During a walk along a "levada" at Madeira island, my wife liked some flowers and I happily obliged with a couple of snapshots. Back at home, while processing the files I thought perhaps there was some potential in them, and began experimenting: instead of the classic route of soft, light, and saturated images, I tried the opposite direction: dark, hard contrast, and desaturated tones. I liked the result, and did a bit of post-processing more, just to remove the background; this is what I got.
These pictures are special for me, because of the lesson they teach: sometimes, less is more. Those flowers did not impress me when I saw them, I did nothing special to photograph them, and did not spend a lot of time retouching the images. However, the more I took from them (colour, softness, background, ...), the more I liked them; these out-of-context flowers are interesting precisely because of their out-of-context status.
For the curious, both pictures were taken with a Canon 400D camera and a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 lens; exposure time was 1/125 and 1/200, diaphragm at f/2.0, and sensitivity at ISO-100; available light and no tripod. Processed with RawTherapee and post-processed with GIMP.
