California Wildflower
What are these little iridescent pearl flower buds? I have no idea. I found them in the local hills on a bush and are very cool. I have no idea what they look like in bloom. If you know what they are, let me know, I was unable to identify them online.
Salsify Seeds II
What do you do when you don’t have a macro lens and you want to get on the Dandelion Bandwagon (1, 2, 3)? Get a bigger dandelion! Again, we have Salsify seeds setup in my ‘studio’. In the afternoon, the sun comes through a window in my house and has served as my back-lighting system for awhile. I think it worked well here. The one thing I don’t have and need is a black backdrop to make something like this stand out even better.
The details in the fibers are wonderful. Click through to see them in good detail.
Broom Bush
Broom bush from the front yard. These things smell wonderful when in bloom. Sadly this is almost done blooming for the year.
Yellow Mustard
I find yellow flowers extremely challenging to photograph. I’m not sure why they always lose their detail and appear so flat. No matter how I work the camera and the post-processing I always struggle with a attaining rich looking image. I’d love to hear pointers on how to make yellows feel as sharp and deep as other colors.
This image was taken in a very vibrant field of yellow mustard. The colors were fantastic. While this is nice and I like this image quite a bit, It doesn’t capture what I saw. It was all much more vibrant and had more texture in the petals.
Reaching for the Sun
More from the walk to the farm. This time we have a happy little sunflower with some definite personality. This flower was just begging to be photographed. It was in a challenging location and it was tough to get an angle on it, let alone one where the camera would be still. I love the wide range of colors in this shot.
Papaver
At Deer Hollow Farm in the park on Sunday, there was a small garden with this Papaver poppy growing. The delicate red paper-thin wrinkled petals and how they catch the light are just wonderful. The white anthers and purple filaments combined with the bright yellow pistil that looks like a fancy pat of butter work so well for this large flower.
Thistle and Honeybee
One of my new recent favorites! Today, I took the kids hiking through the hills in San Antonio Park with some friends to visit Deer Hollow Farm. The flowering thistles were drawing my attention but not delivering in any shots, no matter how much I encouraged them. Along the hike, my friend mentioned the bee on a nearby thistle. Needless to say, that was followed by several clicking sounds coming from my camera.
I love the pollen on this bee, the colors, clarity, aphids and spider web.
Deep Red
Okay, I found one more image that worked from yesterday’s rose garden outing. Also, there is an image I had high hopes for, but in the end doesn’t work for me. The more interesting part to me is the action that happened where i wasn’t looking (or focused for that matter). Oh I wish I had seen it when it was going down! That is the one drawback to the remote shutter release. 
One of the Hardest Captures
Today’s capture comes with pain, frustration, and a bit of misery. I wanted to jet off to get some photos in the evening light at the Heritage Rose Garden in San Jose. The kids wanted to come along to take flower pictures of their own. Sounds good. I get the nice light, they get to hang out, my wife gets a break.
That is where things went wrong. The rose garden isn’t really too close to anything. As in, it’s not setup like a regular park. So when my older daughter said, “I need to go potty really really bad,” just after I setup for my first photo after we drove out there; I had to figure out how to deal with the situation. We worked around the issue, and I won’t go into detail how, but lets just say, timing was critical.
Back to shooting. Of course, it’s quite windy so every shot takes tons of patience. At least I have my tripod and remote shutter release. Until I hear. “She fell! She fell and hurt herself!” Apparently the kids were playing on a hill and my youngest one fell on the concrete and cut the inside of her lip, poor thing (she’s fine now). That marked the end of the photo trip. 40 minutes of total driving, and 20 minutes of highly distracted shooting. I wasn’t really happy with any of the shots, so here is the best of the outing. Oh, in 30 more minutes, this one would have been so sweet.
Happy Mother’s Day
Happy Mother’s Day to all the Mom’s reading. We’ll be celebrating with a nice brunch and then keeping the kids away from the house so mom can relax in peace.
Well Hello, Daisy
Today I bought a circular polarizing filter. So naturally, what is the first thing I do to break it in? Take it off the camera and do some reverse-lens macro shots. It’s what you would have done, right? That’s what I thought.
What we’re looking at here is a little daisy that was growing in the grass field of a local school. This was taken at 135mm focal length. Isn’t this shot one that is required of anyone taking flower photos? I thought it was, so I made my attempt at it.
Alyssum
I love being close enough to walk to farmer’s market. When the weather is nice it makes for a good Sunday morning event. One house along the way has a wonderful flower garden in the front yard. I stopped to take a few shots, and let my girls try their hand at some as well.
These Alyssum Flowers are my work but it won’t be long until I’m featuring the kids stuff. They love taking flower pictures. But the rule apparently is, one photo per flower please. No more. No duplicates, no matter if it is from one location or another. That means one poppy photo, one daisy photo. I guess this means we either need a bigger garden or we’ll have to start traveling soon.
Spring Colors
This is lavender in the foreground and broom bush providing the nice backdrop in the background. I love the contrast here, and the evening light added just that little bit more. The little spider web in the top completes the overall look for me.
Carpenter Bees
Lavender attracts three varieties of bees and the paper wasp in my front yard. These guys are Carpenter Bees. They don’t have stingers but are still rather aggressive. Despite their large size, they are harder to shoot in an interesting way than the honey bees since they are much faster and much more impatient. In the top photo, if you look, you can see my reflection in the eye. The bee below seems to have lost an antennae.
That Was Bitter!
I am finding that I enjoy taking photos of the bees in the front yard. They don’t mind me being there and they are great subjects. This little guy was hanging on to the lavender with just his hind legs while cleaning his tongue.
Buzz Buzz
The evening light today was perfect for shooting some tree blossoms and the busy bees working on them. I was using my 28-135 lens for these shots which means I had to crop quite a bit to get the right detail. The real challenge here was sharp focus with the quickly moving bees. For that, I used live view, zoomed in to quickly manually focus on the bees while somewhat still. Once they started to move, I let the rapid-fire shutter go. This collection is out of about 30 total attempts.
Confused – Daily Shoot 79
With the constant endless rain, winter is still going strong. The blossoming trees give hints of spring. This made for a tough choice for Daily Shoot assignment 79. (Which was completed a few days late)
#ds79 – It’s Groundhog Day in the U.S. Make a photo that illustrates whether it’s more like winter or spring where you live.
Daily Shoot #4: Close
#DS4: “Get close! Photograph an ordinary object from as close as you can manage. Fill the frame!”
Yellow flowers in my front-yard.
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