Bougainvillea sp. [Bougainvillea]

[Shamali]

Khalatkar, S.D. (2022) Bougainvillea sp. Comm. ex Juss. (Nyctaginaceae). Flowers photographed in visible and ultraviolet light. LINK

 

Nagpur, Maharashtra, India

6 March 2022

Cultivar in home garden

 

Synonyms:

• Tricycla Cav.

 

Reference

1. Wikipedia (14 Mar 2022) Bougainvillea. Wikimedia Foundation, San Francisco, CA.

 

Gear:  Sony a6000 + 35/3.5

 

Visible Light [f/10 for 1/60 @ ISO 200 in Sunlight with Fotga UVIR-Block Filter]

 

 

Ultraviolet Light [f/5.6 for 1/50 @ ISO 3200 in Sunlight with Baader UV-Pass Filter]

 

 

[Shamali]

I would be really happy if the members can guide me on these images. I am just starting out with the UV photography and your inputs would be truly valuable. 

[Andy Perrin]

Lovely photos in both visible and UV. Which lens did you use? It’s missing the brand. 

[colinbm]

Looks good to me.

[Cadmium]

Yes, those look good. Nice flower. I am unfamiliar with your visual filter, but it seems to work well.
Keep it up. :-)

[dabateman]

Composition looks great.

Not sure how you did the white balance,  are you going for the colors presented? 

Or did you use PTFE to white balance the UV image?

[nfoto]

These photos are precisely like what I got doing Bougainvillea in UV.  So you are definitively on the right track. The shape of the blur circles indicates you have had the lens fairly wide open, and often stopping a non-specialist lens down a couple of stops can improve the outcome.

 

Getting a good "false colour" balance in UV is a mixture of taste, approach, and having an adequate target that is reflecting as flat as possible along the UV range studied. The latter is typically obtained by a white not too soiled PTFE target. The former aspects depend inter alia on whether you use a native daylight/flash balance in the RAW converter, or select "No profile" which is technically, but not necessarily aesthetically, correct. Experiment to find what you prefer. Typically the no-profile processing will result in more blue-green instead of lavender colours. With a false-colour rendition you are free to choose anyway.

 

Looking forward to see more examples.

 

[Shamali]

22 hours ago, Andy Perrin said:

Lovely photos in both visible and UV. Which lens did you use? It’s missing the brand. 

Thank you! The lens is actually based on the Kuribayashi lenses. The older ones are known to be good for UV photography. The dealer from whom I bought the lens, keeps a watch for these. 

22 hours ago, colinbm said:

Looks good to me.

Thank you! 

[Shamali]

20 hours ago, Cadmium said:

Yes, those look good. Nice flower. I am unfamiliar with your visual filter, but it seems to work well.
Keep it up. :-)

Thanks. It's a long way to go. 

[Shamali]

16 hours ago, dabateman said:

Composition looks great.

Not sure how you did the white balance,  are you going for the colors presented? 

Or did you use PTFE to white balance the UV image?

I used PTFE. 

Can you please elaborate on colors presented? Being an amateur I am not very much into the technical stuff. 

[Shamali]

12 hours ago, nfoto said:

These photos are precisely like what I got doing Bougainvillea in UV.  So you are definitively on the right track. The shape of the blur circles indicates you have had the lens fairly wide open, and often stopping a non-specialist lens down a couple of stops can improve the outcome.

 

Getting a good "false colour" balance in UV is a mixture of taste, approach, and having an adequate target that is reflecting as flat as possible along the UV range studied. The latter is typically obtained by a white not too soiled PTFE target. The former aspects depend inter alia on whether you use a native daylight/flash balance in the RAW converter, or select "No profile" which is technically, but not necessarily aesthetically, correct. Experiment to find what you prefer. Typically the no-profile processing will result in more blue-green instead of lavender colours. With a false-colour rendition you are free to choose anyway.

 

Looking forward to see more examples.

 

Thank you for explaining the balance part. These are unedited images. I am not very sure how to process these images. I have been recommended to use Photoshop or CaptureOne, but I have to understand how this works. 

[Shamali]

4 hours ago, Andrea B. said:

Shamali, in the botanical section titles and the headers must follow a certain format so that I can make the botanical indices. So I have made a few small corrections.

Thanks Andrea. I shall follow these. I thought the format is for the wildflowers section. Thank you for making the corrections. 

[dabateman]

13 hours ago, Shamali said:

I used PTFE. 

Can you please elaborate on colors presented? Being an amateur I am not very much into the technical stuff. 

I was referring to the strong purple of the UV flowers.  You may not have set the white balance and just used a default in camera white balance setting. That is fine if you intended the final results to look like this. However. If you photographed PTFE, then you can set a white balance using that in Photoninja or Capture one or RawTherapee or your favorite image editor and the colors will look different.

Andrea was going for some White balance standard using PTFE for some specific forum uploading locations. So make sure to read the rules before posting anywhere. 

 

[Shamali]

On 3/15/2022 at 8:52 PM, dabateman said:

I was referring to the strong purple of the UV flowers.  You may not have set the white balance and just used a default in camera white balance setting. That is fine if you intended the final results to look like this. However. If you photographed PTFE, then you can set a white balance using that in Photoninja or Capture one or RawTherapee or your favorite image editor and the colors will look different.

Andrea was going for some White balance standard using PTFE for some specific forum uploading locations. So make sure to read the rules before posting anywhere. 

 

Sure I will look into it.