Photographing our Chocolate lab one afternoon this past Summer, I noticed our Vitex Blue Diddley flowers were brightly lit by the afternoon sunlight. Getting down on my stomach and using the EF 100-400MM F/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens that was on my camera, I isolated several single stalks with a clean background and took several images.

The color image (shown right) has blueish-purple petals that were slightly washed out by the bright light, but I took the image with the idea of post processing in black and white.

To accomplish the conversion, I used Photoshop 2018 with a gradient map layer, a black and white conversion layer, and a dodge & burn layer to isolate and accentuate the flower structure.

Thanks for stopping by today!