2025 Bulbs, Part 2 - or - oops, all macro lens shots

There's no unifying theme for these images. This walk is actually the week before the last bulb post, and while it's obvious the light was still pretty flat, you can tell there's more color present in these shots. Rosid trees were in bloom, though no significant representation from cherries. As tends to be the case, though, the bulb flowers received more of my attention. These little narcissus flowers (via 100mm macro) are showing the little bit of moisture that remained from perhaps watering that morning.

This narcissus was in a much earlier-blooming stand of flowers, from what I remember. My memory is a little hazy on them, but near this photo, I have one of a blossom that was quite thoroughly slug-eaten, and in my experience with my day-lilies at home, the slugs take a little while to find a bed in bloom. This flower escaped the attention of the slugs, but not the ants.

These two tulips were about to open. I was taken with the fact that it looked like they were doing so together, as a pair. It made for a nice scene, though if I ever print this one, it'll be 8x10 - I only just now saw I failed to frame without the garden sign in the background.

I felt like this was the star of the day, though. I don't often get a chance to make interesting images where the subject is centered in the frame, but every once in a while works for me.

Interestingly enough, all four of the images I selected to represent this walk are from my 100 macro. I am not sure what lenses I actually took on the walk, but only three are represented in the 54 images i uploaded for the day - I shot one image through my 14mm, five images through the 20-40 zoom which I adore, and the entire remainder are the macro. Pentax's 100mm AW macro has become a really common carry for me on both APS-C and 135. My travel kit, if I get three lenses, is 16-85, 55-300, and the macro. If I'm doing a walkaround, I'll select a kit that makes sense for the weather, but the one overlap, regardless of if I'm doing ultrawide+standard zoom or array-o'-primes will be the 100. It's small, light, and does two things really well: 1:1 macro and middle-distance portraiture for flowers, like on this post. Traditionally, my go-to for the latter has been the 77mm f1.8 Limited lens, which I still absolutely adore... but that lens carries the penalty of lack of weather sealing, and would usually leave me without close-focus capability.

September 24, 2022 - Mono means one, pod means pod - and, u l t r a w i d e

contextualized

Most of the work I do is documenting what I have called fiddly little things, which involves a lot of flowers and insects. One would think this would be work that leads itself to a lot of macro lens time, and you wouldn't be wrong if you found yourself in that camp thinking about me... but I also spend quite a bit of time doing this with wide angle glass. When I first started using 'real' cameras in 2003, I had exactly two lenses: an smc-Pentax M 135mm and an smc-Pentax K 24mm. Lens designs contemporary to the 1970s appear to have assumed nobody would ever try to take close-up photos with a lens that was not specified for the purpose, so the 135 does not get terribly close to anything. That's great for things like rabbits, but for flowers, a theoretical 1:9 maximum reproduction ratio isn't very inspiring. The 24mm focusing at a quarter meter does a couple of things: first, a nominally tighter 1:7-ish ratio does actually make objects larger on film, and second, the photographer being actually closer to the object makes it feel... well, closer. I spent a lot of time 'misusing' that ultrawide lens, and so I developed a fondness for my own accidental style, one of context surrounding an object. The lead image on this post is such an example... it's not going to light the world on fire as an artistic accomplishment, but we get detail on the flower and we get a lot of background showing where it grows.

This specific example is on a point of land into Pine Lake in Wheaton Regional Park in Maryland that often gets used as a fishing point. These little asteraceae blooms were waiting to greet anyone that bothered to wander off into the woods to watch the small group of ducks and geese on the water. I used my 14mm (APS-C) to do this capture, a lens I absolutely adore using, and one that I wish would get a reissue with more aperture blades and weather sealing.

This photo is through the 21mm (APS-C). While not an ultrawide field of view, it's still very much in the genre of "look at the wonderful world around the thing you're photographing." With these anenome flowers being so delicate and pale, exposing for them tends to produce a beatiful vibrant blue sky on clear days like this one. 

I think this is the star image of these three, though. Milkweed bugs patrolling a seed pod made for a great foreground with the structure of the plant visible in the back. The only thing I wish I had been able to frame up a little better would be fully-open flowers, as none of the buds on the foreground sprig had gotten to the point the flowerhead just beginning at bottom center at that point. One of the things you have to accept doing this kind of photography, though, is that it is nature and therefore subject to the sense of order of things that respond on a seasonal timescale. I can't make a flower bloom, and don't want to try.

That said, I never will just go out with a set of ultrawides. I do have to carry a macro lens with me, and this walk was one of my first with a monopod.

Using a 100mm macro and on-camera flash, I was able to stabilize enough to catch this moth napping on what looks to me to be goldenrod. This photo also managed to do something that's relatively hard to do by accident with flash-macro work and shows background detail, not just a dark rectangle. Macro with context is really difficult to do like that unless you're kind of intentional about making sure the background exposure is going to be within the same couple of stops as the subject.

Or you can just shoot bugs in a flower. This species of hibiscus is almost always good for finding something lunching inside, and this day it was a little bumblebee and a honeybee. This image also did something I always love finding out in processing when I get home though...

It contained bonus bugs! I do think this might be a parasitic fly that was tending to the honeybee, but regardless, there's a whole world of little things going on even beyond the little things I can see and decide to act on. I also love the fact that the added detail of the pollen stuck to the bee really shows how pollination works.

2025 Bulbs, Part 1 - or - color in gray

 I'm doing flower posts out of order here, as April 19 was the last day I went out specifically to do spring bloom work this year. Unfortunately for the drama of the photos, none of the days I had time to do sessions at the gardens featured anything other than uniform overcast. Fortunately, fast glass and bright colors can do a lot of heavy lifting on their own, and I've also gotten to be much handier with managing curves and color balance to add a little extra pop if the image calls for it.

I used full-frame this walk, and few kits on a nice day are more rewarding to do flower work with than the FA Limited lenses. The three frames I selected for this post are all through the 77. When I shoot flower portraiture like this, the 77 has always done a fantastic job painting the scene. I had concerns when I got a full-frame digital camera that the wider field of view would create a problem for me, as I had only ever shot the lens on APS-C where it's about equivalent to 115mm, but practice in this field and a little experience doing portraiture sessions have made me more comfortable with the native field of view of this lens.

These tulips were planted at the Brookside Gardens fragrance garden area this year. All of the hexagonal beds featured these three colors, with maybe a less uniform distribution than I remember them doing from years past. There were fewer people enjoying them this year, too, but I think that's because it was gray, and my experience is that only the die hard gardenfan will spend time outside peeping on days that aren't full-sun and warm. One can make an argument that 80 might be too warm for a mid-April day, but it certainly wasn't an obstacle for me.

A new favorite thing from this year was magnolia flowers that were bloomed in such a way - usually via missing a petal - that you can see the stamens and carpels through a window in the petals. This saucer magnolia was doing a great job of that, and with the distance I had between the flower and where I could stand outside the bed beneath it, I was able to throw another flower out of focus in front of it. I remember reading someone once say that under no circumstances should you ever have anything out of focus in front of your subject... I can't imagine leaving an entire set of layers out of your compositional toolkit just because you think your viewers are too dumb to handle it, though.

Magnolias, at least saucer, star, and sweetbay, represent an interesting challenge generally thanks to their tendencies to flower too high to effectively photograph like this. In a way, that's one of the nice things about the distance created by a flowerbed you're not allowed to walk in. I have my limits, since the most reach I have native full-frame is 135mm, but I suppose if I know I want to do this in advance, I just take APS-C gear instead.

Another "huh" about this selection of shots is that all of them are subject-right. I will do that a lot with picking candidates for share. I suppose this is because I get biased to one side of the screen or another by my first few good shots, but who knows for sure. Maybe it's because I'm right-handed?

This narcissus bed was closer to the conservatories. As you can see in the lower left, it was pretty late for some of these, but the open flowers from that morning or the day before were striking. If I had this shot to do over again, I'd stand up a little bit and try to get the clump in the background more in line between the foreground and secondary flowers - or it's possible this ended up like this because there was a fencepost or sign to the left. I do try to shoot around the obstacles in the gardens, and sometimes it forces slightly weird views.

One thing missing from this frame that I know I've seen in other shots of narcissus flowers is an ant. It's a pretty common experience to come home from a garden session and find at least a couple of shots like this will contain ants on the flowers. I don't usually think of ants as pollinators, but they're there, dutifully shuffling probably nectar around. 

The final observation I'll provide here is that I do need to be a bit better about my editing practice from days like this. Most days, I will use shadow and highlight controls to expand my images' histograms to fill the full range of brightnesses. Doing that will give your images a lot of pop, but they become in a sense dishonest, featuring shadows that weren't there on the day. I'm not against extreme editing practices categorically, but for my own work, a subtle pushing of the boundaries is what I generally want to aim for. I might have to do an A/B demonstration at some point, but leaving the darkest pixels of the image off the 0 floor is a big benefit when processing this type of image.