I am not much into photographing wildflowers. I do have a soft spot for Orchids. One such Orchid is the Pink Lady Slipper that is also known as the Moccasin Flower. They are found in mixed or coniferous forest that is moist and shady. I usually come across this Orchid  when I am hiking along trails in Killarney provincial Park  in June. For more info on the Pink Lady’s Slipper check out Andy’s Northern Ontario Wildflower website.

http://www.ontariowildflower.com/pine_forest.htm#ladyslipperp

To make the flower itself stand out I used a technique found in Scott Kelby‘s Adobe Photoshop CS6 book for digital photographers.

I started by processing the photo as I would normally do. Then I would flatten the layers and save the file as a Tiff. This allows me to go back into Camera Raw. Once in Camera Raw get the adjustment brush. Drag the exposure slider all the way to the left. The shadow slider can be dragged all the way to the left to made things even darker. I did not move the shadow slider as I still wanted to see some habitat. Click on the erase button. Set your brush size to what you want. In this case I wanted to show the flower.  Set the feather ( softness) to 90. Then click once over the area you want lit with a soft spotlight like you see in the above photo. You are revealing the image in that one spot by erasing the darkness.

Well that is it for this week. Thank you for stopping by. A wonderful Happy Valentine’s Day to all the wonderful ladies out there.So until next week happy trails

 

 

This