This week, the photo challenge team welcomes a guest challenger, Cee of Cee’s Photo Challenges. I’ve been a follower of photo challenges she posted or others she’s mentioned almost since I started blogging about photography. Her challenge this week features images of a single flower. She writes, “When I was asked to guest host, my first thought was it had to be a flower challenge and as I thought more about it, I came up with the topic one single flower. One of my favorite quotes is ‘If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.’ Buddha.” You can read her entire challenge post here.

Though I have little knowledge of varieties of flowers, (you’ll note my lack of names referenced in these images),, I know beauty when I see it. This challenge allowed me to review my gallery to look for floral images to share. I paired that task with another, improving my skills with Luminar. For each of these images, I found the original source right out of the camera, and after some basic Lightroom tweaks, I exported each image to Luminar Flex to complete the reprocessing.

This image happened to capture a bee in flight. Even though I’d seen a couple of bees flying around the plants, I didn’t expect to capture one. In the reprocessing, I cropped the image square to include the bee and since the background wasn’t quite out of focus enough, I added a soft filter mask to the background and a dark vignette to emphasize the two subjects.

This image needed only minor adjustments. I increased the sharpness of the flower and since I’d used a telephoto lens with a wide lens opening, the background needed no softening. I added a subtle vignette in Luminar and called the image finished.

This image is one of the few flower images I’ve printed. The reprocessing involved lowering the background exposure with a mask to make the warm colors of the flower stand out even more.

A square crop, a soft-focus mask for the background, and a high structure mask for the flower brought out the delicate details in the petals.

This flower was processed almost identically to the image immediately preceding.

My favorite floral image in my archive is this rose. It is the only image not captured with a DSLR and telephoto lens. I saw the flower sitting on the counter in a glass of water. I used my Samsung S5 cell phone, holding it directly over the top of the rose. The dark gray counter provided a perfect backdrop for this image. The light gray at the bottom is the reflection of a fluorescent tube ceiling light. The reprocessing included only a crop to a square format and a tweak on the Structure slider to bring out the definition in the petal edges.

Thanks again to Cee for allowing me to share some of my favorite flower images.

John Steiner