Back To The Garden(s)

Yeah, I know I said no more Iris Gardens, but I was invited and thought it would make for a nice break, a good day out. And it did turn out that way. I didn't want to shoot the same flowers in the same way as I did before, so I said, you know what? I'll just bring one lens-the 50mm ƒ/1.8, shoot everything blurry, and see what happens...

So I did lots of that, used lots of blue in the white balance, and used the fastest shutter speeds to mute the effect of shooting in broad daylight in direct sunshine.

The effects were interesting, and immediately lent themselves to some collage work using two images-the results of which you see here. It's very probable that you will see more of this in the future.

Accompanying me on this trip was my friend Rita, who suggested the trip in the first place. She owns a Pentax K1000 film camera, and completely manual film camera at that. On top of that, the lens was a 50mm ƒ/2, making for as "pure" of a shooting situation as imaginable. Sha was also limited to a maximum shutter speed of 1/1000, and only 200 or 400 speed film. I still haven't seen how her pictures came out, but we did use my camera's auto metering to try some other options for her to set manually.

I still have a few rolls of film left, one of which is Fuji's Velvia 50 ISO slide film (Ken's favorite), that I want to give her to shoot (ideally really colorful stuff in broad daylight), then scan and post.

Finally, I also realized that there was more to do, more to learn about this flower thing before I abandon flowers for good (if I ever really do). One is that I should shoot them with one of the Canon 70-200mm  L zoom telephoto lenses (ideally the top one), which would give me way more flexibility with getting close ups of flowers from a distance that are hard to reach at the Gardens. And I also want to shoot with a macro lens, ideally this one right here! Will I get them in time for next spring? The following? Let's see what happens...