Anyway, I headed to the Botanical Gardens in DC with all of my camera gear in tow, including my backup camera. I was not going to take any chances. I had a brand new 4 GB memory card installed, and was ready to go.
I took pictures of not only orchids, but cacti, various plants, and leaves. I'll cover those in the next few days. I wanted to start with the orchids because my mom LOVES them, and I love my mom. I wanted to post everything for her as soon as possible.
I have to say, it was HARD! Several reasons:
1) The area where the orchids were was very hot, even for me. (I think 75 degrees is frigid)
2) People were everywhere, and were constantly bumping into me.
3) I made the mistake of working out hard earlier today, and I was convinced my arms were going to fall off.
Admittedly, only 2) really had an impact on my pictures. When using a macro lens, the slightest movement can make a picture blurry. The crowds were therefore an added challenge for me.
I did well, though - I think. I'm always second-guessing myself. In fact, I deleted several pictures after I'd posted them! Here are my favorites:
These are my favorites for many reasons, but mainly because they seem "artistic" to me. The first and second pictures look like watercolors - the first bright, the second muted. The third picture looks like it has little hands, and I feel like the picture pops (click on it to see the larger version). The fourth has great colors, and the last one reminds me of Hawaii. I'm not sure why.
A few technical notes:
1) I took at least six or seven versions of these pictures. I needed to account for plant motion (which causes blur), setting changes (mainly ISO speeds and f-stops), and different angles. This was really useful, as I had many choices.
2) I climbed on quite a few benches to take these pictures. Fortunately, no one stopped me. A lot of the orchids were either high up or far.
3) Post-processing was necessary for each and every one of these. For some, I just cropped. For others, I had to change the exposure, as they were too dark or too light. With others, I changed the brightness, decreased the highlights, changed the brightness, increased the saturation, and increased the vibrancy. In other words, this was a very very VERY resource-intensive process.
What if you have an SLR, or if you don't have a macro lens? You can still take pretty pictures, but you'll lose the ability to take very close closeups, if that makes sense. I saw many people who didn't have the same capability, and a few of them asked me about my lens. If you are serious about macro photography, there's no way around it. However, if you want to take pretty pictures from a bit farther away (I was inches from these flowers), then keep my technical notes in mind - they still apply to you.
Till tomorrow!
No comments:
Post a Comment