Sticking Out In A Crowd

            Patience for a photographer comes standard with the art. Sometimes it takes hours of waiting and 100's or maybe 1000's of shots to get the particular shot you want.

            This goes double for the macro photographer. Or at least when this particular photographer shoots macros.

            When I bought my new SLR back in April, one of  the neat little do-dads that came with it was an attachment lens that serves both as a wide-angle adapter and when you screw off the outer part a macro converter. The macro converter came in real handy because it was springtime and flowers were all starting to bloom, grass and tree leaves were turning green again. So experimenting with macro photos of flowers was a must.

            There are two variables that add to the my patience needed to achieve macro flower pictures. One, the fact that you have a window of distance you have to be from the subject in order to be able to focus on it. Two, if the wind is blowing you have to wait for the right moment to even be able to take a picture, much less get the one you want.

            If you are set up on a tripod it is easier to display more patience because when you find that distance window, it's there and you just wait for the wind to die down and snap, you take your shot. Unfortunately, I wanted to be more flexible so I was committed to hand hold for these shots.

            Normally, I would say the wind does not cooperate. One of the standards of composition is isolating the subject by using selective focus or a shallow depth of field. In this case, the wind aided in creating this effect in two ways. Just shooting with the macro attachment forced me to use a shallow depth of field. With my focus steadily on a single flower in the cluster, the wind was blowing the outer flowers just enough to force some blurring, thus adding another level of isolation for the flower I was focusing on.

            Patience paid off with this shot.

           

Details: Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XS, Tamron 28-80 f3.5 lens (@28mm), macro attachment, ISO 100, f3.5 1/500