Maples and Such

The other day, I was able to make a brief stop at Saint Edward State Park; my primary motivation was to find some blooming bigleaf maples (Acer macrophyllum) to photograph, something I have yet to really do well.

The first three images focus on individual flower clusters; for all of them, I opened up my aperture as wide as I could to blur the background and isolate the parts of the flower clusters that I had in focus.

Below is a wider shot of some blooming maples on the edge of the big lawn around the old seminary. I knew I would need to crop it heavily, as you see here, because the upper half of the original frame had too many distracting splotches of white sky.

Finally, a change of gears to Pacific bleeding heart (Dicentra formosa). I wanted something that included a mossy-forest background. This one's all right, although the mossy trees don't figure as prominently as I imagined. I used f/16 to get detail in the leaves and mossy trunks in the background. I'll be playing around with some more compositions like this soon, hopefully, as there are lots of bleeding hearts in the park - the only reason I didn't pursue the idea further was a lack of time.