Beauty in Decay

Beauty in Decay
I decided that after the camera club flash workshop last Friday that I would try and use my flash guns a bit more. That way I may remember what I should do :)

We arrived back from Margate just before lunch and early afternoon I decided to take a stroll in the garden. It’s a small garden so it does not take long. 

One of my favourite flowers in the garden is the Purple Coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea) and I noticed that they where going over. 

I stuck my twin flash onto the macro lens  to just fill a bit of light into the shadows. I decided to keep the aperture near wide open at f/4 to keep the depth of field small as I wanted to keep the flowers in the background out of focus. 

Camera on manual exposure, I found the exposure I liked with the flash off and then set Flash set to ETTL with -1 stop flash compensation.  I took two shots one with the focus on the spikes at the back and one with the leaves at the front in focus. I then stacked these two images in Helicon Focus. 

In hindsight I should have taken three shot with the third in the middle focus range. I do normally do this but had a ‘Mind Blank’ 

Very little post processing adjustments.