This time of year I regularly consult my wildflower ID book: The Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe by Richard and Alastair Fitter. The illustrations by Marjorie Blamey are superb and they provided the inspiration to relook at the orchids I had found earlier in the week along the Southwell Trail. I particularly wanted to isolate the flowers from their natural background and create an more illustrated style finish to the final image.
To achieve this I used piece of mount board propped up behind the flowers and chose flat lighting conditions to avoid any strong shadows. Later I added a textured background, reduced the overall contrast and accentuating the outline of the flowers:
One of the footpaths from the Southwell Trail cuts across fields towards Kirklington. It passes over a footbridge with partial views of a large pond (part of the Hexgreave Estate). I have taken images from this vantage point before and it is the complexity of the compositions that I find interesting. I repeated a variation of the processing technique applied to orchids to achieve the final finish including a reduction in contrast, lightening the tones and accentuating edges:
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