Photo Of The Day

The spring flowers are pushing through and will be blooming very soon. I took these Tulips that were fully developed but had not yet opened up at the Missouri Botanical Gardens in St. Louis, Missouri. I used very shallow depth of field to create the nice soft out of focus background.

Irises

Iris is a genus of some 260 species of flowering plants with showy flowers. It takes its name from the Greek word for a rainbow, referring to the wide variety of flower colors found among the many species. As well as being the scientific name, iris is also very widely used as a common name; for one thing, it refers to all Iris species, though some plants called this belong to other closely related genera.

In North America, a common name for irises is 'flags'. It is a popular garden flower in the United States.

Some irises grow in deserts, some in swamps, some in the cold far north, and many in temperate climates. Bearded Iris and Siberian Iris are two of the most common types of iris grown.

Irises are very hardy and do not need a lot of maintenance. Some of the Irises in my wife's garden were given to her by my great grandmother and they have be in the family now for over 100 years.

 

My favorite technique for photographing them is fairly simple. I use my 70-200mm zoom lens and then add my 1.4 extender. This gets me to 280mm of focal length. I generally shoot a f4 to f5.6 to keep my DOF shallow. I look for flowers that have a good seperation from the others and I have more flowers in the background. This allows for nice sharp focus on the target flower, but gives me that beautiful soft palet of colors for backgrounds.   

The Beauty of Tulips

The Daffodils and Crocus have bloomed and wilted, but it is prime time for the Tulips now. There are so many colors and variations of tulips it is mind blowing. The great thing is they are are beautiful. My favorite technique is using a fairly long telephoto length and a wide open apeture to isolate a single flower and throw the rest into a soft out of focus blur. I hope you enjoy the show.

The weather will be great all week. Get out there and take some photos.

Photos of the Day

One of my favorite subjects to photograph are flowers of all types. I love their colors, various structures, designs, and patterns. Today I have posted some orchid photos. Orchids are the largest plant family with almost 22,000 accepted species with hundreads of new species added yearly. They make up 6-11% of all seed ptants. Orchids can be found in almost all climates except deserts and glaciers, but most are found in tropical environments.

The Missouri Botanical Garden's 92nd annual orchid show is now open and runs through March 28, 2010. They have over 8,100 of orchid plants in hundreads of varieties in their greenhouses. I highly reccomend a trip there to see this display. Here is a link to their web page for the orchid show.            http://www.mobot.org/events/orchidshow/default.asp 

I took these shots using a Canon 20D and a 70-200mm f2.8L IS lens. at the 200mm focal length. The hot shoe flash as set to -1 exposue compensation to fill in light in the flowers and make the background go darker. I then darkened the background further in Photoshop to take out and distracting elements and make the flowers be the only elements of the photograph. Clicking on the photos will open them as a larger file in a seperate window.