We turned off into in officially designated Scenic Vista near Sedona, Arizona. Sedona is well known for its magnificent red rock formations, and I dutifully took the 57 millionth photograph of the landscape from that spot. Poking around the edge of the parking area, I saw some pleasant small blue flowers. Later, I found out they were a poisonous weed called silverleaf nightshade. Weed or not, it’s a photograph.

I was using an SLR for the landscape, but even with a macro lens it wouldn’t focus closer than about 9 inches, not close enough for a half-inch flower. So the first step was switching to my close-focusing pocket camera (a Nikon P6000). It is best to include the flower, the leaves, and the fruit in the image. That makes the photo useful for identification and it is generally interesting as well. The nightshade has light foliage, so I tried to get it against a dark background.

There were about a half dozen plants around the edges of the parking lot, and after some fiddling around, I found an arrangement suited my purpose.
The original photo is:

Not too bad, but the background is a bit confusing. Nature photographers sometimes putting a piece of black cloth behind a plant to isolate it for identification, but the result looks unnatural. After trying a number of options, simply raising the black level in the lighting > levels adjustment worked best. I also cropped the image a little tighter.

A larger version is here. The larger version shows another problem, The blossom is slightly out of focus. That’s a problem with using a pocket camera. You get some idea of what is in focus, but the screen is not good enough to see the details.

My standard trick for patching focus is to posterize the image using the standard feature of Photoshop™. I also tried some of the fancier Topaz Simplify filters, but this time posterizing worked better. I then add some texture in Photoshop to yield:

The larger version is here It’s a nice enough treatment for a noxious weed.

By the way, the landscape view from the parking lot yielded a sliced vertical panorama,

But I’m sure everyone captured some version of that, whereas I obtain the silverleaf nightshade as well.