Violet Echo

Posted: July 26, 2009 
Filed under: Floral
Tagged:
Comments: Leave a comment

Description

I believe these are African Violets, but I am not 100% certain.  This photograph was taken during the same outting to the experimental farm gardens in Ottawa, ON as the Blue Flower photographs.  It was taken with my Nikon D200 and my Sigma 70-300mm macro zoom lens at full zoom and closest focusing distance (0.98m).  However, this distance was halved because I was also using my Nikon 6T close-up lens.  I did not use a tripod to obtain this photograph, and instead lay down on my stomach and used my elbows as a brace sniper style.  Over years of taking photographs, I have learned that it is very important to be aware of your breathing when taking hand-held macro shots, which usually is not advisable as it is very risky business.  Generally, you are much better to rbace your camera with a tripod, as in macro photography you are working with depth-of-fields of less than half a centimetre, and sometimes even less than that (mere millimetres).  A very slight accidental movement forward can ruin a photo.  To capture this shot, I took over 60 frames before the wind agreed to let me have a good photo.  The other very challenging part is that with most digital cameras, except for the very highly expensive top-of-the-line cameras, the viewfinder is only 95% of what the actual photograph will be.  That is, what you see in the viewfinder is only 95% of what will be captured by the image sensors in your camera.  I decidedly wanted to keep all extraneous light outside of the composition, but at the same time very much wanted to keep the dark border of the flowers.  So, I was forced to do an extreme amount of bracketing – the practice of taking shots at different focal lengths, exposure settings and/or film speeds in order to ensure correct composition and exposure — in order to make sure I got the shot I wanted.