My birthday flowers

I have birthday at the beginning of January and I always get some flower(s) from my colleagues when we get back to work after Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Two years ago I used the flower in my 52-week photo project, then last year I used it at the beginning of my still life project. Have you seen (and remembered) those photos?

It started to feel like tradition and I didn’t want to make this year any exception. The thing is though that as I get the flower usually on Monday and can’t shoot it until weekend, the shooting is quite a difficult job because the flower gradually fades and its petals start to fall off.

This year I experimented a bit more and created two versions – dark and light.

They are not perfect but taught me a lot which I’m grateful for.

Then I experimented with the light version a bit more and created two more images with a different feel.

In Lightroom I used virtual copies for creating and working with these other versions, it’s exactly what virtual copies are for and I recommend using them. BEWARE though. When you delete the source image for your virtual copy, the virtual copy is deleted as well without Lightroom (at least Lightroom 5) asking your permission and you may not recover it.

Well, tradition is tradition, so hopefully next year I will show you more…