This is a day lily in our backyard. They only bloom properly for a single day, according to Marian, so I hustled out on D-Day and got this picture.

In reality, this flower is pure yellow, but I dehazed it to get the deep orange in the middle. Dehazing has gotten something of a bad rap for being overused, but that’s mainly because too many people use it to actually dehaze hazy photos. Generally speaking, if you have fog or haze in a landscape, you should leave it there. It’s part of the scenery, and trying to remove it doesn’t improve things. However, I occasionally find it useful in modest quantities for pictures where the lighting is just a little too drab. This very much includes portraits of people taken indoors in very flat lighting. Today’s picture is sort of the flower equivalent of that, except that I felt free to use more than the usual level of dehazing because it’s just a flower and I didn’t care about hurting its feelings.

July 14, 2018 — Irvine, California

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