Got home from work yesterday and noticed immediately that the swelling buds were starting to blossom. Needless to say my camera hand started to itch and I immediately grabbed my tripod and Macro lens and set to work. Most of these shots were taken at close to 1:1, the buds are really tiny, 1/4 inch in diameter tiny.
For depth of field I shot this at f16, a f-stop I would normally avoid, but is necessary to get a useable amount of depth of field.
I really wondered what this would look like in B&W, so I did a quick conversion. Not convinced that I have it right, need to fiddle with the Levels and Brightness a smidge. Do kinda like it though.
I opened the aperture up a bit and moved a little bit further back, I wanted to balance reasonable sharpness of the buds with blurring the background as best I could. I rather like the blur in the background, another reason to like this lens.
I then thought it would be fun to go for ultra thin depth of field. I tried to get just part of one bud in focus and then the rest progressively more blurry. I achieved what I wanted, but I am not sure if the photo is a failure or not.
Back to f6.7 for a more reasonable amount of DOF, I love the color and light/shadows on this blossom.
I then wanted to experiment a little with very deep depth of field, stopping down to f22 gives me a much deeper field, but I do loose some overall sharpness, I think the tradeoff is worth it.
This is the exact same shot but at f2.8 as wide of an aperture as the lens can go. At this close of a focus my DOF is about 1/8 of an inch. That makes getting the salient stamens in focus on a tree that is moving a pretty chancy thing. I think I did OK, need to play with it more.
Stay tuned for more flower shots. You will probably be sick of them by summer.
