This week’s trip to the Australian Botanical Gardens, Mount Annan was a little different. Pushed for time so had one hour from the time I left home to when the Gardens shut so about 15 minutes of actual photography time in the gardens. During that time I managed 93 shots, 66 of one mushroom, with various light changes, angles and intensity, plus a few wild rabbits in the gardens. So fifteen minutes wasn’t long to go finding mushrooms or birds.

I quickly found last week’s mushroom and set up my speedlites and moved them around for different effects.

When I get home each week after a shoot I have to go through the shots see which ones are worth publishing on Google plus and see if one is a better one that I have in the galleries on my portfolio tab on my web site.  So in today’s case I had 66 mushroom shots to go through all very similar.

The first thing I do is a quick review of each shot working through them all and any that look like the exposure is OK, focus seams good and there is nothing obviously wrong with the shot like a leave of stick over the shot.

After I’ve listed the better shots as one Star I’ve now got a short list top review. At this point I usually get the first of these and start to work in the development module of lightroom and adjust the shot, adjusting the highlights, shadows, highlights and blacks, I start with the shadows lightening them to being back some of the details, I usually drop the highlights to make sure they aren’t to bright, then I bring down the blacks to darken the back ground, this is usually not to much as the lighting has usually done most of this. I’ll use the graduated filter to darken and distracting elements in the back ground, any that are in the main shot I’ll use the adjustment brush to drop the exposure leaving the main element of the shot the brightest part of the shot, (This is what the eye is usually drawn to). I’ll usually raise up the contrast and clarity a bit and depending on the shot raise the vibrance and saturation as well.

After that I’ll check out the sharpening raising it as much as possible without bringing in any artefact’s and bring up the noise reduction a little as well. Lastly I then add in a Vignette darkening the corners of the shot again to bring the main element to the main focus of the shot.

Once I’ve done all these settings for one shot I’ll set the filter to one star showing only the shots I’ve selected as one star, and then sync all the shots with the one I’ve just updated, this will bring them all to the same level of processing in one go.

Next I go back to the library module and select the survey mode with then shows all the one star shots in the main panel,

at this point I close all the side tabs plus the top and bottom tabs so the main pane is not full screen, this increase the size of the shots, in survey mode as you move the mouse over each shot there is a small cross shown on each shot in the lower right corner,  any shots that are not the best if you hit the cross they are removed from the survey as you remove more shots the remaining shots get larger. So makes it easier to choose as you get less shots. I’ll usually get these down to around three shots, these I’ll mark as two stars.

I then go out of survey mode and adjust the filter now to 2 stars which will bring up the three remaining shots, these I’ll look at in full screen mode and look for the best shot, which is the one that has best focus and exposure on the whole mushroom (In this case) including the stork which is often in shadow if I haven’t got the second speedlite angled right.

The three shots below are the final shots I had to select form this week, the last shot being the one I decided was the better shot of the week.

THis one I rejected as it was to wet and lost some of the details as teh water makes it look soft and out of focus. This one I knocked back as the front edge of the cap seamed out of focus and angle seamed a little of to me.

This one was the one I selected for the week and made the google plus posting. Once selected I'll do a little more work on it in light room till I'm happy with it and then release it for viewing

It’s a very similar angle to last week’s shot but the lighting is slightly different and the mushroom is a week older as well. I think I like this shot better than last weeks shot.

Hope you enjoy the behind the scenes detail that going in to how I finally come up with the image and some of the work flow involved. 

Thanks for dropping by, hopefully next week I’ll get more time for shots and have a different mushroom to shoot.  

Glenn.