Yesterday I spent the evening (or part of it) at Floriade.
Floriade is a kind of Spring festival, held in Commonwealth Park in Canberra. Lots of tulips and other flowers. Been running for as long as I can remember, but this was the first time I’ve been along for at least a few years.
Covid stopped it one year, and they planted out all the already ordered bulbs in smaller parks and even roadsides around the city, which I thought was a nice solution.
I got there just after 5pm, and discovered that the gates closed at 5… to re-open at 6:30pm for the “NightFest” part.
I actually ended up getting in a bit earlier, but most of these were taken around the start of the evening opening. There were two bands/artists on different stages warming up too.
I’ve always struggled to get decent photos of the event and the flowers, which are, on paper, the obvious subject. This time I approached it more from a street/experimental point of view - for better or worse!
Some seem to have ended up feeling more than a little gritty…
Let me know what you think cos I’m not sure! This is just a few.
Hi Steven,
when I lived in Sydney I use to ski a lot and always stopped off at Floriade while passing through Canberra at this time of year. BTW, colour film back then really struggled with capturing the red tulips. They just seemed to glow in an unnatural way.
Thanks Terry. Interesting about the tulips on film… talking of tulips I think I should have made of an effort to incorporate some in my shots. These pics aren’t really what I’d call brilliant…
Nikon D750 gets beautiful representations of red. I like the 2724, 2605 and 2715 mostly as there is less “noise” aesthetically in them.
I also like the fact that all of them are post processed very carefully so to give different (each it’s own) feeling and cropped so to note the subject.
You’ve played with different techniques as well such as low shutter speed and background exposure metering for shadowy subjects.
Post processing does give a bit of film feeling as well i think.
Thanks! I think you’ve picked my favorites too - although I’ve got a particular liking for the first one, with silhouettes on the hilltop, as well.
I like silhouettes where it’s possible.
I’m glad it looks that way - I was little afraid that them all being different would just look messy! But they all seemed to suit different styles.
I used film LUTs from the RawPedia HALDclut collection on a few…
Interesting you should say that - I’m actually running with a custom ICC input profile made using Lumariver, but it’s not that different to the default dt profile. What I’ve noticed though is that just a matrix ICC profile isn’t enough to match different cameras. My Olympus EM5ii, using a profile made the same way, still looks different. It’s a whole subject in itself…
That’s the only one where I used a mask - to slightly brighten the man on the left.