Crazy Tuesday

 Another Flickr group that I participate in is called "Crazy Tuesday."  It is a moderated theme-based group, where the subject matter changes from week to week according to a chosen theme.   This week's theme for instance is "stamps."  

Yesterday, I worked on a sheet of Ukrainian wildflower stamps from the year 2000.  Here's what I finally came up with:

I was pretty happy with this, but then I thought that it seemed silly to have just a picture of stamps.  I could have easily just done it with a scanner.  It needed a little something else.   Today, I worked on reshooting these stamps to include some flower in the margin.  Just something to emphasize that the stamps weren't merely scanned.

At first, I used my go-to lens:  a Canon RF100mm F2.8 L MACRO IS USM lens mounted on a tripod.  Even with Adobe Lightroom, however, my image was a little skewed.  I reshot once more, this time using a Canon RF24mm F1.8 MACRO IS STM lens.  The wide angle gave me a lot of extra room around the subject, so that any distortion was away from the center of my subject.

I was careful to place the flowers in such a way that any shadow they cast would be towards the lower-right.  My natural light source was coming from the top.  Exposure was .3 seconds at f/8 and 200 ISO.  This was actually created from three bracketed shots and processed as an HDR -- High Dynamic Range, which captures a much wider range of light and shadow.

Somehow, I suspect that I may encounter some resistance from the group moderator, as she had said this:

Your photo must unambigoulsy show the THEME OBJECT which FILLS THE FRAME (without a big negative space) and the THEME must be RECOGNIZABLE (without having to say in the description “it is this or that”. As our group’s name is CRAZY TUESDAY – some craziness is very welcome but WITHIN the implemented group rules/requirements. Sometimes that is more or less possible – depending on the theme.

I've run afoul of group rules before that has resulted in my picture being removed.  I'm going to state my case in the photo description, arguing that I didn't want to post something that looks like a scanned image.  We shall see.

About this stamp sheet

The "Flowers of Ukraine" (also known as Plant World Flowers) stamps, issued in October 2000, are a beloved series of 10 miniature stamps designed by artist Kateryna Shtanko. This iconic wildflower souvenir sheet placed 3rd in the seventh World Cup of the stamp held by Timropresse.