Soma-Sema.com » Floral

Day Lilly VII

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:11:16 +0000

This is a photograph of a Lilly, one of seven such photographs. Each one of these was taken with my Nikon FM2 using Kodakrome colour positive slide film (100 ISO) and my Sigma 70-300mm apochromatic macro zoom lens. I had to use a tripod for this shot because both flowers were in the shade of a very large oak tree. In order to get the second flower in any degree of focus, I had to use a smaller aperture for greater depth-of-field, which requires a slower shutter speed to compensate. Combined with the fact that 100 ISO film is about as slow a film speed as you can buy (though they can go down to 50), I was working well below hand-held shutter speeds. It is important for young photographers to remember, one shift in shutter speed, film speed or f-stop is equivalent to doubling of halving the light hitting your film. That is, if you shift from f/8 to f/16, or from 1/125 to 1/250, you are halving the amount of light hitting your film. In reverse, you’d be doubling the light. Thus, if you shift aperture, you should compensate by adjusting shutter speed when possible, or on digital cameras you can adjust film speed instead.

Yellow Lilly

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:49:41 +0000

Untitled II

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:48:38 +0000

My curiosity was aroused by this odd yellow flower blooming out of a much larger red flower. I still do not know what the species of genus is, but it is an odd composition to have a flower blooming from a flower and I could not resist taking this photograph. This was taken from the Botanical Gardens in Montreal, a fantastic place to visit. Their website can be found at http://www2.ville.montreal.qc.ca/jardin/en/menu.htm.

An old friend, with whom I grew up playing competitive soccer and attended high school, and I periled the aggression of a merciless winter storm to get to the gardens because I was only in the city for a day and we could not resist a butterfly exhibit that was happening that weekend. I took this using my Nikon FM2 loaded with Kodak Elitechrome 100 ISO film at 1/60, f/8 at full zoom and closest focusing position with my Sigma 70-300mm macro apochromatic zoom lens and my Nikon 5T apochromatic close-up lens.

Untitled I

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:47:04 +0000

I visited the Botanical Gardens with a friend of mine, Josh Brown, whose own work can be seen at www.josbrownphoto.com. We were, unfortunately, not permitted our tripods into the greenhouses (we visited in the winter during a hard driving snowstorm and the outdoor gardens were frozen) because the pathways were too narrow. Me, being stubborn and experimental, wanted to try the Fujifilm Provia 100 that Josh had given me, and the Kodak Ektochrome 64 and Elitechrome 100, had refused the higher speed films for the resolution the slower speeds would grant me. I had to take quite a good many shots to get this particular composition because I had to concomitantly push the film to 400 ISO and drop the shutter speed down to 1/60 and 1/125 of a second with my Sigma 70-300mm Apo Zoom Lens at nearly full zoom (200mm). However, my practice as a youngster near the bird feeders in the dead of winter with my old Nikon Em, skipping school and taking pictures of chickadees, finches, nuthatches, cardinals, downy and hairy woodpeckers, and the occasional red squirrel, has been finally paying off as of late.

To find out more about the Botanical Gardens in Montreal, please visit: http://www2.ville.montreal.qc.ca/jardin/en/propos/propos.htm

The Forlorn Petal

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:45:20 +0000

This shot was taken in Murphy’s Point Provincial Park just 45 minutes from my hometown of Kemptville, ON. I was using Fuji 400 ISO Sensia slide film at 1/60 and f/8 on a rainy day with my Nikon 135mm lens, a basswood lending me cover as I stepped down a steep ditch into a drying cattail marsh of late spring. The water adds vitality to the purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) flowers that only makes the blurred premonitions of fallen pedals lying on an oblique blade of grass all the more poignant. The purple loosestrife has wreaked havoc on marshes and wetlands across the colossal breadth of North America: starving out species of orchids in the states that are already on the federal endangered species list, destroying waterfowl habitat by drying up wetlands until what once was nourishing, bountiful, and diverse is now unwholesome, dry, and monotypic. It invades and spreads, sucking up all the moisture like locusts on crops.

But officials across all countries are working with local activists and volunteers to maintain this problem within the copious expanses it already strangles. The forlorn pedal in the foreground, though melancholy because the flower is beautiful in its own respect but dying, dually serves as a source of hope, that in the destruction of this alien species in North America marshlands is the salvation of native species.

For more information of the Lythrum salicaria, visit http://www.ducks.ca/purple/. For a quick-shot to information concerning the use of biocontrol insects to combat the problem of purple loosestrife, click on http://www.ducks.ca/purple/biocontrol/biocon1.html.

Although one would probably be hard pressed to find someone who has not heard of the importance of wetlands, one would be equally hard-pressed to find someone who knew the depth of why they are important. For a comprehensive, science-based paper on the importance of wetlands, visit: http://www.ducks.ca/conserve/wetland_values/pdf/nvalue.pdf

The Cycle Respun

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:43:23 +0000

This is another photograph I took while visiting my cousin, Robin Rutherford Baxter, in Southampton, England, along with my other cousin, Chris Duguid of Loraine Baxter in Ballater, Scotland. The photograph I must profess is a happy accident. I screwed on my cokin filter system and used my yellow filter to try to heighten the flower and background of what my cousin called “brooms.” However, I pushed the film by accident, and was using a fairly fast shutter speed in the bright daylight to compensate for a wide aperture; this combination resulted in what is called reciprocity failure. When this happens, the film will take on a greenish hue, hence the colouration of the photograph.

More on reciprocity failure can be found at http://photonotes.org/cgi-bin/entry.pl?id=Reciprocityfailure

Snow Blooms

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:42:04 +0000

Although it does appear that some black, skeletal plant is blooming frost, it’s actually just a fresh winter storm caught on a long dead cap of Queen Anne’s Lace, or Wild Carrot (Daucus carota). The cool hue comes in part from the slight shadow of the overcast sky above, and from the extra sensitivity of Fuji film to blue. It is important to remember, for those new to nature photography, that shadows and anything caught therein, when using daylight film, will take on a blue hue in the slide or print.

Scarlet Lychnis

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:40:39 +0000

This scarlet lychnis (Lychnis chalcedonica) flourished with a partner beneath a young and healthy poplar tree, content now that it can reach above the wall of cedars growing between the house and the road. I used my Nikon FM2 and my 135mm E-series lens with a Vivitar +2 dioptics close-up lens at f/5.6 with Fuji 400 ISO slide film.

Purple Buds

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:37:57 +0000

I enjoy this shot because of the blood coloured stalks and blades, and because of the brown ones already dead foreshadowing the fate of everything within the frame. It makes me wonder, would we be able to cut down so many trees, so many hundreds of thousands, if we were showered and flooding in the blood the flowed forth? Would we think differently of their status as living things if they bled the same as us? I can imagine the trees crying out that infamous Shakespearean line from Merchant of Venice, “prick us, do we not bleed?” Granted, a tree cannot feel pain, but does it not end as we do? Does it not die and lose life like us, to decay and return to the carbon cycle? Surely, that thought would bring more compassion to those reaping the forests of the world, to have them spew crimson instead of amber.

Phalaenopsis Orchid II

danbaxter — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:36:26 +0000

This was shot in the Montreal Botanical Gardens after my battery died and took my exposure meter with it during the Phalaenopsis I shooting. At this point I was experimenting with f/16 and f/8 apertures and 1/30-1/125 shutter speed at 90 and 100mm on my Sigma 70-300mm zoom.

The orchids hung heavy with their abundance in front of a dark blue backdrop. By zooming in on the flowers to get a light reading, and then zooming out, double checking the exposure difference, and underexposing the shot by a stop to a stop and a half, it becomes simple and easy to isolate the blooms against their background. The exposure variance when underexposing will differ from camera to camera, film to film (though the differences between these, excluding changes in ISO, will be relatively small). The key behind every simple and difficult technique is to know how YOUR camera and equipment will react to the situation. And, naturally, bracketing greatly increases your chances of getting the image in your mind onto the film.