03 Dec 12.  I began work on this image last January about the time we were thinking that if I didn't do something quickly, the plant would be too far past its prime to be worth shooting. Being the time of year that it was the plant was obviously something with a Christmas theme, and what better says Christmas than a poinsettia. This was to be a desktop effort with the idea that I wanted to make the living plant look like a fake silk one. Kind of a 180 from when I was a kid and the fake flowers were so bad you didn't want them in your house, now they are so good that they often look better then the real thing and never need watering, even if dusting is a regular requirement. I think I did a pretty good job of achieving my original goal, but it never felt sharable for some reason. Today I decided to see if I could make it something I'd like to share. After looking it over for a bit, I decided that if I could bring out some of the detail in the petals it might render it presentable. All I did was apply a bit of detail extraction which provided just the kick it needed to meet that goal. After the detail enhancement it was sorely obvious that it need a LOT of cleanup so after roughly an hour of fixing hundreds of little character flaws, we arrived at the image you are viewing. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; ISO 200; 1/60 sec @ f /11 with fill flash on a tripod.
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