Some Spring flowers

[Davejl]

#1


#2


#3


#4

[Shadowman]

Nice series.

[IzzieK]

Hmmm...very nice. I think I better process some of my shots from the Botanical Gardens. That is inspiring.

[Davejl]

Hmmm...very nice. I think I better process some of my shots from the Botanical Gardens. That is inspiring.

Thank you Izzy. You comment makes me feel better about myself: these were in my own garden, but fortunately they are capable of looking after themselves (they need to be with my lack of dedication to gardening)

[JohnRostron]

I particularly like the Dicentra (#4). The pink is very nicely brought out. However, the blurred blue in the background is distracting.

John

[DanK]

Very nice shots. I'm envious: apart from a few daffodils, there aren't any flowers here.

I agree with John about the bleeding hearts.

You face a difficult tradeoff in shooting in their natural setting. A wider aperture helps blur the background, which can be too busy in a natural setting, but it also makes it harder to keep the entire flower (or as much as you want) in focus. This is particularly apparent in #2, where you opened up a bit more than in the other three but still ended up with a busy background. In #4, it looks to me as though you didn't get the entire set in clear focus for this reason. Ditto, #3: the veins show that parts of the flower are out of focus.

That's why I often cheat by cutting the flowers and shooting them indoors.

For what little it may be worth: My own taste runs to very detailed macros, and for that goal, f/9 is wide for flower macros unless one wants part of it blurred. I usually shoot narrower, and when I can (there has to be no breeze), I stack multiple images. I do this routinely indoors, but I have only rarely managed to get a good stack outdoors. Instead, I just close the lens down, as the appearance of sharpness from greater DOF usually more than compensates for the minor effect of diffraction.

[Davejl]

I particularly like the Dicentra (#4). The pink is very nicely brought out. However, the blurred blue in the background is distracting.

John

Thanks John. Fair point re the blue (grape hyacinth)

[Davejl]

Thank you Dan. My garden is probably at its most colourful at the present time, almost certainly thanks to an almost total absence of really cold weather during the winter. (Various daffodils, tulips, grape hyacinths, pulmonaria, dicentra, forsythia, aubretia, lilac, berberis, pear, cherry etc. currently in flower- and plenty of dandelions).
I take your point about photo stacking. Unfortunately, I just can't bring myself to cut flowers to photograph them, and it seems never to be still enough in my garden nowadays to do an "in vivo" photo stack. (There seem to be far fewer still days than there were, maybe a consequence of climate change). Just occasionally, however, the odd flower stem snaps or bends naturally, and I don't mind picking them

[Barbara Ponder]

Lovely images!

[Davejl]

Thank you Barbara.

[vaez]

All image very nice and lovely

[Davejl]

Thank you vaez.