Fun with Flowers

Yesterday, I spent some time in my heated garage, with an improvised photography studio. The day before. I bought a beautiful hibiscus with three buds from the local garden centre. I was hoping to do a time-lase series of the buds opening but I discovered the buds were already fully opened when I went out to the garage yesterday morning. So, I spent some time trying out different lenses, lighting, and compositions.

I posted two of the best shots to my Flickr page (see link in upper right of this page). I thought I'd write about the experience here.

The shot above shows two of the opened flowers. This a somewhat distant shot to show the blooms and leaves, lit by an on-camera flash. I used a spiky plant in the background to hide the distracting garage clutter. This was the starting point for subsequent close-ups. I thought the blooms themselves and the stamens needed to viewed closer, leading to the shots posted on my Flickr page.

Today, I was going to do a series of much closer shots of the flower parts, at magnifications of 1-5x this morning. Sadly, the blooms were one-day wonders. They had already started to curl up and wither away. There's still one unopened bud so maybe I still get those shots in a few days. I must say that, by doing this photographic exercise, I learned some good lessons for next time.