Sweet Pea Flower #1

The story behind this image

Look at a flower through a macro lens and a whole, nornmally unseen, world opens up before your eyes.

I didn't have to go any further afield than my own back yard to take this photo of a sweet pea flower in all its colourful glory, but taking a worthwhile close up photo of a flower demands more thought than just pointing and shooting, and there are many technical and artistic challenges to overcome before pressing the shutter.

For this image, the main problem to overcome was the breeze. Although there wasn't much wind around it only took the merest breath to set the flower swaying. This meant that, in order to keep at least some of the flower sharp, I needed a fast shutter speed.

The consequence of needing a fast shutter speed was that I required a wide open aperture, f2.8 in this case. This wide open aperture resulted in a razor thin depth of field which, with the flower swaying to and fro, caused various parts of the petal to move in and out of focus in a quite random manner which was imposssible for me to keep up with by moving the camera back and forth, my normal means of focussing when doing flower close ups.

So in the end I held my camera in a fixed position relative to the flower, with it swaying in and out of focus in the viewfinder, and hit the motor drive, taking a dozen or more individual frames in the hope that one or two would have the part of the flower in focus that I wanted to emphasise in the final image.

I'm glad to say the plan paid off, and this one frame gave me what I wanted.

An upside to the very shallow depth of field was that the backgound fence was thrown completely out of focus, becoming a smooth green blur that contrasted very nicely with the red petal. I deliberately chose to photograpgh this particular flower because of the green background, as the background to a macro flower shot is just as important as the subject itself.

So there you are. On the face of it, an easy photo to take on a pleasant afternoon in the garden, but in reality, more tricky than you might think.

Image data

Filename - flower sweet pea 01.jpg

Camera - Canon 5D

Lens - 100mm macro

Exposure - 1/160sec @ f2.8, ISO100

Location - N/A

This image - 800x800px JPEG

Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2

Comments - Fast shutter speed used to freeze movement.