I was digging around in my archives tonight when I came across this flower image. I took this image over a year ago, shortly after getting my Canon 100mm f2.8 lens. I was experimenting with different settings on flower shots, some on tripod, some handheld.

This one was taken at f2.8. I shot with the aperture wide open to get a soft effect. I like the glow of the petals, like a white sheen surrounding the green center of the flower.

I decided tonight that I wanted the center to be sharper and have more softness in the petals.  So I opened my RAW image straight from Lightroom 4.4 into Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro 4.  There I was able to isolate the center with what’s called a control point. It allows me to specify where the effects of the filter are going to be. So I applied Detail Extractor and Pro Contrast filters to the center, after using Glamour Glow Filter on the petals to make them softer.

I saved the image back into Lightroom and exported it as a JPEG to share with you here. Hope you enjoy it.

I lost my insect ID book and can’t remember the name for this fellow. They are quite common here in South Florida, and swarm the Fern Forest Nature Center here in Coconut Creek. I used the new Topaz Clarity plug-in (I’m an affiliate Beta tester for them) as well as the Smart Sharpen tool in Photoshop CS6 to process these images. I have always been fascinated by their compound eyes….

I’m excited about my recent upgrade to Photoshop CS 6. It’s definitely faster than the CS5 version and has some neat features. One of my favorite is the Oil Paint filter.

I’d seen what some photographers were doing with this filter on their nature photos, and it was one of the deciding factors in making this upgrade. It looks great on birds, and as I’m discovering in my experiments, it works well on butterflies.

I usually like to create an inverted mask in Photoshop and paint just on specific parts of the image, like wings or feathers. This image was very pleasing to me with the filter applied to the entire picture. I finished it with Pro Contrast filter in Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro 4.

I captured this a  few weeks ago at Butterfly World, here in Coconut Creek, Florida. I never tire of creating images of the Tiger Longwing, as it is an attractive butterfly with lots of detail in the wings.

What I have been going for lately in my butterfly images is scenes with multiple butterflies in the frame. This is not so common in the wild, but quite common at Butterfly World, especially on cooler or overcast days. They tend to bunch up together and rest for longer periods of time.

The key to making a shot like this work is go get down to a low angle and shoot straight at them. With a macro lens, the depth of field is not so great, so I need to keep them parallel to me for the best effect. To the right of the Tiger Longwing is a Madeira butterfly with a partially obscured Piano Key butterfly to the left.

We’ve come into our rainy season here in South Florida. Starting in May, it starts raining almost everyday. It doesn’t necessarily rain all day long (though it does at times),it usually starts in the late afternoon and goes for an hour or two.

This particular evening it had stopped raining but there was still a solid cloud cover. Now I can’t get the traditional sunset shot under these conditions, but I can get at times a glowing sky if the diffraction of the sun’s rays are right. And that’s what happened here. The wet street and cars helped reflect that glow in an interesting way.

I took this with my Canon Mark II 5D with a 17-40mm f4L lens. I used Lightroom preset from Trey Ratcliff (Stuckincustoms.com) to make it look like what I saw with my eyes.