Botany Photo of the Day

very cool photo, and I must say ever since I downloaded your widget for the OS X dashboard I love checking it out daily.

I realize there's probably a FAQ somewhere but how do you decide what order to post in, do you take requests?

Thanks!

There's really no FAQ, though there is an About Botany Photo of the Day page. Also, there are a few ways to submit photos (links at the bottom of the page).

What order to post in? That's a good question. There is a certain amount of logic to what and what order entries are posted. Here are some general rules, which I break often:

1) I try to post one submitted photograph a week

2) I try to ensure that the seven most recent photographs (the ones on the main BPotD page) are at least somewhat compositionally and “colourfully” different.

3) I try to show photographs in season, though I'm not always successful at this. It's a bit of a moot point, though, since the audience is international; what is in bloom locally may have finished weeks ago a few hundred kilometres to the south.

4) Lastly, if there is a particular event (especially UBC Botanical Garden events) that I can help promote a bit, I will. For example, expect an apple photograph or two in the upcoming weeks re: AppleFest.

Excepting those rules, though, I follow my muse. I try to take photographs in the garden every week, though lately I've only managed every second week. A few hours is often sufficient to supply photographs for 5-7 entries, sometimes more. It's an interesting sort of pressure to decide what's good enough to share with a few thousand people every day.

As for requests, sure, but they are of course limited to what I have access to.

Just a few more rules:

5) I try to feature plants from different plant families. In the mid-term, I'd like to index the images based on plant families, though that will probably be done with other software. Long-term, a photograph from each family would be a goal.

6) As another long-term project, I'd like to develop a Google Map application that georeferences the location of the photograph, so that one can browse the Google Map and search by entries geographically. Once that's done, I'd then have a new goal...

I feel like I'm talking to myself with three comments in a row! Anyway, I received an email asking me about “overlay” in Photoshop.

Overlay is one type of blending allowed via the Calculations command. To access it: from the top-level menu, click on Image -> Calculations... and you will then be presented with the Calculations options. From here, I play (and I do mean play because I find it fun) with: Channels, Blending and Opacity. So, for the image above, I set Source 1 Channel to Blue, Source 2 Channel to Green, selected Overlay from the Blending dropdown and left Opacity at 100%.

The final step, if you are satisfied with your creation (and want to make it easy on yourself), is to ensure you change Result to "New Document" instead of "New Channel".

For a better explanation of the technique, I'll refer you to Darwin Wiggett's Great Black-n-White Photos From Colour Film.