Flowers, not that easy

For a challenge I decided to try taking pictures of a flower sprayed with water.  I purchased a bunch of flowers, with some exotic types in it for us to work with and armed with a couple of LED lights, off we went. 

It soon became clear that to do them justice was not going to be as simple as I thought.  I deleted all of mine! the best one is here so you can imagine what the others were like!

I used a Canon 100mm f2.8 Macro lens, but somehow was not getting the results I wanted.

 

I'll have to read up on technique and have another go at it.

In other news I put my first "tip" video on to Youtube the other day. 

I'd been helping a friend with a shot of some flying Gannets he'd taken on the Farnes Islands.  It was a great shot but there was a gap in the shot where there were no birds and it looked odd.  We tried slecting birds and pasting them in but that didn't look right.  Somehow we found that you can use the Patch tool in Photoshop CS5, in reverse and in this case got perfectly blended birds to fill the empty space.  It was particularly pleasing as it took seconds and blended the different shades of sky perfectly.

You can see what I mean on the video here on a shot of Manx Shearwaters flying in Wales.

So if you have any tips on taking flower pictures, or comments on the video clip, please let me know.

Cheers, Peter.

Flickr stream