Diagonal

Shot in the hills behind Ocean Mesa Campground outside Santa Barbara, CA. Stacked my 70-200 f/2.8 on top of my Nikon 1.7x teleconverter. Lightroom Workflow: *Import from SD card. Apply standard copyright metadata and typical keywords (author, camera body used, etc). *Apply low-ISO preset. This is a combo of sharpening, noise-reduction, and a few other tweaks that I find make a good starting point with shots that are under ISO 400. *Crop square. I knew I wanted a strong diagonal composition, but I didn't know how well it would fit the square crop until I looked at in the Crop module. *Adjust exposure for the bulk of the frame. I think I knocked down the Dxposure by 0.1 stops and boosted the Recovery a bit. The central (focal) flower bud was blown out, so that led me to... *Brush -1.5 stop exposure adjustment on central flower bud. *Boost contrast. By now I knew it was going Black and White, and it told me to go high-contrast (no, really!). *Convert to Black and White. Here's the special sauce: Used the Luminosity Targeted Adjustment Tool (TAT) on a middle-color in the background and dragged DOWN. That ended up decreasing the Orange and Red luminosities by a bit, and ended up really making the light-colored foreground pop out. *Add post-crop vignette to further "pop" the subjects. Comments and questions welcome!
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