My mom’s neighbors (hi Dick and Connie!) recently gave her a branch from a flowering orchid, and my mom was sweet and froze it for me!  I guess she wanted to see more frozen flowers on my blog. :)  Then she was nice enough to keep it in the freezer for me for a few weeks until I had a chance to take my macro lens over to shoot.  So I finally got my frozen orchid pictures…

Orchids are pretty flowers, and fun to photograph.  My mom had positioned the flower on a nice angle, such that the petals all froze at the top of the ice.  That was really good, because the parts of the flower that are buried in ice don’t tend to be as pretty in the photo.  When I first took it out of the freezer, the ice was covered in pretty frost.  It didn’t last long in the 80 degree Florida heat!  (Yes, somebody forgot to tell Florida that it’s wintertime.)

I got to experiment with flash and I tried to use the flash light to illuminate the flowers from behind.  I thought that might bring out some really pretty details.  Instead I ended up with blurry images.  Note to self: focus manually next time!

The above image was an in-camera multiple exposure using my Canon 5D Mark III.  I photographed the flower from different angles with each exposure, and I liked how the result filled the whole frame with color.  You could really see all the air bubbles in the ice in the combined image.

Of course I couldn’t photograph a frozen orchid without playing with filters in post-processing a little bit (or a lot…)  My favorite attempt combined the Fractalius filter (to pull out detail in the ice) with Nik Color Efex Pro (to emphasize the detail in the flower).  This image seemed to have a lot of potential, but I had trouble coming up with effects that I liked.

As the holidays get closer, I should try freezing a poinsettia.  I bet that would be pretty!