A Budding Interest

It's been too long since I last posted. Since then, winter has turned into spring! It has become the time of year when I begin hunting for flowers. This morning, naturally, I wanted to fulfill my early-spring ritual of photographing Indian Plum, a shrub with lots of little white flowers that bloom in February and March. It was everything you'd want in an early spring day - overcast skies, occasional filtered sunshine to perk you up, and occasional rainfall to remind you that, yes, it is still February.

The Indian Plum have indeed begun to bloom, although most of the plants are still just beginning to leaf out or produce buds. Below is one such bud. The filtered sunshine you see was not planned. I was working on this composition under overcast lighting and the filtered sunshine appeared suddenly as a bonus. That was the only time I saw it all day! What luck! I used f/5.6 to achieve selective focus on the bud.

Nearby another Indian Plum bush that I was attempting to photograph stood a leaning tree with some exceptionally picturesque moss growing on it. I tried a variety of compositions and the two below are my best. I used f/5 and f/4, respectively, to get strong selective focus. In the first, I used f/5 and not f/4 because f/4 didn't give me quite enough detail in the out-of-focus moss to make the image make sense.

Below are emerging leaves of what I think is a red elderberry shrub - although I'm not quite sure. Its branches seemed rather low for a red elderberry, but the emerging leaves looked like those of other shrubs that I already knew to be red elderberry. There was a lot of light coming through the trees in front of me, so this image has a bit of a backlit feel. F/6.3 to compromise between selective focus and increasing detail on the leaves in the foreground.

Below is a branch of Indian Plum that is beginning to leaf out. F/5.6. The compositional challenge associated with this image is one that I often face when photographing leaves, branches, items on branches, and other very linear subject matter - it can be hard to fill up the whole frame. In the image below, for instance, there is a lot of "dead space" on the top left. I'll hopefully be experimenting with this challenge this spring.

Another bud, this one belonging to a red-flowering currant. F/5.6. This image and cropped and there's still some dead space on the sides; see above.

One final bud, this one belonging to a salmonberry bush. F/5…you know the drill. The exposure for this one was tricky because, despite the overcast lighting, there was a lot of contrast between the dark areas of the branch and the brightest spots on the bud.