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Trying my hand at flowers

While taking pictures of insects yesterday at the Bellevue Botanical Gardens, I noticed that they had lots of pretty things on the plants that sometimes the bugs would crawl on.  As most of you know, I spend most of my macro efforts taking pictures of insects, but the major reason for that until recently has been the fact that the MP-E 65 isn’t the greatest lens for flowers.  Many flowers do not need 1:1 magnification so the MP-E 65 was often too close.  This is not the case with the 180L.  Therefore I put away my flash and took out my tripod and attempted a few flower shots.

This is a cranesbill flower, related to geraniums.  The interesting thing when taking this picture was I had the opportunity to use a rather shallow depth of field.  I kind of like the effect here.  One can still make out the leaves but the stem is not visible.  I could blur the leaves more in Photoshop, but I rather like the effect out of the camera.  I took this at f/5 - which I wouldn’t dare think of for most insects.

I tried a number of different shots of this one flower.  Here’s one where the flower is a bit smaller in the frame.

 

Here’s another viewpoint with two different shots.  The first was taken at f/11 while the second was taken at f/7.1.

In general I like the shallower depth of field shot more, but I wish I had used an even shallower depth of field.  Here are some other shots I took that day.  The second shot was actually taken with my MP-E 65.  It does a good job of getting closeup shots like this, but in general I think the 180L is the king when it comes to flower shots.  I just need to practice a bit more.

Related posts:

1. Experimenting with Photoshop and flowers Recently I have started listening to the photo critiques at RadiantVista.  For those of you not familiar with this site, it is an excellent source of information and composition and Photoshop and on top of that it is free.  Currently my use of Photoshop is limited to changing contrast/shadows...
2. Playing with flowers OK, I promise that I’ll get back to some good old fashioned bugs soon, but I thought I would post some more flowers.  Last weekend at the Bellevue Botanical Gardens I played around with daisies.  I took all of these shots with my 180L but without a tripod.  Instead I...
3. Playing with bugs on flowers This weekend I finally found the chance to get out and take some pictures, as Saturday was a very nice day.  I wandered around in my backyard for awhile, looking in the normal places, and found nothing that I hadn’t photographed several times already.  The shoot was briefly interrupted as...
4. Stalking bees in the garden Those of you who know me will find it very odd that I actually attempted to get some shots of bees the other day.  Even more shocking is that I went with my MP-E 65 instead of the 180L- which is what I normally use when stalking bees.  The thing...
5. A different take of the ponds near my office Recently I started a new challenge where each Friday I will photograph several ponds that are located near my office.  Last Friday I went again to the ponds but I decided to try something different.  Instead of searching for tiny creatures with my MP-E 65, I decided to use my...

Tags: cranesbill, depth of field, flower, geranium, iris, macro, photography