My Parent’s Flower Garden

Way back in June, just before the summer school term began, Traci and I visited my home town for a week.  My parent’s have a beautiful flower gardner that I just love spending time in.  My mother meticulously keeps it in perfect shape.  I found it very difficult trying to find a composition of flowers that I liked.  In my opinion, after just a little experience with flowers, composition is what makes or breaks a flower photograph.  This is true for most photographs, but especially so for flower photographs.  In the picture above is of Lady's Mantle from mom's flower garden.  It is my favorite flower composition, but certainly not the prettiest flower in her garden.

This bird pictured above is of a mourning dove on the bird bath in mom’s garden.  These birds are not as afraid of humans compared to most other birds, so I was able to get quite close to this dove.  I used the external flash mounted on top of the camera to fill the light and give a definitive catchlight in the dove’s eye.

This macro photo of a bee was a lucky catch.  Using my extension tubes (forcing me to manually focus), I chased this bee all over the garden, blasting away as I tried to keep the bee in focus.  With such a close focus distance, the depth of field was very short.  Holding the shutter open with the camera peeling off images in burst mode increased my chances to get a sharp shot.  This photo above was the sharp one, and you don't get to see the one hundred or so frames that were not sharp!