It’s been an amazing past few weeks with the wonderful weather. Hopefully it continues. Here’s a picture I took with my Sony NEX-7 and Leica 90mm macro elmar using the Novoflex adapter. Leica glass on this already great camera, makes even more remarkable pictures. Oh, and the “pixel peaking” feature on the NEX-7 for manual focusing is wonderful and probably will be used by others because of how well it works.
ISO 100 1/60 f/4 Leica 90mm macro elmar
Repost July 2011
I find flowers nice to look at but don’t typically consider them good enough subjects to take pictures of. Probably, because so many people already take pictures of them.
Another reason why I don’t like taking pictures of flowers is because of the composition. Composition is a combination of what you have included in your picture and the way or perspective you took it. For example, when taking pictures of flowers almost always, you stand over them and point down towards the ground. This allows for the flower to be in the foreground and dirt in the background. Dirt obviously is not very eye pleasing and rarely allows for enough contrast between it and the main subject.
One way to change the composition is to be creative an attempt pictures from different vantage points, one in which you typically don’t see. The picture below is an example. Near our driveway we have an island of landscape that is elevated. Because of this I was able to lay down and allow for the sky to be used as my background. This allowed for the tulips to really stick out.
I was wanting to catch the rain drops as they fell off the pedals. The sky initially took a lot away from the flowers. I used Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2 to improve the sky, this definitely help with making the flowers stand out.
Repost from May 2011
One evening I thought I would use my Ikan LED light to shoot some daffodils. I love how well it illuminated the flower pedals. I was using my Leica M9 and the 90mm Summarit-M lens. Obviously, shooting in complete darkness can be challenging especially with a manual focus camera. I had to lay on the ground to get this shot and used a high aperture (f/2.5) to get the shot.
A few weeks ago, I pulled up to our garage and I noticed this lonely daffodil in our landscaping. Fortunately, it was a beautiful day with low lying clouds. I was able to get just the right shot by laying on the ground. What was most difficult was composing the shot without catching the side of my home and the neighbors. This, shot even though not in focus has a great feel and out of all the other shots taken that day, this was my favorite.
