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Passionflower
Passionflower
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Jun, 2014Views
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Behind The Lens
Location
I took this in my Patio Garden, it is full of exotic flowers and in the Summer the Passion Plant gives the Garden an Exotic feel.Time
It was 3 in the afternoon, I had planned to work half day and come home to capture the bloom of my Summer Garden and in particular the Passion Flowers. It was a sunny day on the 21st June. As I drove home, I live in Norfolk, UK it takes me an hour to get home and being England the weather is on a constant change, by the time I got home the bright sunny day had changed to a cloudy one and my fears grew as it appeared a storm was on the horizon and brewing. Clouds were now dark as I Parked my car.Lighting
I had thought of the camera settings as I drove home but as I prepared for that afternoon's session I had fears that it would rain and spoil the shoot that I had in mind. It was now fairly dark, my planned 100 ISO had changed to 800 ISO, I wanted DoF to show dimension and distances within the make up of the Flower, there is so much going on with this beautiful flower, colours, shapes, textures, I wanted to enhance all these as individual parts of the composition, each part of the Flower has a life of it's own. The diminishing light allwed me to use an f8 aperture and the fastest shutter to assure a crisp focus was 1/80th as the wind was now becoming active and movement on the flowers were now more apparent. I feared loosing colour,quality and a crisp focus with the availability of the light which now appeared not as an afternoon but early evening.Equipment
My camera is a Canon 6D and I used my Canon 100mm f2.8 Macro lens, no flash, no tripod, just a balancing act on a patio folding chair and the use of the white walls to reflect the little light that was diminishing by the minute. I positioned the chair as close as I could and battled with Bees as they gathered their nectar before the rain came upon us to find suitable positions. If I was a Bee I would romance this Passion Flower myself, I had to wait at times several minutes waiting for an excited buzzing bee to fulfill herself and leave gratified with her exotic experience and buzzed on to another Passion Flower experience near by. What a beautiful creature too a Bee is. I had chosen the wrong aid to get me closer, standing on a folding chair and totally engrossed in the task ahead, positioning myself closer and at the angles I wanted to be made the chair a dangerous trap, being a folding chair I had put my foot too often too close to the back which resulted in the chair wanting to fold, my heart had jumped several times along with all of my gear repositioning myself not to fall. Luckily I did not, please choose your aids the assistance carefully or it could be the end of your gear and you too. ;-)Inspiration
As I had mentioned earlier my inspiration for this particular shoot was the Passion Flower, I love taking photos of exotic flowers and Sunflowers and this is probably one of the best, it is not so familiar in UK to the lay person. So unfamiliar it is that one person compared it to a jelly fish. "Wow Manuel what is it, a Jelly fish?" It is the shape of it he said. Interesting observation. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, how true this is. There is so much action within the make up of the Passion Flower that inspires me to photograph it again and again.Editing
I processed this with Canon's own developing programme DPP to crop a little not much and in Photoshop I enhanced the colour vibration slightly as I feared using 800 ISO the varying colours would be lost. I don't remember doing much more to it, I try not to increase contrast much as I feel it takes away the quality of the photo and it did not need sharpening. I can positively say I did not do much more to it than to enhance the colour vibration then reduce saturation. This was mainly to increase the Mega Pixels should I choose to make a large print of it at a later stage, it would maintain it's quality in the enlargement.In my camera bag
I have upgraded to Full Format Canon 6D from my Canon 550D APS-C camera. Lenses I mainly use are Canon 100mm f2.8 Macro, Canon 24-105mm f4L (came with the 6D camera, a great all rounder and could be the only lense one needs as an enthusiast),Sigma 80mm f1.4 EX DG which I use for Portraits, Sigma 35mm f1.4 Art, a good quality standard lense. Have been saving up for my dream lense, the monster, the Canon 70-200mm f2.8L IS II. I have spent more time reading about this lense and comparing results to the competition and there is none like it basically. However if you are not as determined as me, I have been saving for over 1 year, making my own lunches and anything to save money even driving carefully to save petrol, Ha Ha. The closest to this quality f2.8 lense for my Canon 6D would be the Tamron 70-200mm f2.8 VC, it costs half the price, or if you do not need the widest aperture of f2.8 for action and low light photography then sister 70-200mm f4 IS comes in at half price, lighter and almost as good as my chosen little big monster.Feedback
The advice I would give myself now which would have saved me a lot of money, the 24-105 f4L Kit Lense that came with my new Canon 6D camera is an all round lense and probably the only lense one needs. So my advice is "Get to know your camera and lense" because the equipment we all have these days is a hundred times better than when I started back in 1979 when I was at College and used correctly they take fantastic photographs, get to know your settings, aperture, speed and work with the available natural light, once you have mastered this all other equipment will enhance your photography but not necessarily make you a better photographer. If you learn to use your basic gear you will learn much more than cutting corners and using gear to help you with the results you want. First position and most important is for you to move to your subject not the subject moving to you, if you want a result move to find your place to capture it when possible, if you practice this you will get a better photo than stand int he same position and use more advanced lenses. Our iphones take wonderful photos, use what you have, you have fantastic equipment so experiment. OKAY enough of the lecture. Having said all of the above for this type of photo I used a Macro lense, I recommend the Canon 100mm f2.8 Macro, it is not very expensive compared to the newer IS (Image Stabilisation) version which costs almost double, I have not tried it but as you can see I get the results I want. Get as close to the subject as you possibly are allowed, move and find new angles of view and do not take risks as I did standing on unsafe assists like a folding chair (what was I thinking, NOT), one can get engrossed in what we do, I could have broken my leg or worse, so prepare and be aware of your surroundings. "How does one fall from there?" "With a camera one can" :-). Where was I? Oh yes, use the highest ISO as the available light allows you to. I wanted to show how busy this flower is, all the colours, textures and shapes and with a little Depth of Field in this case f8 allowed me to show the distance between the elements of the flower to bring attention to the detail of each individual part, had it all been in focus I think I would have lost the many parts that makes this beautiful Exotic work of Nature, a simple Flower, a Passion Flower. In writting this little article I have been inspired to get back behind my camera and work on more projects. I also need to upload more of my work on View Bug web site, I have only uploaded a few photos. Thank you all for your lovely comments. Regards Manuel
