Tag: Flowers

On the cutting room floor.

I thought it would be worthwhile to show how a little cropping can make an image. I have rather mixed feelings about cropping as my ideal is to make the image in the viewfinder. It’s not for nothing that I say I admire Henri Cartier-Bresson and his principles.

Principles are nice, but a good image is everything.

The original image, after correcting the color and intensity, is nice enough, but there’s an awful lot of blurry green background. Once you’ve seen one bit of green blur, you’ve seen it all.

A first crop gives:

Which is pretty good, but maybe we can do better. Let’s try a square crop:

That’s better but let’s see what happens when we get close up:

That’s got the main flower right, but something is missing. So we go back to the original aspect ration and stay close in:

And that’s right. It has the detail but the other blooms balance the image. This image is the one on the website.

Spring Daffodils

Daff’s

It’s dull, drizzly, and grey. Here are the first of this year’s spring flowers to brighten things up.

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The trick, of course, is to get down where the flower is and shove the lens as close as maybe to it. These are on an eastern exposure of our house and in flower much earlier than most.

Wild Iris #springflowers

This week the wild iris are in bloom in Alabama. They’re much smaller than the garden variety, but intense and dashed beautiful. They tend to like shady locations. Ours are intermingled with an Oxalis species that has a delicate purple flower, unlike the more common yellow variety.
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There are several of this small yellow flower as well. These prefer the sun.
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Spring Flowers #MondayBlogs

The daffodils were out, and so was I.

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And one crocus.

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The trick to getting good photographs is simple. Watch the light, get close, and pay attention to the composition. It also helps that I’m using a digital SLR and taking several shots. (I mean it’s only electrons.) I also use a polarizing filter to enhance color and cut down on the glare.

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