Water Lily

The water lily (a.k.a Nympahea) in the image below was in a pond in a public garden. It was evening (we actually made it out just as they where locking up) and rapidly getting dark. I did not have a flash ready, so I shot a few frames as ISO 800, meaning to capture the wonderful dark pink color of the petals and the rich dark yellow of the stamina against the reflections of the dark water.

It turns out that I dislike the noise in the color image to the point of finding it objectionable. Noise reduction did not really work for me, because it removed all the texture from the petals due to smoothing. Before tossing the image, I decided to try it in black and white (thanks, Lenswork, for reminding me that black and white is not dead! But that’s for another post.)

In black and white, I like the slightly gritty texture on the petals that is caused by the noise.

Water Lily

What is, unfortunately, not visible here is the huge number of tiny drops on the petals. You can
see some of them (as splotches) on the petal in the 9 o’clock position, but there is a huge number of them on most of the petals. Either they are too small to be seen at this size, or my skill is insufficient to make them visible at this resolution – they are definitely there in the full image.

Does anyone want to purchase a print? 😉