Day 348

I find it hard to resist buying flowers when I walk past them at the supermarket, so today I didn't. :-) I bought a small bunch of gerberas, but it was only when I got home that I realised I don't have a vase to put them in any more. I found an empty plastic storage container in the back of the pantry, and used that instead.

I put the 'vase' on the kitchen counter, as it provides a plain, close-to-white background. I set up the camera on the tripod with my 50 mm lens and used a reflector to bounce daylight from the window onto the flower. I then took a series of identical shots with varying apertures. I liked the depth of focus that I got with f/7.1 best. I did most of the processing in Photoshop, adjusting brightness, contrast, levels, curves, hue/saturation, and then applying an unsharp mask. Finally I added a texture layer and played around with blend modes, opacity and fill until I got a result I liked. The texture is a freebie created by Sharon Collins at SKC Photography. See the link to her site in my blog roll in the side bar.

I restarted work yesterday after the Christmas break. I've got a new contract to write two two-hundred page maths books. I'm aiming to get them both finished before the end of February, so that I can take a leisurely route home when I go back to the UK. It seems like a wasted opportunity to travel across half the globe and not see anything apart from the interior of airports! So I'm going to be pretty busy over the next couple of months. Not the best time to take on a commitment to *three* daily blogs! 'Cos that's what I'll be doing during the first fortnight in January. I'll have this blog, which will be in its final two weeks, I've got my new Ryan Gosling Hey Girl blog that I want to keep going because I'm having so much fun doing it, and I'm also going to be starting a River of Stones blog. Phew! Wish me luck!