I Come to the Garden Alone, While the Dew is Still on the Crocus

I've been plagued by a nasty virus lately, but I've still found a few opportunities to do some photography. For instance, a few mornings ago I wandered around my parents' garden and did some photography there.

This first one is a closeup of what I am told is an andromeda bush. I wanted to split the composition into thirds vertically, with the middle third taken up by the buds and the outer two by the wet leaves. I didn't open up as wide as I could have, using f/5.6. I wanted to preserve a bit of background detail so that the leaves - and the water on them - would be perceptible.

Now some buds. Crocus buds? I'm really very poor at identifying garden flowers. This one was particularly tricky because there was no way to set up my tripod for this shot, which means I had to handhold it. I didn't use the widest possible aperture, instead using f/5, because I wanted a decent area of the foreground bud to be in focus.

Another bud composition. F/3.5 to maximize isolation. It's always hard at that wide of an aperture to get the focus point exactly where I want it. With practice, I've gotten better, but it still took a bit of trial and error in this case.

And, just for fun, here are some images from last year - I did some shooting in our garden in June last year, but somehow never got around to sorting and posting any of the images (I wonder why. Perhaps I was busy with something at the beginning of last summer.)

The first images is of columbine. I tried this composition several times, with the focus point on each of the flowers. I think it looked best with the focus point on the central flower, as you see here. I used f/4.0 to achieve maximum isolation.

This next one - okay, I don't know what it is. It looks cool, though, and when I shot this last June, I thought that the clusters of hanging flowers resembled fireworks. I used f/3.5 to maximize isolation - any extra background detail would have been fatal to the composition, because the background was a fence, and would thus have created a lot of distracting vertical lines.