Exploring tropical plant prints with a Fuji X-H1

If you are a regular follower of this blog, you may have noticed that it hasn't been updated in quite awhile. I spent most of the summer and fall preoccupied with a pressing business situation that came up. That didn't leave me much time for personal work and kept me from adding blog posts.

One thing that did change over the summer/fall is that I became pretty much totally immersed in mirrorless camera technology. I recently picked up a Nikon Z7 and have a Z6 arriving shortly. This is in addition to the Fuji X-FH1 I also use. One reason for the switch is because I have also changed over to shooting video almost exclusively for stock photography, and modern, mirrorless cameras are much more suitable for this than DSLR's. But that is a story for another day.

One of the benefits of taking some time off from personal work is that you come back to it with fresh ideas. Recently, I have been photographing tropical vegetation, mostly with the Fuji X-H1, and applying some post-processing techniques to the images. The photos below are samples of the techniques I developed for this new look. Almost all of the images are a combination of two or more images, some put in as Photoshop overlays. The colors  have been muted down, and the palette limited to an almost monochromatic tonality that came from my days of using split-toning in my darkroom process of printing from negatives.

The four photos on the bottom were all take with the fuji X-H1 and what I call my "do everything" lens, the Fuji 18-135mm zoom. The first photo of the spread out palm leaf was was done using the Fuji 18-55mm lens.