Successful Botanical Dreaming Workshop with Mark Johnson & Bobbie Turner
On May 30th Mark Johnson & I put on our first workshop together; it was a great success! We had eleven participants from all over the country here at my home & garden studio for a full day of shooting beautiful flowers & Photoshop Instruction. The enthusiasm, passion & talent were flowing all day long from all of the talented participants. Here are a few images from the attendees & I encourage you to check out their portfolio of work from the Botanical Dreaming Workshop here.
The Workshop focused on shooting flowers in creative / outside conventional thinking sort of ways & then maybe (or maybe not) applying additional outside the box kind of Photoshop VooDoo from Mark's book Botanical Dreaming. There was a pretty equal balance of Canon & Nikon shooters using a variety of lenses from Macros to Lensbabies. Most all the shots were taken of cut flowers from my good friends Dena & Carolyn at The Awesome Blossom.
Bronwyn Fargo is a Boulder resident photographer. Here she took the approach of shooting up to capture a unique view of the Gerber Daisy. Beautiful image Bronwyn!
Carole Milligan is a photographer in Steamboat Springs, CO. Here she captures a technically difficult shot using a few tricks one can pick up in Mark's book. Materials used: Black paper, Glass, Rain-X, Fine mist spray bottle and of course Flowers. Great shot Carole!
Mark Goddard flew in from California to spend the day with us. Mark is quite skilled technically and has great stuff "in the bag." Thanks for coming Mark!
Steve flew in from Maryland to spend a few days shooting and attended two Workshops here in beautiful Boulder, CO! Here Steve backlit the subject with a snoot and used a soft umbrella camera right. Steve & I had a great time shooting in the "Black" studio. Thanks for attending Steve!
Of course seeing everyone having such a good time shooting beautiful flowers all day made it hard to not want to shoot myself. So on Saturday morning I took advantage of not having completely cleaned up from the day before and snapped a few shots myself.
Here is a hybrid that I grow in my basement hydroponic greenhouse using steroids, proprietary fertilizers, food coloring and various cross germination processes. Just kidding, I pulled petals off of two different flowers and stuck them in this white Spider Mum. When Jill saw this she got onto me for killing flowers. Technically, aren't cut flowers already dead?
In camera (only with a Nikon) one can take multiple images. This is from two images of the same Yellow Spider Mum. Shot 1 taken in sharp focus on the center of the flower. Shot 2 zoomed in and forced out of focus for the soft halo affect.
Pretty straightforward. Macro shot and some Photoshop tweaking.
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