Following Yildiz's suggestion I have tried a B&W conversion of one of my daffodils. Abit of a departure from all of the colour here I'm afraid.

Very beautiful Birma- I love the B/W!

Birma, I think it does very well in B&W.

Dusty

I think it's good as well, but there again I'd like to see another shot at a stop underexposed at the time of exposure to get those slightly overexposed highlights, or even expose for the highlights themselves. Underexposing will make the image slghtly more noisy after pp, but who takes any notice of a little noise in a b&w? I reckon it's probably an enhancement.
You'd need a new flower for that experiment by now though I'd say, Birma.
Greg

Some excellent flowers around here guys.

Camellia taken in our back yard, one of a few still left.




Not perfectly sure what these are?

So that's a Camellia, very pretty. And the other one (I also don't know what it is), is a nice bright blue.
Good ones DA.
Greg

Beautiful camellia David.

The blue one is known as 'grape hyacinth' from genus 'muscari'. It is also included in the lily family for a couple of reasons but that's immaterial at the moment.

I like the grape hyacinth for its vivid blue and orb-like flowers and it also has a resemblance to a bioluminiscent creature that lives in the dark waters of the deep seas. It's also blue-violet of colour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscari

Yildiz

Thanks Guys for the comments on the B&W - I agree with Greg that there are a few bits over-exposed - hope to have another go soon

Lovely Camellia David - I don't think ours look very promising this year -- I think we're meant to feed them iron, but I always forget until too late. I think the blue flower is a Blue Grape Hyacinth? That is a nice shot of them.

< edit - I see Yildiz has come the rescue on the flower identification >

Hi Birma,

The B&W conversion looks very radiant. Thanks for giving it a try. Like others mentioned already this photo oor a new shot is open to many experimentations. There's something about daffodils, they respond to B&W nicely.


H Greg,

I thought about your comments on the red and yellow bleeding on the edges. I think I had some trouble while shooting the flame-like red-yellow tulips and had to smooth out the burns by desaturating a little. This does not occur that often, only when the daylight amount is at extremes, like noons of a hot and bright day. I don't have this problem when shooting outside under an overcast or rainy sky.

I don't have much of a complaint though, as long as I have the software to make some post-shooting corrections on the images shot in RAW. In-camera JPEGs may prove a disaster though or maybe sshould be handled with more care.

I actually like the warm, radiant and vivid colours of the Alpha generation, so I hope the minor adjustments ever to be introduced don't ruin that warmth altogether.


Yildiz

Hi Yildiz,
I think I formed the opinion about red (but more especially yellow) camera processing back when I was using first my KM5D with Elements 5, then with Elements 6 and by then the A100, I think the A100 was actually better than the KM5D with yellow, but it could have been just the E6 was an improvement over E5, I have E7 on the backup computer which hardly gets used so I don't know how good it is by comparison with the previous versions or with the KM5D and A100 directly. I am now using E8 with all three cameras on my front line computer (A700 now as well) but haven't really had time to do much in the way of testing comparison with the results I had before, but I do get the impression that E8 is a long way more advanced than E6 was.
And yeah I agree 'vive le KM colours'
Greg

ps. I had the KM and Sony Software that came with the cameras, and I don't think that either of them could solve the yellow problem either, it was actually coming from the camera like that in the first place, bright strong yellow over yellow or another light colour with the same exposure value sometimes/most times got smudgy and bled, and red can do it too to a lesser extent, that is, red sometimes bleeds into another overlaped red with the same, or very similar exposure value, but red doesn't ever seem to bleed into a different colour...and that's a good thing. In any case if the problem is in the camera (which I think it is), the KM5D won't ever get it fixed with a firmware update, the A100 has a later firmware fix available (I don't know exactly what it fixes, some noise issues and lens release updates I think) than the one I currently have, so I will get around to that at some stage.

It was raining in sunny Northern California so I decided to take some shots of flowers in the vase. This is with Minolta MD58/f1.4, on Sony A900 with O ring diffuser on HVL58 in manual mode.

With MD/MA glass adapter.



With MD/MA glassless adapter

Hi Ewan - I came across the very same flowers growing in a garden wall this afternoon near where I live - I can't get PSE7 to represent the colour correctly . Violets and blues seem hard ot get right. I think the road sign really makes the shots - #1 is my favourite.

Sury, I like the exotic colours in your #1.

Even if I can't get blue to appear correctly ( ) I have been plugging away with the B&Ws. I kept the daffodil from last week and so it has gained character which I have hopfully added to. We have some lilies in the house as well.





Both taken with the Min AF 35-70 in macro mode.