Life Observed

Here's a high key picture.  This splendid bloom is presented against a white background to captivate and impress.  This is not a studio picture, I found the subject in a garden we visited. In fact the method I used was to photograph the flower from below and I used the grey sky as a backdrop.  Suitable application of exposure compensation pushes the entire image towards white and gives it the high key look.

Nature rolls out the white carpet of snowdrops each year at Welford Park, West Berkshire. The grounds are opened for a week or two and you can snap away to your heart's content. Lovely.. PS. This picture was taken using one of my micro four thirds cameras: A format that cannot, as we see, create narrow depth of field effects...

Aah. Rain. That's more like it. We can't be doing with all this blue sky and sunshine nonsense. Let's have lots of lovely rain. 

Another close up, and this time it features another favourite subject of mine. (Use the search box above and go looking for "poppy"). This uses my trademark dark background to provide a visual context. BTW. I wonder why they need to be so hairy.

These purple pompoms on the top of thin green stalks in our garden are Allium. I think they are a photographers's gift, and look really good in the right light. If you get up close, there's lots of detail to be seen By the way. These are not bokeh pictures, the term is being mis-used. They are narrow depth of field pictures. Bokeh is the Japanese work to describe the quality of the out of focus areas. In this case the first image displays smooth bokeh.

Close your eyes, feel the hot sun on your back. Smell the roses in the garden. Aaah. Lovely. A picture from last year, in the garden on a clear summer's day? No. Alas. Sainsbury's roses in a vase in our sitting room in the dark in January. Sunlight courtesy of off camera flash . Tamron SP90 old school lens, and the Olympus E-M5 of course.

You focus a lens by twisting a thing that moves the glass forwards. The further forward it goes, the closer the focus point.  In the old days this was obvious: You could see the lens move as you did the twisting. These days something magical happens deep inside the lens and elves move glass in secret ways. Anyway, you can force a lens to focus loser by fitting tubes between it and the camera. I have a nice set of Kenko tubes made for the micro four thirds camera range, and here's what you get if you park them on a legacy Tamron 135mm telephoto lens.. That is not too shabby at all. Let's hear it for good old fashioned extension tubes.

Cheer up my little friend. The electronic weather prognosticator on my desk tells me it is going to be sunny today. But then again (rather like the TV weather forecast) the electronic weather prognosticator on my desk tells me all sorts of rubbish on a daily basis.  Look, it's simple: Will It Rain?

Ah, the giant poppy . Which photographer can resist these lovely and arresting explosions of colour? Normally the green pod splits at the top and the flower emerges top first. However this example managed to split the bottom of the pod so the crumpled top section remained dishevelled when the pod was removed. I took the opprtunity to grab this picture before the moment was lost. How does it form itself like that inside the pod? Life is full of wonders, innit. It doesn't take long for the flower to unfold itself to the world in general.

Backlit and apparently in hiding, these heralds of Spring lurk at the end of the horse exercise yard adding a nice splash of colour to an almost monochrome scene. "If you see it, snap it"  - that's what I say...

Here's an exercise in minimalism. I spotted this back lit blossom yesterday, backed with a shaded wall.  This required some fancy footwork with the camera to get the exposure correct:  I used spot meter for the blossom combined with +1EV compensation to get the right range of tones while keeping the background nice and black. Quite often, less is indeed more:

Get down man, get down on the same level as your subject.  Dog pictures look better shot from dog height, and it's the same with toddlers. When it comes to daisies, well you have to try harder, but we must suffer for our art. In this case I took the wrong camera. The venerable E-1 doesn't have a tilting rear screen (in fact it doesn't do live view at all..)

The village green has sprouted daffodils a plenty this past week. What a cheerful sight they are after all this Winter we've been having. This is a classic context picture. I framed it to include the church in the background and I selected a viewpoint that brought the daffs closest to the camera, Next I adjusted the zoom to get the right relationship between foreground and background, and finally I chose an aperture that gave me narrow focus on the nearest blooms while leaving the church recognisable. Here is a similar picture, but the narrow focus has been emphasised further. Click on the DOF label to see more.. These pictures are in memory of Dad, who had a soft spot for Daffodils, and for Mum who died recently.

Confused by the late and mild Autumn, our giant daisy produced a new flower recently. What is happening to the seasons? Autumn is the new Spring. Summer is the new monsoon season, and Winter is the New Ice Age. Just keep hold of this fact, fellow Winter haters: The shortest day is only about 3 weeks away. Excellent!

I rather like these small and compact flowers. We have some in the garden and they are a magnet for bees and other insects at this time of year. All very natural.  What isn't natural is this picture, as it is partly faked. The sunlight is actually off camera flash. The shutter speed was chosen to make the background dark, and Photoshop finished off the process. (I like a bit of black in my pictures, you will find evidence all over the blog: Here's a random example... ) Now you know the secret you can see this one comes from the same neck of the woods, with flash and selective darkening used to isolate the bloom and add impact to the image. I show all of this to remind us that nothing we see in print is quite what it seems any more. The digital revolution has given us an endless flow of potentially perfect images. I do wonder if that is a good thing ...

Here's an unusual view of one of our hanging baskets. I chose the upward looking perspective so I could include the sky. I then added some diffused off camera flash to lift the flowers and selected a shutter speed that would balance the flowers and the sky. Here's another picture along the same lines: Both of these images were taken in so called "strobist" mode. That's where you reject any technical assistance and set the camera to manual exposure and the flash to manual output. Now you are reduced to guide number, luck, or trial and error. There is a blog devoted to doing flash the hard way... There are other examples of this method in my blog - even this one ..

Here's me thinking I had pictured something rare when I took this close up shot today... The only rare thing here is the close up shot of a bug. Not my normal behaviour. In fact this seems to be a Harlequin Ladybird, and as such it's an invasive species that we could do without.

The giant poppy. Aah, these start as a promising green bud, then suddenly burst forth as an uncertain crinkly red flower. This matures into a beautiful bloom for a while, but it soon fails and fades. The pure red begins to turn, and flower is past its best. Finally the petals fall on by one until it is no more.  Some days I feel like I am past my best, and I'm waiting for the petals to fall.

I do like a picture to have context. This covers ground I have already covered in an earlier blog, but I think it is worth another visit.  While walking around the village recently I saw a wall of blossom near the churchyard, and aimed my trusty 70-300 macro tele zoom at it. There is no problem in capturing the details of the flowers, but the question is, what to place in the background, and how far out of focus should it be? In this case I wanted to emphasise the local context, and I chose to include a corner of the church in the shot. I wanted this out of focus so that it wouldn't distract from the flowers, but sufficiently in focus to be recognisable. This is where you need to find and use the depth of field preview function on your DSLR. The same principles apply to this image as well, I am attempting to preserve the context while keeping the viewer concentrating on my subject. Composition, context, depth of field control. It's all art and science.

The spring sunshine has transformed the paddocks and lanes, so opportunist flowers are springing up everywhere. Here is the ubiquitous Dandelion clock with its flower in the background. The question is, how does one transform into the other? What an amazing process!