color of the background here i like this light color but this is so dark that i think i might need to choose a little stronger color so i'm going to go right here you can see now there's the color that i'm going to use this one i'm going to change the orientation all right and let's put the center it doesn't really matter because i'm going to do this with a brush let's do that opacity i'm going to go a little heavier with this all right like that i'm going to click brush this is something i always do with the brush all right brush is highlighted my brush is highlighted let's just start going over this and with this one i'm gonna i'm still at 19 that's my problem let's go up to around 75 i think let's do that i'm actually going to paint it on these brighter petals as well okay i'm going to get those toned down into the background a little more in that area here's a bright spot you see how that will just tone that right down same with this area i'm going to paint it on this petal as well and this section all right i'm then you let go of the mouse and go back over any areas that need a second coat so to speak the areas that were very dark okay and you see now that doing that keeps your attention here those were strong areas of contrast everything here is light and pink and beautiful and then there were these dark areas so you want to eliminate contrast you want to keep the eye on your subject this is a really really simple way to do that questions for me on color effects or on flower photography or on viveza or anything yeah there's a lot of questions um let's see here so first of all uh kathleen do you ever save your presets let's say you combine uh several filters together um i have done that for um portraits one um when i do a photo shoot of a family session for example or when i shoot my granddaughters i know that their mother will be framing them together and i i want anything that i do to match and so yes i have recipes for people but i don't with flowers because for me it's just too individual um do you work with the mouse in screen or do you uh i i have a tablet in a box and i know i need to learn how to use it but i took it out once got really frustrated and i'm pretty darn good with a mouse so um yeah yeah do i have one yes do i use it no okay um let's see here and let's talk about the base and color effects together do you usually start out with vivesa and then go to color effects what's your workflow between the two that's a great question yeah i would start off with the vasa um because it's selective okay so i would want to make any selective changes first say in this before i would add a vignette the vignette or the dark and light in the center i see those as a finishing off technique um not not anything that i would do right in the beginning so i start in the visa let's let's talk about showing before and after there are a couple people that wanted to see how you compare the befores and afters uh would you be able to pull up an image in this at the top of the screen where it has a compare button oh good good idea um sure let's let's let's uh let's do let's open this one all right so uh this is one that i i processed and added a texture and i feel like the flower it really wasn't this yellow and i i feel like i went a little bit overboard so i went into color effects to try and fix my error okay oh we don't really want a vignette that we uh want to neutralize that white all right so let's just click uh i'm going to neutralize the white okay so if you want to compare you can either click the compare button and hold it down to see or you could do a split screen okay where you can see the effect that way or this third option would be to see the two images together as a whole okay does that help yes that's great okay um all right let's go to this do you ever use vignette blur no no i i like to get do my blur in camera so that is one that i have never never used you know um you know i shoot with i shoot with lens babies and um and i i love the distortional blur so i don't add blur in in post-processing okay what about focus stacking i'm sort of like the the opposite of photo stacking focus stacking i i i like to say that i like to dance on the edge of seeing how little i can get away with having in focus and still tell the story that i want to tell so um i i love blur i if there's you know i love blur anonymous i could be president because i really love it and so focus stacking just gives you so much depth of field that it's just totally not my style nothing wrong with it and i see a lot of people do beautiful work with it but it's just not for me uh there's a question about cropping okay do you crop no i don't i don't crop my images what you see is what i saw through my viewfinder if i'm shooting a landscape and i have to straighten the horizon i will crop you know just the edges that i that you know that because i had to um straighten the horizon i do not crop my flower photos i i compose at the time looking through my viewfinder doing that makes you slow down and slowing down i think makes you a better photographer you pay more attention you know i i never say well i'll just you know i'll compose that in photoshop i'll crop that out i don't i mean i'll clone in photoshop to remove something but i don't throw pixels away to do that okay and do you always use a tripod i never use not for flowers i don't use a tripod i use it for landscapes when i'm going to have a slow shutter and i need deep depth of field when i'm shooting flowers most of the time i'm shooting at a large aperture let's plenty of light in and right now still at this advanced age i'm very steady when that stops and i might i start having issues with sharpness and detail then i'll be on a tripod but right now i use my tripod to hold my diffuser or my reflector or a background so i still bring the tripod but i don't use it i don't put a head on it when i bring it to a garden just extra weight yeah interesting do you ever use those little clips to like keep the flowers from moving around um not in a public garden i'll do that at home i will also use them i'll take a cut flower and use my clamp and then i can place a textured background print behind it or i can move it to an area of the yard that has better light a better background gives me lots of control okay here's more of an artistic type question nicole is asking many of your flowers are blurry when is it better to have them clear or not that's personal taste you know i personally like to have at least a small area in focus now and then i you know i will go totally soft but most of the time i want selective focus not soft focus selective focus where i have a small area in focus surrounded by blur that's my favorite way to shoot but if the flower you know is all about texture then i'm going to use a smaller aperture to bring that texture out so it really depends on the subject i can shoot at f 22 i just choose not to most of the time i'm more f 5.6 and under between 2 8 5 uh i've been shooting dahlias in my garden dahlias have a lot of depth and they have petals coming toward you all right so if you don't stop down to a small aperture with something like that you're gonna get what i call blob blur the parts coming toward you will be blobs so i stop down when necessary for the subject or because you know or to tell the story that i want to tell okay and what about using a flash do you ever use a flash never nope never natural light i i control light with the diffuser and a reflector i have a small reflector that's silver on one side gold on the other you could also use you know when i've been desperate i've used a piece of white paper to bounce balance light if you've got a white t-shirt on and you're close to your subject you can bounce a little bit of light a little piece of tinfoil in your camera bag works great as a reflector you don't have to buy one okay and deborah's asking what does kathleen do when there just isn't a good background in the field ah that's great i am i i sell textures on my website you some of you might know this and i will print them out on matte paper and i then glue them onto foam core people always ask what size i have most of them are eight by twelve that's plenty big for most flowers and i'll put with the foam core one texture on one side one on the other matte paper so that you have no glare and with my plant i'll place that behind my subject now i don't really do this much in a public garden because you can't get your tripod legs in the garden beds um you know if it's a situation where i can or i will just hold it uh if i have to but here at the house i definitely can put my tripod right right in the garden and shooting inside i i will do the same thing i got some of my textures printed by in 11 by 17 which is as large as my printer prints that's why it's that size and i'll just place them against a piece of foam core and set my subject up in front where either in a vase or attached to my clamp my wimberley clamp and um and use those as a background so most you know and there are times let's just face it that you you know you look at the subject and the subject might be beautiful but the background is horrible and there's nothing you can do about it then you just enjoy that subject for its beauty and you walk away okay here's a question for you from michael do you ever use artificial flowers when fresh aren't available oh michael no [Laughter] no michael they're always available there are dandelions growing in your lawn if you've never shot clover before really have a close look at clover grocery stores have flowers now home depot has amazing plants um you know that you could take a potted plant shoot the heck out of it for a week and then put it in your garden no i i do not ever shoot artificial flowers god my grandmother would be rolling over in a grave i got my love for flowers from my grandmother and she hated artificial flowers i i couldn't do it michael just couldn't do it okay well you know i just want to say uh kathleen i just absolutely love her images they're so i don't know soulful they're artistic and beautiful and uh you know kathleen i've known you for what 10 years or so back in the days of nick software so she's been using nick collection for a long time and you can see how beautiful her post-production is i want to thank kathleen for a wonderful presentation for showing us her artistic and gorgeous images thank you lori and if you know anyone that comes up with a question afterwards just you can get to me from my website kathleenclemens.com just send me a note okay great well thanks everyone for joining us and we hope you have a great day please join us again for another webinar kathleen thank you very much thank you bye-bye bye [Music] you

Channel: Nik Collection

Views: 27,267

Keywords: Nik Collection, Nik Collection by DxO, Editing software, Lightroom, PhotoShop, HDR, nik sofware, nik collection 2, nik collection 2.5, viveza, sharpener pro, macro flower photography tips, macro flower photography tutorial, macro flower editing, flower macro video, flower photography editing, flower photography tutorial, flower, flower photo, nik collection 3, flower photo editing, kathleen clemons, kathleen clemons flower photography

Id: KmbnRZc6oIE

Length: 50min 43sec (3043 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020