Tag: flowers

Walking with a macro lens

Posted on by SteveH
Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute

The bright sunny days in Spring are ideal to go walking with a macro lens. The sun is relatively low, the air clear, the plants all nice a new. I took all the following buds, flowers and seeds in a radius of a few kilometers. The fact that I was walking with a macro lens meant that I saw more. I was looking for original seeds and new growth. Unfortunately it meant that my walk took a little longer than expected.

This local park is typical of the scenery this time of year in the Yvelines in France. It is the only photograph that wasn’t taken with my 100mm macro lens.

There are new flowers and buds in the garden in Spring alongside the leaves and seeds from last year’s growth. There are more photographs of flowers and plants in my gallery.

Where to buy my work :

Some of my photos are available for purchase on my Adobe Stock store or Pixels store.

Or directly here :


Other posts that my interest you

The following posts are also related to flowers and plants:

Please follow and like us

RSS
Follow by Email
Twitter
Pinterest
Instagram

Natural gardens help protect nature

Posted on by SteveH
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

More and more we need to leave our gardens to grow unhindered in spring to help nature – birds, insects and plants. Natural gardens help protect nature in contrast to the over tendered lawn, fertilized flower beds and treated plants. This year I have been resisting the temptation to overwork the garden and I have tried to leave it as a natural garden.

Could I have a rarity?

This May may have been the warmest on record and it’s taken it’s toll on the lawn. It’s also meant that I’ve had to water some of the plants that I have planted. My potatoes, strawberries and tomatoes in particular. However there are some other plants that I never see normally that are thriving. Most impressive are 2 plants in the middle of the dry grass that must get mowed every year normally.

I am not an expert but a bit of research leads me to think they might be Pyramidal Orchids ( Anacamptis pyramidalis) Apparently, quite rare if it is. You can read more about it on Wikipedia (opens in a new tab).

Touring the garden

Having may curiosity piqued by such a find I set off to tour the flowers in the garden on a random May afternoon. I have planted tomatoes, fuchsias, geraniums, honeysuckle and roses. But there are many others. The hot sun kept the daisies closed but below are the others.

There are chives, some sort of tiny pea, wild strawberries and climber in amongst the honeysuckle.

Hopefully I can get as much pleasure from the natural garden, maybe save some time, money and back ache at the same time give nature a boost which in turn should help us all. Some of the wild flowers are discrete and you need to taker a closer look, but small is not necessarily less beautiful. We shall see how the garden develops. In parallel I will continue to look after my potatoes, strawberries and tomatoes.

How to purchase

Some of these photos are available for purchase on my Adobe Stock store. Or from the menu above, or even buy your art directly below.


Please, take a look and tell your friends about my work and sites.

Other pages that may interest you

There is the Flowers and Plants album, and there are 3 blog posts relating to flowers

The role of white balance

Posted on by SteveH
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

This March has seen a wide range of weather, more than usual I think. Early Spring warmth and late winter coolness. Spring weather photography can inspire and to benefit we must always have a camera handy. There was even a good coating of sand from the Sahara giving exceptional sunsets. In March the sun is still relatively low in the sky which helps with the lighting. So why am I talking about the role of white balance? Because as I mentioned, the early spring warmth and winter coolness, and white balance is all about the warmth and coolness of light. Here are three examples where different lighting can make a big impact on the results.

Let me draw your attention to a camera feature that you may rarely look at: White Balance.

What is White Balance?

It can simply be put as the colour of the light, and this is defined by its temperature. If we use the noon sunlight to be the standard some light appears more orange, for example candles, and some appears bluer, for example modern car headlights. These are also referred to as being warmer, being orange, or cooler when bluer like a cold tap.

White balance values

Your camera, and phone are, by default, set up to take pictures using an automatic setting for white balance, AWB. You will find it in the menu, or expert menu. The role of white balance is to adjust the camera to compromise lighting conditions to take a good image in most circumstances.

The setting of white balance is creeping into everyday life too. This should make understanding it much easier. When you purchase LED lights they are defined by their temperature. Temperature is defined by 3 scales: Celsius (C), Fahrenheit (F) and Kelvin (K). Ice is defined as 0°C, 32°F and 273.15K. LED lights and White balance use the Kelvin temperature scale. For your cameras, a little counterintuitively, warmer candle like orange light has a lower temperature than the bluer clear sky. Typically the light from a candle will be 2000K and a cloudy sky 6500K.

How to set white balance

Why modify the AWB setting? Simply we want a white sheet of paper to look white when we photograph it. If we take the photo of the white paper in a candle lit room the paper will appear orange. The role of white balance is to tell the camera that this orange colour, the 2000K, is in fact white, which is about 5500K. The camera then has a simple addition/subtraction of some Kelvin to do to make our whites really white.

In the menu of the camera you may not find the Kelvin scale, but terms which relate to the typical light source for that temperature. So 2000K will be referred to by incandescent. 6500K as cloudy.

Using RAW is better

If you can take your photos in RAW, rather than JPEG, you have the added advantage that in post processing you can modify the white balance easily. This can be very useful, for example, when you are taking a series of photos of the same subject. A wedding is a classic example where the bride is dressed in white and you are photographing her in the garden, in sunshine and shadows, inside dark a building, around a candle lit table, in camera flash. All very different lights and therefore temperatures. If you don’t modify the white balance the dress will change in colour during your day.

Learn more

There are many resources on the internet which can explain all this in more detail and go further to explain how to set the white balance manually using the white object that you want to appear white in specific lighting conditions.

Take a look here, photographylife.com (opens in a new tab) for example.

Other photos

I have some other different lighting photos on my site, for example: Evening sunlight and lighting and shadows.

Some of my photos are available for purchase on my Adobe Stock store or the link in my fine art store (opens in a new tab).

RSS
Follow by Email
Twitter
Pinterest
Instagram

3 stages in the life of a poppy

Posted on by SteveH
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

A purple poppy caught my attention. A change from all those red poppies we see everywhere. When I looked around there were a few in different stages of their lifecycle. I wanted to capture the delicate petals and a sense of the short time they flower. So here are three images that show 3 stages in the life of a poppy.

Opening

Prior to open the flower, all enclosed in green, swings upwards in a smooth curve. You can see 2 on their way up in this image. Here the petals are opening and this the first of the 3 stages in the life of a poppy.

In bloom

In the second image I wanted to capture the delicateness of the petals and the bright colour. There are only 4 petals. In this image I focused on the edge of the nearest petal. as the focal length is short the next 2 perpendicular petals are gently blurred. The final fourth parallel petal is almost lost. The details on the petal show the creases in the delicate petal as it unfolds. Origami nd laundry come to mind.

Seed distribution

Once the petals are gone the beauty of a poppy is not over. The next task is to distribute the seeds for the next generation. The final image of the 3 stages in the life of a poppy shows part of the reproductive system. The Stamen and Anthers (the home of the pollen and male part of the plant), have all fallen away with the petals after pollination. The Style and Stigma sit on the the melon like ovary which is the main part of the image. These three items together form the pistil.

All those lovely shades of green make a very calming image.

Technique

These photos were all taken using a 100mm macro lens, f/4.5 using ISO100 at 1/200s.

I have other posts about poppies and flowers, for example Catch them while you can about red poppy fields. I also have a gallery Flowers and Plants.

Some of my photos are available for purchase on my Adobe Stock store or DepositPhotos store or the link in the menu.

Other posts that may interest you are:

Where to purchase my work

Some of my photos are available for purchase on my Adobe Stock store or directly via the menu, below.


Using a zoom lens

Posted on by SteveH
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

A Summer morning gave me another chance to grab my versatile 18-135 mm f/3,5-5,6 zoom lens and Canon DSLR show you the possibilities when using a zoom lens. The weather was bright sunshine which presents some issues but makes a walk in the garden very enjoyable. The flowers, leaves, insects, the reflections on the pond were the ideal environment to get great photos and a source of inspiration. In this post I just want to show you the impact of using a zoom lens on the composition of the image.

The context

The above panorama shows the context. There is a path that goes all the way around the pond, with bridges at both ends. The view is particularly captivating from the bridges. But it is also beautiful from all sides. This means that people are often in the frame and can be a distraction from the natural beauty. Using a zoom lens, and patience, will allow you to capture the images when there are few or no people in the frame.

Above you can see people on the bridge and on the right hand side. The person in red, under the weeping willow tree, is the most bothersome as red really catches your attention.

First, whenever possible, set the ISO on your camera to 100, as I did here. This will reduce any potential for noise in the final image. Noise being a grainy aspect to the photograph.

Three examples

Here are 3 photographs from the bridge at the eastern bridge. They were taken with focal lengths set to 22mm, 56mm and 76mm.

If we compare these to the panorama we can see that the higher the focal length is the less we can appreciate the length of the pond. Distances are compressed. This is where the artist in you will decide the right balance between keeping the depth of field in the image, zooming to remove distractions, and focusing on details.

Clearly if the bridge is the subject of the photo the more you zoom the more of the bridge you will see. It is hardly visible at 22mm. But if you are taking a photo of a water lily pond, then 22mm really shows the pond in its surroundings.

My favourite here is the 56mm. Why, because it takes the gentlemen on the right out of the frame, it keeps the blue sky, the impression of a pond. The reflection on the waters surface of the sky is less overpowering.

Zooming even more

Changing the objective on my camera to allow me to zoom to 250mm allows me to focus on individual items in and around the pond. Here is a of 2 while lilies amongst their leaves. There are several insects in and around the flowers. If you look carefully there is a turquoise dragon fly just a short distance above the left lily.

I did another post on zooming earlier in the year which you can find here.

You can see more flowers from this garden in my flowers gallery, https://avenuedesimages.com/flowers-and-plants/

Some of my photos are available for purchase on my Adobe Stock store or directly below. There are other landscape photos here.


Catch them while you can

Posted on by SteveH
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Poppies flower for a short time, you need to catch them while you can. They are short-lived perennial plants and have brightly coloured flowers. The petals appear crumpled and very fine. Spreading out as they straighten. There are many species and many colours. The one I see most, is the 4 petaled red poppy. It grows in and around farmer’s fields of wheat, corn and barley. I expect it’s the Papaver rhoeas, or common poppy I see most. I think it’s this one because of the name and its description. It has 4 red petals. The other famous poppy is the Papaver somniferum, commonly known as the opium poppy. This one I never see. The common poppy will flower from late spring to early summer but each flower doesn’t last long so catch them while you can.

It’s hard to imagine how soldiers in the battlefields of the first world war would look upon such a field of poppies. But the poppy fields of Belgium became a symbol of the conflict and feature in a poem from the front line – In Flanders Fields by John McCrae.

Remembrance

The poppy maintains that link today as the symbol of remembrance for the Commonwealth Remembrance Day. This is held annually on November 11th. It marks the end of First World War hostilities. In the UK the date is an important fund raising event for veterans and organised by the The Royal British Legion. The poppy is not the only flower associated with the end of World War 1. In France it is the cornflower, which is often found growing next to poppies.

Follow this link if you want to see more of my photographs of Flowers and Plants. There is also another blog post showing 3 stages in the life of a poppy flower.

Some of my photos are available for purchase on my Adobe Stock store or directly below. There are other landscape photos here.

.


A spring afternoon walk around Villennes

Posted on by SteveH
Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute

A cool spring afternoon was the ideal opportunity to take a walk in the park. Walk around the park and capture the quiet atmosphere at the start of lockdown. New year’s growth is just appearing. As a result; it is not swamped by the profuse summer leaves and flowers.

The small Paris suburb of Villennes-sur-Seine, in Yvelines, France has some wonderful architecture and parks. So I stayed in the centre of town and visit the Parc du Docteur Fauvel, the town hall and its garden and the river Seine. The river runs very close to town here. This spring afternoon walk around Villennes was in April.

These were taken on my Canon camera with either my 50mm or 18-135mm lens. I would recommend a Spring afternoon walk around Villennes as it shows you don’t have to be far from the city of Paris to be in lovely countryside. It’s a short train ride from St Lazare station. When you get off the train I suggest you start by appreciating the architecture of the old station building. However, If you come by car, parking in the town centre is limited and short stay. The town is not far from the A13 and A14 autoroutes.

My next walk will be a little upstream on the river Seine at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine

Follow this link if you want to see more of my photographs of Flowers and Plants

Some of my photos are available for purchase on my Adobe Stock store, via the link in the menu or directly below.