Once more into the breach!

That's about as absurd a title as I could come up with for "once again I got before 7:00 AM on a weekend and took some photos of flowers in my back yard." If I didn't amuse myself I'd probably cease to exist.

I really liked what I had the other day taking photos of back-lit daffodils, but I didn't take nearly as many as I wished. Here are a couple more takes on that idea. Exploring the theme, if you will.

ISO 200   20mm   f/5.6   1/1000 sec

ISO 200   20mm   f/2.5   1/2000 sec

 Both of these are the same flower and the sun is directly behind, which adds to the translucency. I particularly liked the triangles that are made when two petals overlap - it's not something you see unless there's a strong back light and it changes how you perceive the flower's shape.

Neither of these really did what I wanted, not that I could have clearly articulated what I was trying to do until I got back to the computer. Perhaps it was because I couldn't quite isolate the flower from the surroundings - other flowers, trees in the back, leaves. I have about 10 shots at different apertures and tried a bunch of crops, but I couldn't quite get this the way I wanted. Perhaps I should have found a way to block out everything else so that I could physically isolate the flower, but that seems like cheating. Surmountable problems? Sure - that's why I practice!

ISO 200   20mm   f/2.5   1/2000 sec

For those of you following along at home this is the same spot (maybe same flower) that I took the halo shot of a couple weeks ago. This time I made sure to obscure the sun completely behind the flower and I think it creates a neat image.

I did a fair amount of processing this photo, especially by desaturating the background colors and pumping up the yellow and orange. I tried this as black and white, and it's neat, but the color is just so nice that I like keeping it in this time. It's a give and take for aperture as I want enough to have detail on all of the flower, but I really want that bokeh in the background. Not perfect, but I like it.

I will officially put a few more items into my bag of tricks:
--Be mindful of aperture so that you get enough detail in a flower, but still have good isolation
--Pay attention to the background, especially things you can't crop out
--Sun behind a flower is really cool