A LITTLE FLORAL MACRO

I have been drifting away from macro in recent months, but I thought I would share a few floral macro images that I have managed to take over the past few weeks.

The first was a "grab shot" that I got while I was out looking for other opportunities.  I noticed a plant posed against a floral background and took the following.

For the record, this was shot at f/4 to create some separation between the plant and the floral background.

The image below was taken in the little perennial garden in our backyard.

My goal was to include the immature flower on the left for context.  Perhaps I should have included the entire mature flower.  However, there is already a lot of "waste" on the left side of the image, and including both flowers would only have increased the waste.  In the following shot I focused on a single blossom.  Better, I think.

This was shot at f/5.6.  I didn't want the greenery to be a distraction, but the relatively open aperture did soften the focus on the petals some.  Not a bad effect overall, I thought.

As a comparison, I took the following shot at the Mitchell Park Domes at a much narrower aperture of f/22, bringing the flower into sharper focus.

And here is another Domes shot of an essentially spent daisy, taken at a extremely narrow aperture of f/51.  Here the foliage was in focus, but for whatever reason I thought that just added to the complexity of the composition.

I took the final two shots in our garden on a very steamy evening, so steamy that the lens was fogging over.  

In post processing I ramped up the contrast to compensate for the fogging effect.  The first of the two shots is a little weird, but I thought the residual hint of fogginess in the last shot created a little "atmosphere."

John