Heart of a Magnolia

What does a street photographer do if he hasn’t (for various reasons) time to head into town for street shooting? He grabs his camera, heads out the door for five minutes and takes some ICM photographs of a nearby Magnolia tree that is in full blossom. And capturing the heart of a Magnolia…for a few more images from my quick lunch break photo session click below….

The whole thing did not take more than five minutes. I took the Fuji X-T2 with the Fujinon 18-55mm 1:2.8-4 and headed to the Magnolia tree standing 50 meters from our house. I intended to shoot with a slow shutter speed (1/8 sec) and combine it with some intentional camera movement (ICM) by slightly shifting the Fuji while pressing the shutter as well as turning a bit the zoom. As it was during bright daylight, I needed to dial in the largest aperture (f/22) and the lowest (ISO 200) to allow me shooting with 1/8 sec (similar to my recent post Waves)

My main work in post-processing was cropping deep into the images for those details of the petals, that have these “dreamy” touch due to the applied ICM.

It was actually fun to search the images for what crop works best. Doing this in the develop module of Lightroom Classic, I just look at the little preview window in the top left of the workspace while adjusting the crop in the working window. The preview window just shows how the final crop would look like, while in the working window the darkened parts of the cropped out parts are still visible, which I find makes it harder to judge the result.

So five minute capturing some shots, 10 minutes editing. A good invested 15 mins of photography during the lunch break. My visual push up of the day.

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Have a great Thursday

Marcus

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