On Queen’s day I went to the Keukenhof with my mom, to appreciate (and photograph) the flowers. That is, I just take pictures of the flowers, my mom also takes pictures of the weird looking tourists-and they are almost as abundant as the flowers 
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I think the best image of that day was this pink ribbon bromelia (Aechmea fasciata). It actually took me 45 minutes of googling to find the Latin name of the damn thing! Too bad one of it’s pink leaves is cut off by the edge of the frame.
I loaded the image in Lightroom then I first set the “camera calibration” profile to Camera Vivid, then upped the standard LR settings (clarity +57, vibrance +21, and saturation +7-you don’t want to overdo this, now do you?) and increased the “blacks” setting to 15-quite high actually. I reduced brightness to +46 from +50, and upped “contrast” to +37. And there you have it. This picture was shot with a Nikon D700, Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 at ISO 1250.
Pink ribbon Bromelia: Aechmea fasciata
But I did one other thing. As you can see, there is another pink flower in the background-which sticks out like a sore thumb in the original, so to cover it up I used the “adjustment brush”, set to lower the saturation to -13 and brushed over the background flower to make it less intrusive. Did I spoil the picture now that you know it’s dirty little secret?
