Taking time to smell (and shoot) the flowers

I love getting outside and photographing gardens, but it's easy enough to do it indoors too! I had a few days annuak leave this week, and paid a visit to the Brisbane Flower Markets.

The range of flowers - native and exotic - was awesome, and I picked out bunches of my favourite pinks and purples in varying degrees of bloom.

At the moment, I'm going through a bit of a high key phase, and love the look of virbrant flowers against a stark white background. This is easy enough to do with a light tent, and over-exposing by a couple of stops on the Canon Powershot G12. Whack it in macro mode, and off I go.

I love close up floral photography - the colours and textures all within such delicate petals....I find it really relaxing too. Flowers don't make demands. They don't talk back or blink...they always look great, even when they're wilting or have dried.

Here's a couple of my favourite images from the last couple of days!

Loving the G12! Is it as good as the 7D for still life images?

It was *yet* another wet weekend in Brisbane, and I had a bit of time to photograph some of the beautiful flowers I received for my birthday last weekend.

I thought I'd experiment and shoot the same flower set up...with the G12 vs the 7D + 24-70mm L lens. We're talking about a $2,400 difference in the cost of the gear taking the photo here...

Here are the two images....obviously the composition is slightly different, but both were shot hand held in a light tent to give this high key effect....for the image shot with the 7D, I used an off-camera flash. For the image with the G12, there was no flash, I just over-exposed the image by two stops.

Can you pick which image was shot with which camera?

In case you wondering, I shot the first image with the G12 and the second inage with the 7D. For a little compact camera, the G12 and all its manual capabilities is pretty damn impressive, don't you think!

365 Challenge #308 - New Farm Park's rose garden

It was a gorgeous day out yesterday! Photography buddy Robyn and I arranged to meet up at Brisbane's Powerhouse to check out the Nikon Walkley Press Photo Exhibition, which finishes this weekend.

The collection of 100 of the winning and finalist photos was inspiring. Press photographers, particularly news photographers, usually have very little time to set up the images we see in newspapers.

These photographers are often shooting in the most difficult conditions, like wars and disasters. As we wandered round the images, we wondered whether the shots were straight out of the camera or if they had been photoshopped at all.

It was also interesting to see that some of the winning shots broke some of the "rules" that we've been taught in various workshops - like the rule of "don't stick your subject in the dead centre of the frame". A number of the winning photos had captured the subject right in the middle of the image. Go figure!

After a few quiet drinkies on the balcony of the Powerhouse, we wandered out to New Farm Park with our cameras. I hadn't been here since before the area had been inundated in the January floods, and it was great to see everything largely back to normal.

The sun was still hot and glary, so shooting flowers (or indeed, anything) was a tad tricky. A polarising filter helped to pull back the light and add some colour to the sky. I experimented with shooting these roses from underneath.

I love the colours of vivid colours of Summer, but am also looking forward to cooler temps in Autumn.

All photos taken with my Canon EOS 5D Mark II and the Canon EF24-70mm f/2.8L lens.

365 Challenge #240 - A different perspective

It was a beautiful day to get out with the camera, and smell the proverbial roses. I've been to Brisbane's Roma Street Parklands a bwzillion times before (not that I exaggerate), but today I went out with a couple of missions:

1. To only use one lens (in this case, the Tamron SP AF90mm F/2.8 Di Macro 1:1 lens) for the entire time, and;
2. To shoot from a different perspective.

There were plenty of bugs, flowers and things I love to shoot, particularly now that I can get really close to my subjects. How much do I love the macro capabilities of this lens! Using just one prime lens (as opposed to the zoom lenses I'm far more used to using), forces me to use my feet and take more time to set up a shot, rather than using a zoom to hone in on the subject.

When I came across a bed of flowers, I tried the trusty old trick of placing the camera on the ground underneath it, pointing the lens skyward, using autofocus to latch onto something, and firing away. I'd seen shots from other photographers like this, so it's not by any means an original idea, but I do love the random shots that come out of it.

There's more pics from today's shoot on my Flickr page.