Raindrops on Roses

Raindrops on Roses

Image of the Week

Raindrops on Roses

I have wanted to capture natural raindrops on roses for a long time. I know several people who carry a mist bottle with them to create water drops whenever they want. Although the images seem nice, they do not seem natural to me. I have waited for a good day when it had rained, or maybe even after the sprinklers were on. I was lucky to get a day that had light rain in the morning, that did not evaporate much by late afternoon. This provided an amazing opportunity to capture raindrops on roses. This was taken at the McKinley Park Rose Garden in Sacramento, CA.

Image Considerations

This yellow rose was nearly flawless in how it was opening. The raindrops made for the perfect appearance, so I was suddenly changing from trying to capture raindrops on roses to capturing this special yellow rose. With the yellow rose petals opening so perfectly, I wanted to capture the depth with the raindrops on the rose. I choose f/22 to get the depth of field I wanted, even though I knew this would impact how I would work with it in post processing. Capturing the true color of the yellow rose was my next goal. I took several test images to make sure the exposure was what I wanted for the color of the yellow rose. Adjusting the exposure compensation to -0.3 got the result I wanted.

Image Lighting

I captured this yellow rose late afternoon with the sun low. This made for no concerns about shadows in the image and made for truly wonderful lighting.

Camera and Settings

I shot this with my Canon 1Ds Mk III and Canon 28-135mm IS USM, mounted on a ProMaster tripod. Normally I would want to use ISO 100 for an image like this to get the best colors possible with as little noise as possible. There had been just enough breeze while shooting that I felt a 1/30th exposure was the slowest I could afford to ensure no movement of the flower. Using ISO 200 made this reasonable. I wanted to show the depth of the flower, so choose f/22. I knew this would alter how to think about post processing, as the background would be more in focus than I may normally want.

  • 112mm
  • f/22
  • 1/30th
  • -0.3 exposure bias
  • ISO 200

Editing Inspiration

In this image, I wanted the rose to stand out without any interference from the background. Because I had shot at f/22, there was more in focus behind the yellow rose than I wanted. I decided that I did want some of the leaves in the background, so long as they were did not detract from the rose. With this, I did a combination of burning around the image edges, and removing unwanted background. I filled parts of the background with black to complete the effect.

Because my initial goal was to capture raindrops on roses, I wanted to be sure to enhance the raindrops without going too far. The final steps I took were to adjust the color so the yellow rose was truly what I wanted, and some added luminosity for the rose.

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