4 posts tagged “flower”

I've been taking a lot of flower photos recently with my macro lens. I love all the fiddly detail in flowers - especially like those in the buds below (the red isn't part of the flower - they are the leaves).

Coastal Flowers : firey red

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Coastal Flowers : Orange

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Six Fingered Hand

Coastal Flowers : Purple feathers

Almost there

Yellow rose

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It hasn't been all flowers though: I've been on a leaf binge too!

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Well then. I'd say that's a challenge!

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'Course, the reason I don't post too often is that I don't actually have an interesting life, and can't rant or rave about current events because I'm living under a rock. It can be dull under here, you know, so on the occasions that I do get out, I like to visit such far and distant places such as my local botanic garden just down the road. Perhaps you'd like to join me, one day? When I first came to Coffs Harbour, I thought that the botanic gardens would feature (as many do) formal garden areas; leafy walkways, fountains and waterfalls. And then found out there's a duck pond at the start, some bushland exactly like the rest of town, some mangroves exactly like the rest of the creek, and some lawny bits interspersed with unkempt paths and unevocative trees.

Happily, things have picked up. There waterfall - man made and rather poorly landscaped - has been turned on most times I've been there. It's odd to see it running one minute, then the sound to die away and water to slowly dribble to a halt.The red asian bridge over the lagoon still goes to a patch of dirt and unmown lawn and as such provides great photographic opportunities from one direction only. The orchid and cactus house (in the same building, of course, because these types of plant go so well together) has been locked on every visit bar one (when the door wasn't locked down properly and I was able to open it to the public myself). Quite interesting cacti inside, if you're into such things:

a prickly situation

I'm afraid I'm not that much into cacti, other than an interesting diversion for a photo. At any rate, there was a red paper wasp nest of particularly large size attached to the side of a prickly pear cactus, and since I am considerably allergic to the little buggers, I only snapped off a couple of shots that particular day. The cactus house has remained locked ever since. On my most recent visit I was pleasantly surprised to find that quite a bit of work had gone on and many of the scatty tatty bushes and trees had been visciously pruned; extensive mulching had been done under most of the common public areas, and that the swampy birch grove was indeed swampy (and a mosquito paradise to boot), as opposed to the parched overgrown backtrack I'd previously ventured down.

Not that I'm trying to talk it up. It still has that red bridge to nowhere, the crazy unmaintained scrubland tracks with plastic-coke-bottle-and-shopping-trolley-laiden mangrove swamp views, the nature walk along the chain link fence between bracken infested scrub and cemetary, the annoying wedding parties taking up all the good reading spots.

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Still, you do find the odd gem here and there.

It's been quite a while since my last blog. The usual excuses people go for are that they are busy, or are having a life, or are tired from work/school/college/relaxing-too-much. Actually I haven't seen that last one. I forgot my Vox password and so I haven't posted. I know there's a link there on the logon page to retrieve it, but I've been lazy. Up until now.

flow

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Photo-wise I've also taken a long hiatus - because creatively I've been a dud lately. A few weeks ago I bought a new gradiented ND4 filter for my wide angle lens, which has been really interesting to get used to. The first few sets of photos seemed pretty under-par, but as I've gotten the hang of it, it's really given me some more range. For instance, I'm usually pretty hopeless at capturing the flow of water. However with the ND keeping the exposure down I can capture the flow better. And take a look at how it really booms on a sky:

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That's a midday sky here in Coffs Harbour, which is quite different to the almost-white colour I'm used to getting. I'm happy with this lens - for now. I'm of course wanting a ND8 or anything higher now. And some warming filters. And... oh, the list goes on.

Anyway, here's a few more shots I've taken recently that I'm also happy with.

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spotty

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soft focus

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While the soft focus effect isn't something I was going for, it was quite a pleasant surprise. It was only last night that I was perusing the Hoya website and checking out their soft and special effect filters. The effect here isn't such a filter - it's simply me with a 300mm telephoto lens, 2x magnifier and fogged up glasses. Yes, I thought the foggy effect was sweat on my glasses, so I ignored it. But what an effect!

figures dancing around the tree

I was also busy getting super close to flowers this afternoon, trying to capture the little details that most people don't see. For instance, in the red flower to the left, I've always thought that the centre part looks like figures holding hands and dancing around a tree. See that centre yellowy but with the spotty orange "trunk". That's the "tree". Other people think I'm crazy.

heavy with flower

I've been shooting in Raw mode lately. This is really cool because I can twiddle the images a whole lot easier that with jpegs. My EOS 350D came with a rather drab raw processing program, but if you're willing to look past its pretty hopeless interface you find all the neccesary options for brightening or fixing your photos. There is a problem with shooting in RAW though - each photo is 8MB big on disk, and also has a 3MB jpeg version as well. So not only can you shoot 1Gb of photos without breaking a sweat, you transfer them all from the camera and end up with doubled up shots!

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I was happy with today's flowers. I actually shot about 200 images, and am currently exploring software that can manage them all (Picassa looks ok, except it has no ability that I can see to detect or manage duplicates). The interface is quick and it understands the .cr2 file format, which many products don't do.

Anyway, tell me what you think of my flowers.