Natural Yard Life

It's that time of year again where the bees and flowers are mingling. My yard is just full of little yellow flowers and the bees are just going crazy. Earlier today, I was looking at a picture I took a few years ago of a bee, and I thought, why not do something like that again? I only have about an hour today to do the blog, so my yard was the perfect place for photos!

I grabbed my camera, and set off into the great unknown. Not really, I saw a nice patch of flowers from the porch with a bee already there, and grabbed a good shot within a minute or so. I had the camera set to Av, f4.5, +1 1/3 EV, and ISO100. Using autofocus, and full telephoto, I just stalked the bee from flower to flower until I got something I liked. The patch of flowers was in some dappled sunlight, so there were some really cool bokeh effects with tonal transitioning. I guess is what you could call it...

Anyway, in Lr I set to b/w because I'm just not a fan of color lately for some reason. I crushed the blacks a little, then raised the luminosity of the yellows, oranges and reds. This all brought out more in the shadows, while still preserving the blacks.

Then came the cropping. There were elements of the photo that I liked, but I couldn't include them all in the photo with the crop I wanted. So I went into Ps, and moved different parts of the photo around so that they were all closer together and in the crop I liked. Since the background was just bokeh, it was super easy to blend everything with layer masks.

See you tomorrow!