Today we have a special essey for Leo’s and Nat’s Cactuses. There are many pics, therefore I recommend some patience.
About the session’s details:
- Photos taken with the Samsung Galaxy S10e.
- Mini photo studio with plenty of light.
- Photos pre-processed on Darktable, cropped and background removed with Gimp.
This is the first time I tried to understand, even if briefly, how to remove the background from some photos and thus I did it on all cactuses to train. When shooting the photos I didn’t try to be as sharp as possible, so the vases were overlooked.
Be aware: I don’t know much about cactuses, don’t wait a lot of technical info in this post.
The tiny ones
These are cactus with very thin and little “hairs” and thus hard to clip with good quality without spending a huge amount of time. The fact that the hairs are tones of white, same as the background, makes it even harder.
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I like them, but here at home they don’t usually grow and reproduce too much.
The pointy
Another big challenge to clipping, due to the large amount of detail due to having too many thorns. The fact that the thorns are yellow makes it a bit easier, but not too much.
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With these, I’ve noticed less is more: putting less water and leaving them be helps. With time some sprouted. One of the child is in my office. It can be noticed that the tallest ones bend into the sun’s direction.
The bended
With well-defined thorns, although white, these are little horrors to clip in a white background. Many times I had to do it fully manually and even though I dropped several details.
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The bended do well here at home. The first of them used to stand in the beginning and, when it bended for the first time, I almost killed it trying to save it. Only after Natalia found out from other people that they are just like that.
Both green and yellow vase cactuses are child of the big one.
The tall
Furtunately there is at least one type of cactus that is easier to clip. The tall ones are good examples. Once I’ve read somewhere that the one from the fist photo below is actually a succulent, but I am not sure anymore about it.
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In the above clicks there are only two species. The one that repeats itself the most is the one that had more children here at home. It was already 4 and, as you can see in the green vase with a pole, there is another one ready to be replanted.
The powerful trio
It was reasonably easy to crop these.
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They were a birthday gift to Natalia in 2017 and are the family’s ground zero. With them it all began. I like these brown-orange-ish (some would say terracota) rustic vases.
The succulents
The succulents are well delimited and easy to clip. In the cases below, I had more problem with the vases.
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I personally love the pointy ones. There are more resistent and I think they are very pretty, on the other hand Natalia likes the round ones.
The reunion
To wrap it up, here is a very cheerful party! I focused on taking individual pictures due to my initial goal of documenting each cactus, but in the end of the essay I took some with the below plants:
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Taking cactus pictures is nice, they are interesting plants. What is not nice was to clip these 39 images!
Though I have watched tutorials and noted that different techniques are more effective or faster to a given type of cactus, in the end the process took a lot of time and I even ended up with my hand hurting.