Welcome to Shutter Notes, our new weekly community feature. Shutter Notes will be a chance to get to know our community members a bit better. Each member will share a little bit about themselves and an image they’ve chosen.

This week we’ll meet Barbara Dunn. Barbara is a retired educator from the Chicago area. She has been interested in photography ever since she received a camera for Christmas when she was in sixth grade. Now, she happily has much more time to learn about and explore photography.

This beautiful, short-lived cactus flower was photographed at the Chicago Botanic Gardens. Barbara wanted to show how these flowers show us the complexity of nature. The details and varied colors are what prompted her to share this particular image. She would like people to be intrigued by the shapes, details and colors when they look at this shot.

Barbara Dunn

How Barbara created this image

To get the composition, light and everything the way she wanted with this flower, she shot about eight frames. That’s when she was satisfied she had what she wanted.

As for post-processing, this was cropped and changed to sRGB color space. Basic adjustments were made in Lightroom. She then adjusted the color saturation to make it match what she actually saw when taking the image. Then she masked the edges and darkened them in Photoshop, then sharped them using Topaz Sharpen AI.

“I learned to get really close with macro images, and although I have other cameras and lenses, I really like the 28mm macro for capturing fine details. I also learned that the color we get after processing is not always the color we wanted. Since these flowers last a little more than one day, I learned that being in the right place at the right time is important for photography.”

Thank you Barbara for submitting and sharing your lovely cactus flower with us. I love how you’ve filled the frame and captured the beauty in the details.

Please join us in the Photofocus Community and find the complete description and instructions on how to submit your image for consideration here.

Please only submit one image at a time and for now only one submission per person. We’ll ask for more at a later date if we need them. If you have any questions, comment here or send me a message within the community. We look forward to your submissions.

If you have any photographer friends you know would enjoy or benefit from being in the Photofocus Community, be sure to invite them!