This is the first image that I produced with with my Canon G5. In many ways there isn’t anything special about it – i.e. photographing beautiful flowers isn’t all that difficult – but the technical work that went into it gave me some satisfaction.

It’s produced from a RAW image; i.e. an image that hasn’t been processed in-camera. With the majority of point-and-shoot digital cameras the outputted image is a jpeg file that has already been sharpened, compressed and had various other changes made to the actual image captured by the camera’s sensor. RAW images, on the other hand, are unchanged. As such they’re flat (lacking in contrast), often very dark, and quite desaturated. So, to get from the RAW image to something that looks reasonable is, at least when you haven’t done it before, something of a time consuming process.

The only thing that I’m not happy about, in the version presented here, is the slightly jagged appearance of the edge of the petals (particularly noticeable in the upper-left area of the picture). The original version is ok; i.e. it was reducing it’s size that introduced this problem. I think that it’s something to do with the degree of contrast between the upper edge of the petals and the dark background but, no matter which method I used to reduce the image (straigt ‘image size’ in Photoshop, or Web Presenter Pro), I couldn’t eliminate them entirely.

(I would have included the shooting data for this image but, unfortunately, I managed to erase it)