Chicago Flower and Garden Show - 3.06.11 - Post 3/3

So this is my last post on the flower show.  Just a few more shots I thought were interesting but didn't fit into my other themes.

The Geometry of Plants

 Fun with macros/Annoyance with macros.  I really wanted to get both of these cactus 'fingers' in focus, but my camera was having none of it.  Even on manual-focus.  I could get one or the other, but not both.  This may have had to do with the limited options I have for focal length when shooting in macro.  I also wonder if I had known then what I learned last week about spot-metering if I could have gotten them to both look better. As you can see, despite being two parts of one plant, the lighting on each was different.  That was how bad the lighting was at this place.  All that said, there are some very cool aspects of this shot.  Look at the piece in focus.  I love the geometric pattern the spines make as your eyes travel from the far left edge up the cactus.  There's hexagons and triangles and rhombi.  I love it.  This is when macro photography is fun.

Jewelweed in Ruby and Emerald

These jewelweed leaves were gorgeous but I'm learning that Red is Hard.  On my LCD screen, on my computer screen... red is hard to reproduce.  This is as close as I could get, and my mind's eye still tells me it's not saturated enough, but when I try to turn up the saturation, even a little, the red becomes magenta and that's not right either.

Arctur African Attempts to Stretch

 My awesome little daisies again.  These are African daisies and I find it amazing how many varieties of African daisies there are out there - all of these have white petals and purple centers.  My best guess, given the pointed petals is that this is an Arctur African Daisy.  But if someone out there is a better horticulturist, feel free to correct me.

Pretty, Purple and a Total Mystery.

I have no earthly clue what these are, but they're really pretty.  Like I said in an earlier post, very few flowers in the show beds were actually labeled.  And because these are cultured flowers, I can't even use my normal tricks of looking for websites that feature the wildflowers of a given area and then look at everything in the 'purple' category.  I can't even use the identifier programs because they want things like native location and when they bloom.  Guess what?  Who knows?  It was an indoor show where the flowers were forced, so... *shrug*  If you've got an idea, please holler!

Shades of Blue

These are blue hyacinth.  The blue can be seen best where the flower attaches to the stem.  They're bulb flowers like tulips and daffodils, but have many flowers on a stalk, which always makes me think they're something else.

On First Reflection

And, of course, my (sort of) first water lily of the year.  Water lilies are one of my favorite flowers.  I only count this as 'sort of' because it's in a garden show.  But I suspect that when I start getting out the the Lincoln Park Lily Pond in the next month or so or the Botanical Garden when the tulips start coming up, I'll start finding some that are working their natural cycle.




Okay, that's it for that show.  Last week I was in Nashville, Tennessee and we took my 15 month old nephew to the zoo.  Nashville, like most other zoos, has some brilliant set-ups for some of their animals - like the outdoor meerkat exhibit with a cluster of babies! - and some that are just awful and unshootable - like the red panda who spent most of her time pressed up against the corner of the glass grooming.  Those shots and a discussion of metering coming soon!

Trendy Photography: I'm Apparently Doing It Right

So a few photography blogs I've been reading have been talking about bokeh.

Bokeh is defined by Wikipedia as: In photography, bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light."  Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting— "good" or "bad" bokeh, respectively.

Basically, it's the idea that you use the blur to bring out the focal point of your pictures (with greater or lesser amounts of success).  Here are a few of my better bokeh pictures...

Floating Sunspot

What I absolutely love about this one is that the bokeh creates the effect that the flower is just floating in space.  There is a stem... but you can't see it! 

Turaco, Busy Building

 This is a White Crested Turaco from the free-flight section of Brookfield Zoo.

Little Bug Makes an Exit

In this one, not only is the background blurred, the edges of the petals on the left are too, drawing your eye to the center of the flower and the bug crawling out of it.

Grasshopper, Stick-Clinger

 This little grasshopper was ridiculously easy to lose in the grass, so without the background being obscured, it would be hard to see what I was trying to capture.  This is from a photography trip I took last fall with a friend.  We were heading back to the car from one of our stops when I saw this guy bounding around the grassy area between where we'd parked and the highway.  I made her wait fifteen minutes while I chased him around until he was still enough for me to get a good shot!

Mr. Fokker Poppy Faces the Sun

 This one is interesting because it's the blurry flowers in the background that give this photo some needed color to keep it from being too monochromatic.

12-Spotted Rester

 This one is more typical of what you see in the 'text-book' examples of bokeh, where the background bits become little circles of light.  Personally I wish I could get more of my shots to do this.  I often get just really harsh glare off the water.

Itty-Bitty Flower Committee

 This is a little curl of flowers that took me forever to capture properly.  Believe it or not, the whole cluster is about the size of a nickel.  When you're shooting with a macro lens, you can be pretty sure your background will be quite blurred.  This can be good when you're trying to isolate something like this, but less helpful in settings where you want to capture everything.

Shiny Red Wings

 This guy is from one of my recent Midewin posts.  The beetle is in sharp focus, as is the leaf he's on, but the rest of the plant, and the plants behind him are almost nonexistent.  Because of all the soft greens, his red shell really pops.

Halloween Pennant in August

Dragonflies like this are pretty well camouflaged, so if the background were to stay as busy as it really was, the dragonfly wouldn't be nearly as visible or clear.