Botanical Gardens - Victoria Haus
Back in the Botanical Gardens again. I was hoping to spot the owls but was unlucky this time. Nothing lost though, it's a nice place to spend some time for a short after-work visit and has been open later in the evening recently. This time I spent most of my visit to the Victoria Haus, but before looking at the picture from there, I have another image.
The first shot is one that I've been trying to get for a while. I once saw a lizard walking across this plant and liked the composition, but wasn't able to get a shot in time. They can move very fast! So whenever I am there, I pause for a while at this spot to see if there are any lizards around. This time there were a couple close by, so I took a seat and waited. Not only was I lucky enough to see one of them clambering across the plant, but it also turned its head in such a way, so that it appeared to be looking right at the camera.
The rest of the images are from the Victoria Haus. All were taken with the 60 mm Macro lens. I have been pleasantly surprised by this lens. Being used to the size and weight of the Sony 90 mm macro lens (which is without a doubt a great lens), I was wary of the M.ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 60mm 1:2.8 MACRO. The build doesn't feel as stable as the Olympus PRO lenses, but it is also weatherproof, and from my experiences so far, it is more than capable of doing the job!
All of the following flowers are small, none are much more than a centimetre across. I loved being able to get in really close to these flowers and being able to take my time on the composition, without the chance of them running away!
The first shot is a very simple composition, with a very shallow depth of field. I liked the contrast of the yellow bud against the variations of green and bokeh in the background.
I'm torn about this image. I liked the composition when I took it but in hindsight, I feel that the bud in the centre throws the image off balance. I am tempted to try to remove it in Photoshop, but I tend to prefer not to do this though.
The next three images are of the same type of flower, although different actual flowers. This encompasses what I love about macro work. The power to be able to show what in essence is another world, to be able to show beauty and fragility in the details of something that can be easily overlooked.
If we take the next image as an example. For me, my eye is drawn straight to the centre of the image, the delicate white petals and yellow centre and deeper to the orange points of what I think are the anthers of the stamen. Then over to the second flower to the right, and only after this does the near-perfect reflection become evident. Once the entire image is seen the scene then becomes reminiscent of a small tropical island with the white flowers as the palm trees.
Going in a little bit closer shows in more detail how fragile these flowers are. The translucent petals are so fine that there are points that appear to be transparent
There are times when I think that I should concentrate on one area of photography, be it either Landscape, Wildlife, or Macro, but I just wouldn't know which to choose! I love being alone on top of a hill early in the morning to see the first rays of a new days peaking over the horizon, equally as much as love to find beauty in these small worlds through a macro lens.
