Two Headed Gerbera Daisy

I’m always talking about looking for subjects with character in nature. Subjects that set themselves apart from the normal. I was picking up flowers for a workshop and came across this two headed Gerbera Daisy.  So I was excited to take it to the workshop and photograph it.

I shot this in the morning on Saturday before the workshop started. Here is the original out of the camera shot of the two headed Gerbera. The background was a image of green grass, and I shot it with the f/stop at f/3.5. I placed the point of focus on the stem and sepal and let the shallow depth of field soften the petals. The cameras white balance was off a bit but not a problem that Nik Software programs can’t easily fix.

In the first adjustment in Nik Software Color Efex Pro, I applied the Bleach Bypass filter which muted the color.

Second step was to go into Nik Software Viveza2 and do some smoothing out in the background a little, and adjusted the stem and sepal with a more natural green color. I worked the Structure slider to bring out the textures in the stem and sepal and define the lines more in the petals.

If you noticed the little gap between the two heads you see a stray red petal, so I cloned out that and cloned out some of the little debris on the sepal. Here is the final results.