Spring Blossoms

I love seeing the blossoms begin to open up each spring.  It’s a sign of hope breaking through from the dark and gloomy winter.  Here in western Oregon, the spring season is gorgeous to see each year.  However, enough has been written of that though many writers much better than I.

Due to El Nino and the early spring that it brought, Traci gave me my birthday gift early this year; a set of extension tubes.  Extension tubes decrease the minimum focusing distance a lens would normally be capable of.  Shooting close to the subject in macro photography is more difficult than I first thought, as it is very difficult to achieve sharp focus on the subject because the depth of field (depth of what is in focus) is extremely shallow by nature.  In getting these eight photos below, I shot many, many more exposures that were out of focus and not what my mind's eye had envisioned when I pressed the shutter.

click here for Flickr slideshow (8 photos)

But, when captured well, blossoms are such beautiful photographic subjects.  I hope my photos do them justice!