chrisleighphotography.com

At the weekend I went for a walk around the area with my camera and took a few photos of newly emerging buds and flowers.  We had catkins and mahonia and the hellebore shown above.  Last year I went to Trench Hill Farm near Sheepscombe in the Cotswolds where I was able to photograph lots of different coloured hellebores, as well as daffodils, snowdrops and all sorts of other spring flowers.  I’m looking forward to being able to do that again this year – but this time with my DSLR.  Since the flowers are green, they are not quite as attention grabbing as some of the other colours so I’m tempted to try recolouring a version to see what it looks like.  This shot has been through the usual processing in Aperture, then fed into Photoshop for some background colour enhancement (bringing out the blue in the bokeh), and detail enhancement of the flowers themselves.  This required using masks on the different layers to make sure that the right parts of the image were enhanced appropriately, otherwise there would have been too much blue on the flowers and too much detail pulling up the noise in the background.  I’m always creating new layers in Photoshop for each alteration of the photo so that it is much easier to refine the adjustments, and also so that I can change the layer opacities so that the effects are not overdone.  You can see photos from last year’s visit to Trench Hill Farm here on my flickr.  DSC06665.