D750/D7200 - Summertime Sunflowers
Equipment Used: Nikon D750 & D7200, Tamron 24-70mm & 70-200mm f2.8 G2 lenses, VanGuard Abel Plus 363CT & Silk Pro tripod , Nikon SB-700 Speedlight, Lightroom & Photoshop CC
A few weeks ago I traveled down to Bays Branch to the sunflower plot to take some photographs of the blooming sunflowers during the day and then again at night to try and get the milky way in the images.
During the day, I used both my Nikon cameras and had the shorter lense on the D750 while the D7200 had the long lense. Settings for the D7200 were ISO 100-125, f7.1 – f9 and had negative exposure compensation dialed in. For the D750, ISO 100-200, f5.6 – 7.1 and also had negative exposure compensation. I had negative exposure compensation because I was using my SB-700 to hit the sunflower with a burst of flash. Since I was using tripods, I used live view to focus on the sunflower and then turned off autofocus and VR. For the Milky Way shots, ISO jumped up to 3200-6400 while aperture was f2.8 and exposures were around 8 seconds.
Once in Lightroom, adjustments started in the basic tab by increasing clarity, dehaze, vibrance and saturation. Sharpening was increased while using the masking feature which kept the sharpening to just the sunflower. Radial filter masks were used to fine tune the look of the sunflower while I used radial and graduated filter masks to fine tune the look of the background.
In Photoshop, I first used the healing clone brush to fix small blemishes on the sunflower pedals such has small holes. I than used the dodge & burn brush tool to lighten parts of the pedals. For the milky way images, I used PS to combine two different images has I had to capture the milky way by focusing to infinity on one image and focusing on the sunflower for the other image. By using layer masks, I was able to accomplish combining the images together.
