How's this for color balance?

I took this shot at one of my client's gardens:

Coreopsis gigantea

How does the color look in this one? Vibrant, or still a bit flat? There is some salvia in bloom at the back, but the purple doesn't seem to show at all...

Thanks for all the advice!

Last week, I blogged about my Ceanothus blue photo color problems. Thank you to all who took the time to write me with advice. I decided to start with the easiest to implement advice and work myself up to more sophisticated solutions that will take a learning-curve on my part.

I took one of the photos from the original blog - this one - and adjusted the color - see the results below:

Color-adjusted Ceanothus 'Concha' photo

Original photo:

Ceanothus 'Concha' original

So, I think that was a good start. My approach was to open the image in an editing program and adjust the color there. It took me hours to figure out how to use the software enough to get to this point. 

So, I am happy with my initial effort and feel so successful at completing something that's been bugging me for years. 

I am really excited about learning more on this topic and look forward to delving deeper. Will report back as I learn more.

Ceanothus photos: any suggestions?

Here are some garden pix of Ceanothus in bloom. The blues don't really pop as much as they do in real life.

At the recent Tree of Life Nursery Spring Plant Sale, there was a rather professional-looking photographer and I asked him how to get the cobalt color. He suggested my photos were overexposed and to start manually adjusting the exposure - not relying on the "point and click" settings already programmed into my Canon PowerShot A640 10 megapixels camera.

Is this what's going wrong with my photos? Any ideas or suggestions?

Ceanothus griseus horizontalis ‘Yankee Point’ 

Ceanothus griseus horizontalis ‘Yankee Point’ (front), Ceanothus ‘Concha’ (back)

Ceanothus griseus horizontalis ‘Yankee Point’ (front), Ceanothus ‘Concha’ (back)

Ceanothus ‘Concha’

The second and fourth photos are typical of what my shots look like - the blue is attractive, but not the fall-in-love-with color that stops my heart when I walk by them.

Is it time of day? Settings? Overexposing? 

Pix from last Gardening Committee Meeting

Will Johnson hosted our most recent Gardening Committee Meeting at his lovely home on March 13th.

We worked though some project updates and plans for the future - will post minutes soon. In the mean time, here are some photos from the group having fun:

Greg Rubin, Dave Flietner, Wes Hudson, Will Johnson

Susan Krzywicki, Sue Marchetti, Will Johnson, Lucy Warren

Susan Lewitt, Greg Rubin, Dave Flietner, Wes Hudson

Susan Krzywicki, Sue Marchetti

New Fact Sheets available

Mary Alice just published a whole bunch more Fact Sheets from the Gardening Committee - the full list is above and you can get to the sheets from this Gardening Committee link.

We are working on more fact sheets. I either write them or edit material from a variety of sources. If you have a topic you'd like us to address or would like to help writ e and edit these in the future, please  send me an email at gardening@cnpssd.org and we'd love to have the help and knowledge!

Green Gardens Group training

Green Gardens Group is running a series of educational classes for professionals who would like to use the Watershed Gardening approach in their work, or teach classes for G3 in these techniques.

The watershed approach calls for the use of at least 10% natives, so this may be of interest to our CNPS SD community.

If you have an affinity for teaching and enjoy spreading the word about native plants these classes can add to your capabilities.

Vince Scheidt's contribution...

Vince Scheidt is bringing a few plants that he will be donating to sell on behalf of the chapter.  Lavatera 'Purisima' $12.00

This photo is from the Theodore Payne wiki - a great resource if you have never used it before!