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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.

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