Nature

Following on from my macro adventure which I wrote about here images of insects I was inspired to photograph some grasses due to there textures and fine detail.

Meadow grass

Grass photographs

Having taken some time to study the form of different hedgerow grasses I was amazed how delicate and fine they are, full of texture and shape

The problem with capturing this image is the slightest breeze moved the subject and I wanted to use natural light, not studio lighting. I found that wrapping a coat around the stems allowed me to steady the grass enough to get a sharp image and have some control of the scene.

Using a Nikon 18 - 55mm lens on my D40 I was able to use a small aperture to focus only on one part of the seed heads, throwing the background out. I decided to take the images in jpeg fine rather than RAW to speed up processing time.

Post capture

I had taken 20 photographs and had 10 usable ones. A great session!

Grass

Very little adjustments needed to be made, which I was delighted with. I did play a brush over the seed heads to dodge and burn shadows and high lights, but used only 2% exposure on the brushes.