Yellow Roses

Spring is just around the corner and signs of its arrival are beginning to show. Our back fence is draped with rose bushes that suddenly bloomed in the past week. The yellow roses are quite appealing and so I did my best to capture them in some interesting ways. I wanted to get very tight close-ups and got as close as I could with the tripod feet right up against the fence. I used a 70-200m telephoto lens with two extension tubes between it and the camera to enable me to focus with the lens much closer than usual (about 10″ (25 cm) in this case). I was able to focus the lens at a focal length of 100 mm. With an aperture of f27.0 I was able to achieve good depth of field.

Here’s the image I took,  a spray of yellow roses. I finished up the processing of the picture with Topaz Adjust 5, choosing to go with a soft focus on the rose petals.

That’s the only image I’m using today from among several I took. The following are all variations of the same image, applying a different look to each in the post-processing. The images to follow are all cropped from the original, beginning with this next one. You can see that the view is closer offering a better view of the detail. I’ve also increased the detail and sharpness settings using Topaz Adjust 5. 

The next two have been significantly altered, a re-styling of the original picture. I used the Topaz Restyle plug-in to apply some quite striking effects.

This may all seem rather abstract in nature but people do breed roses in many combinations of colours. These colours would not be unusual but for the fact I began with a yellow rose.