Double Hellebore 2, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

The original photo of this triad (immediately below) is a double hellebore blossom. It’s one of the first blossoms from the second year blooms of these special hellebore plants, hybridized by Barry Glick of Sunshine Farm and Garden, the self-styled “Hellebore King.”

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The more or less accurate colors of this flower (above), photographed in my studio, are pretty nice I think. But Harold being Harold, I couldn’t resist playing in the digital darkroom. Here is the capture info for the photo: 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 1 second at f/36 and ISO 100, tripod mounted using a Kirk Mighty Low Boy.

I often get asked about the techniques I use to get effects like these (top and bottom). I’ve no desire to be mysterious about it. But the precise steps I use are different every time. It’s a process, when it’s working right, that feels like the image is calling out to me, and revealing the steps as I go along necessary to reveal the inner image. You could say that I am the image’s therapist.

There is some commonality in the techniques I usually use. I start by photographing (or scanning) for high depth-of-field and transparency. I then work on the image in Photoshop using a variety of blending modes with duplicated inversions of LAB channels.

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