A LITTLE MACRO AT THE DOMES

I have been to the Mitchell Domes conservatory literally dozens of times looking for nature macro opportunities.  They seem to be getting more difficult to uncover.  It's not for lack of a variety of flora.  At this point the issues are more ones of limited access with a camera on a tripod and lack of control over lighting.  Over my last couple of visits I have tried to focus on overall composition.

The casual visitor to the Domes is usually drawn to the floral displays, if for no other reason than their diversity of colors.  And they are an easy target.  Here are a couple of floral shots that are very different from one another.  The first is a  photo of a solitary flower.

This flower was fairly "flat" so I could afford to open up my lens to f/4 to reduce depth of field and, in  effect, blur out the background.  Here I focused on the flower's central portion.  As a result, the petals are just a bit "soft," but the effect is a nice one, I think.

This second photo was shot at a nearly wide-open f/5.  However, in this case I was considerably further from the flower, resulting in a significantly greater effective depth of field.  I wasn't able to eliminate the background, even though it is quite blurry.  So I decided to embrace it as context and placed the flower toward one corner to feature the greenery as an element of the image.

When I feel I have exhausted the flowers, I turn to ferns.  They can make good photographic subjects because they present interesting abstracts that are generally bright against a much darker background.  Plus, importantly, they often present a relatively flat surface, and I can position the lens to be perpendicular to that surface.  As a result, I can often get by with a shallower depth of field than I would otherwise be limited to.  These factors pertained in the following shots.

Finally, I liked the following cluster of succulents that were located in the Desert Dome.

In this case in post processing I emphasized the color variations that the plants exhibited.  I also decided to crop the cluster down, leaving just enough to include the centers of all four plants.

John