Cherry Blossoms 3

I thought I would continue with cherry blossom pictures for a few more posts since a couple of weeks from now you will be thinking they are so passé, you won't want to look at them. I have tried converting a few images to monochrome. I won't say black and white because they ended up being more of a duotone, blending gray and a slightly yellow tone to get the final result. That is the power of programs like Photoshop and Lightroom - you don't have to settle for what you originally captures. Although, in most cases, it isn't going to make a good picture out of a bad one.

Here is the original of the last image. I had cropped it to an 11x14 size. The edges that are beginning to shrivel aren't quite as noticeable in the duotone image.

Here is another image where I used a different set of colors to produce a duotone. Adobe Lightroom is such an amazing program. It has developed to the point that a photographer no longer has much reason to take photos through Photoshop for most adjustments anymore. The changes in these two images were all made in Lightroom.

I like this picture even though it too is somewhat soft. These are blooms that are all but spent. They have faded to white and many of the stamens have already fallen out.  Compositionally, this one doesn't fit inside the box of rules. 

Composition has a lot to do with shapes and this image largely consists of two triangles entering the frame from opposite directions at similar angles and two roughly balanced areas of negative space. Somehow, it is unobjectionable and works. That is what I meant a few posts back where I said framing becomes largely intuitive. I don't think I stressed too much over how to frame this image.

Here is a similar composition - two triangles at an angle with two opposing negative spaces. For whatever reason, it doesn't quite work, although I have yet to figure out why.