Aquilegia

Quite a pleasant day here in Godzone today and I couldn’t resist taking a few more shots of the aquilegia in the backyard. You may recall a snap taken with my tablet yesterday … well, today I thought I’d try a camera and see if there was any difference 😉

The light was similar to yesterday, but perhaps a little more intense. Exposure was taken for the blooms themselves and by carefully positioning the camera I could find a shadowey background which, as you may notice in the images below, gives the impression that the blooms were shot against a black backdrop.

No tweaks or twiddles in Photoshop. These images are straight off the camera. I used a tripod to keep things steady and a 200mm telephoto lens. For the first two images the aperture was set to f4, but the last shot was taken at f2.8 (and has a few Color Efex filters applied).

Quite amazing really that these plants survived the droughts last year and such a lovely surprise to see them flowering.

Backyard aquilegia #1
Backyard aquilegia #1
Backyard aquilegia #2
Backyard aquilegia #2
Backyard aquilegia #3
Backyard aquilegia #3

Time for tablets

The stray cat returns!
The stray cat returns!

I must admit that when shooting a number of the houses in my local area I often find it challenging to see what the camera sees in small rooms. Often the camera is on a tripod in the corner of a room with no room for me to get behind and look through the viewfinder or see the display. The problem of composing the shot gets worse when you put the camera a few metres up a pole! One idea was to have an external monitor so I could see what was going on. Using a USB connection along with Helicon Remote allows me to view the scene and focus the camera whilst looking at my tablet. So much easier in those awkward places! I can’t zoom, but I can compose, focus and take a bracketed set of shots.

I didn’t want a BIG tablet. I have enough to carry about and as I’ve already mentioned I can end up in small places! I opted for the little Nexus 7 as it has quite a nice screen, is small and quite lightweight. As it happens I can use it for Skype and the rear facing camera isn’t too bad as you can see from the two shots in this post. It’s 5MP and I find the handling of the device for photographs more awkward than using my dSLRs. As such, the next set of photos posted here will almost certainly not be from the Nexus!

The first shot in the post is of the stray cat that has returned to the compost heap to deposit yet another litter of kittens. I wish we could catch this cat or compost heap kittens is going to be an annual event! The second image in the post is of some aquilegia I planted at the bottom of may garden last year.

Backyard aquilegia
Backyard aqualegia