Photographer's notes: just a side note, I always use the same camera body, and I only own one lens. They are A Canon EOS 40D slr digital. My lens is a 28-135mm. Not very wide, very versatile. Unless otherwise specified, that is what my photos are taken with.
Taken at 1/4th of a sec, at f/32 ISO 100. I find 1/4th of a second to be a magic shutter speed. Just slow enough to play with, but fast enough to capture detail.
In my recent trip to Hawaii, I saw many beautiful tropical flowers. I even went to a stunning botanical garden near Hilo, on the big Island. There I did a kind of study of the flowers and plants. But I realized that there are plenty of lovely, but documentary, photos of tropical flowers in existance, and I didn't need to create more that would simply crowd up my hard drive.
So instead, I took the oportunity to seek out a way to take photos of the flowers that exhibited the most prominent and unique features in they're design and beauty. The result, I hoped, would be a collection of impressionistic portraits of the flowers that I found so captivating. This to me is the esense of a portrait.
The above image is of a stem of orchids. There are tons and tons of orchids on the East side of Hawaii, including wild ones. To me the most lovely thing about orchids are they're cute faces that remind me of the Chesire Cat! The roundness of they're petals, and they're special markings. So to accentuate that, I lowered my shutter speed so that I would have time to turn my camera maybe 45 degrees mid exposure.I also made sure to include the soft C curve of the stem, because I thought it made a nice path for the blossoms.
I think it turned out well, my token of the orchids of Hawaii.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.