Plants!

Today I visited the greenhouse on campus. I've never been in it before, and it was awesome! My friend, Cara, is a plant person, so she was the one that got me in there. We pretty much just hung out for an hour, ate sandwiches, and took awesome pictures of random plants.

It was very nice to be somewhere warm since it was very cold out.

I couldn't decided on just one photo, so I decided today will be a mini series day! See all the photos! These are my favorites.

This one is actually one of the first photos I took. It barely edited at all in post. I shot the backside of a leaf as sun was shinning through it. It's very beautiful.

These two were taken moments apart.  Cara was holding this little plant up into a beam of light, and I just snapped a few quick photos. In Lr, I added graduated filters on the sides to get the rich blues. I did a bit of spot adjustments to make sure the highlights in the leaves weren't overblown.



This was another shot of a leave that sun was shining through. I applied the Cross Process 2 filter to it, which added some blues to the shadows and messed with the hues of the greens a bit.

Another leaf one. This one's almost out of camera, just some fine tuning of the contrast.

I love this one. It's a fern with a shadow of a fern on it. Fernception. I applied the Cross Process 2 filter to it and that's it. The highlights near the top are a bit overblown, but that's okay.

The last one. This was just a really cool little tear in a leaf. I love the contrast between the orange of the dead tissue and the rich green of the living tissue.

As far as camera exposures, they were simply metered off whatever I was shooting. I used my 70-300 lens, so I had to use a very high shutter speed to avoid motion blur. This took out a lot of light, so I had to then use a wide open aperture and a relatively high ISO, at least higher than I usually like. All of the photos were taken with natural light. It's amazing how wonderful it can look. When you can use natural light instead of artificial light, do it. It's easier and generally looks a lot better. It's incredibly hard to match the softness of a cloudy day shooting in the snow or the patterns of light thrown by a beautiful window. You can do it, but sometimes it's not worth the effort. It's better to supplement the natural light that's already there.

All for today, see you tomorrow!