Caltha palustris

• English: Marsh Marigold
• Swedish: Kabbleka (kalvleka)
• Finnish: Rentukka

I think marsh marigold belongs to the category of overlooked flowers. It’s so common that people rarely stop to look at them – we just become blasé to the ubiquituos. But, with a camera in hand, the world looks very different and the deeply yellow coloured marsh marigold are an irresistible subject. A closer look reveals the texture in the petals and the colour really jumps out. Speaking of which, the colour is also the challenge in photographing the marsh marigold. You’d think that the bright yellow is lighter than medium grey, but then you’d be wrong. In fact, you would still end up with an over-exposed flower if you exposed the flower as a medium tone. The red channel will be off the chart with anything less than -0.5 stop exposure compensation, and it gets worse in the sunshine. But compensate too much, and everything else in your picture is just too dark! Shooting with raw has its benefits – the background was nice and green while the flower was slighty over, but a quick highlight adjustment in Rawshooter Essentials easily fixed that. The result is a clean green and yellow colour combination, minus the glare on the leaves – I couldn’t get rid of it even with a polarizer… it only helped when the subject was shaded.

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Image specs: ISO 100, f7.1, 1/400, Canon 300mm f4L w/ 31mm extension tube. Cropped from left and right to 4:5 size, some re-touching to clean the right leaf.