Another obvious subject to photograph during the urban photowalk on Saturday were plants and flowers. I used them as a creative stretch, to start even thinking about other possibilities. They are such easy to pick subjects.
I took this image to show that the flowers are part of the downtown. I really liked it, with one dominating flower, and the blurred but recognizable buildings in the back. Just for fun, I checked how different white balance settings would influence the atmosphere of the image, and really liked the shade setting. The sky was so flat and boring, completely covered with clouds, and adding warmth really made it more interesting, and the color was complementing the flowers.

I was submitting this image for a Facebook group weekly photo contest, and thought I can put it on blog, too. It can be considered one in the series of “light on the tree”, for which I posted a couple a few months ago.
I saw this birch one evening through the window, and liked how it was lit with the setting behind the trees sun. The light was separating it from the other trees in the background. I went out and found an interesting point of view, and took several images from different distance. This was my favorite.

Since I am photographing flowers nowadays, something flowery for “special Friday”. I got so frustrated with this little bud of a rose. It was just a tiny wind that evening, not enough to disrupt those flowers with more leaves. But the rose has an almost empty stem, which made it extremely prone to shake. I had to give up trying to get a sharp image. And put all the effort to get it moved to the point the photograph got interesting again.

I expect next two or even three weeks will be quiet on blog. Good thing is at least I have time to photograph. I started to work on something which might turn out into my first really photo project. I set to photograph my mom’s flower garden. I really can devote time to that, and already spent three evenings with tripod there. Hopefully, I am not stepping on anything important, when I take out my macro and need to get close . First I thought, I have a week or two to work on it, so maybe I will devote one evening for zoom lens, one for Lensbaby and so on. But a browse through first day (3 keepers out of about 100 images) made me re-think the idea. Hard to believe, but I missed the focus even on calm evening and on tripod. So next day, I reshoot missed flowers from previous evening, only to find out that the situation in the garden already changed! The new blooms showed up, and some I wanted to photograph were already fading. I think I need to speed up .
I usually go out to photograph in the evening. There is less heat, and the sun is partially hidden behind houses and trees in the woods. I was setting up to photograph those flowers, when I noticed the sun is shinning through the branches and thought of doing sun flare type of effect. I set-up the tripod, and on my first try, I got this effect instead of what I was looking for. Well, I liked it, so I pinpointed the exposure right where the flower was well lit.

By the way, I am not 100% sure this is the right flower name- I spend already half a day browsing through website with garden flowers, and cannot find exact match. So if you know the name- leave a comment below!

In follow up to yesterday’s post on David DuChemin newest e-book, “Safari- a monograph”, today’s image is using the same post-processing as some of safari images in the book. To achieve the effect, I took a photograph of the white rose from last weekend session around my mom’s garden. I did typical post on it, with curves and clarity slider, then turned it black and white and adjusted tones luminosity. And as a last step, I applied the Lightroom preset called Serengeti Chocolate, which accompanies the e-book.

For this image, I needed two “advanced” shooting techniques. First, it was really bright and sunny day, so I waited for a sun to disappear in clouds. The second, which helped in getting this image really sharp, was standing stable, still and… to stop my breath. I had low ISO to avoid any noise, to which my camera seems to be prone if the light is not too perfect even i daylight. The short shutter speed was a lucky result of the open aperture, which combined with long focal length put the background leaves out of focus. Overall, the outcome I was hoping for.
I tried and took several images, and the first one turned out to be the sharpest and most interesting at the time.

I found this pond with water lilies in a restaurant, for all places. Of course it was not your usual dining-out place. It was one of those unknown in Midwest, and extremely popular almost everywhere in Poland fresh fish frying places. Almost all of them have their own fish (trout) farm, and in some you can even fish for your dinner. So, since they have water ponds, they may have another one, with water lilies as well. In fact, this one I found at the back of the establishment, when I took my camera for a closer look at the area.

There are some flowers, which you would photograph for their color. For example red poppies look great on the background of the green field. And there are flowers where the form, the shape, is what is the most fascinating about them. Like roses, of any color. Or cally lilly. It is almost like the green of its leaves disrupts study of the shape of the white flower itself.

Another crazy day today, and I almost forgot to post something on the blog. But since I was picking three images for Mike Moats macro contest, I decided to put here one of them. I took it a couple of weekends ago, when one evening we were watering my mom’s flowers garden. This particular plant’s leaves were keeping the water better then any other, creating a great photographing subject.

After a couple of years shooting almost exclusively in Aperture Priority mode, I moved to Manual. And believe me- I had a real reason. I am using 99% of the time my Nikkor 18-200 mm lens, and recently I discovered, that regardless the metering mode, it is overexposing pictures. It is driving me mad. Although my husband argues with me, that the pictures both look good on the screen and their histogram looks right, they are too bright to me. And it is not happening with my Nikkor fisheye, so looks it is just this lens. Instead of Googling what the problem is (I constantly forget to do that) I switched to Manual and learn new skills. It is like driving a stick shift car, which I am also figuring out after spending last 10 years with automatic . If you know the rules, signs and all that stuff, it adds only one additional element. Not easy, but not horribly complicated either. Both with car and with camera, I have moments I forget to check, though .
Anyway, I was photographing my mom’s rock garden this weekend, and here is one of my favorite images. It is a little Lensbaby soft, but I still love the leaves/petals pattern and matching colors.