Archive for the 'cranesbill' Category
Growing
I had a walk around the forest to see what’s happening with the flowers. I was particularly interested in the lesser butterfly orchids, they are already growing but will probably take a couple of weeks to bloom. Most things in the forest seem to be in the same stage and I saw a lot of buds of different kinds. A week or two and it’s the high season!
There is one spot in the forest which is covered by a green mat of ferns. I’ve always eyed this spot and tried to find out ways to photograph it, but even when it at first looks wonderfully light green, at closer look you find that the mat is a little bit “broken” so I never created any pictures here. 
Until today, when I saw the half grown wood cranesbill break up the fern pattern and this one leaf with a young fern nested on it. It really was like that when I found it, not sure I could’ve come up with the idea myself!
I tried to clean up the leaf before taking pictures and it looked ok in the viewfinder, but on the monitor I could see the leaf was full of little spots of different kinds, some kind microscopic debris that’s really easy to miss in the nature. So I did a great deal of healing to get rid of the worst, but when I realised that there were probably a hundred of these smaller spots, I gave up and used negative clarity instead. Which is a little bit ironic, considering that I shot it at f16 to get enough depth of field to keep the fern sharp!
No commentsHappening
It’s a rainy and windy day so I decided not even bother with the big camera, even though the macro season has well and truly started. A lot of flowers are on the way up, for example the wood sorrel is blooming at its best but with the weather of course, the flowers are closed. So are the wood anemone in my favourite spot. But then at Hembygsgården I found the lily of the valley leaves growing strong and tall with some buds, some of them seem to be only a few days short of bloom. 
This spot is a south facing slope so it’s always a sure bet in the spring. The earliest common dog violets are in bloom and I also found these wood cranesbill buds.
I’ve never used the Powershot in manual focus mode before. The autofocus struggles big-time with closeups so I had no option but to switch to manual, and to my big surprise it worked really well. Obviously it’s a bit finicky when it has to be done electronically and using the LCD, but all things considered it was ok. It will even be a little bit easier when I don’t have to protect the camera from the rain at the same time!
No commentsWood cranesbill
I’ve had another day to play with the Canon 100mm f2.8L IS macro, but the pictures are few and far apart – not sure why but I’m just not coming across any subjects I like. 
The picture of the very pale heath spotted orchid is getting close to the closest focusing distance of the lens, but it’s nothing that my 150mm macro couldn’t have done. The wood cranesbill though, it would’ve been tricky to pull off with the long macro. I was shooting straight down on it and there wasn’t a lot of light in the forest, 
so the shutter speed was 1/80 at f2.8 (ISO 100). In order to get the flowers the same size in the frame I would’ve had to stand up straight, go to a higher ISO to get a fast enough shutter speed so I could hope to get something sharp. I’m not sure if it would’ve been possible to set up the tripod in such a way that I could angle down the camera, while still being able to see through the viewfinder!
So that’s definitely one for the shorter IS lens, I think that this is the best wood cranesbill picture I have. Just because the flower grows everywhere doesn’t mean that I have lots of pictures of it!
But no, I’m still not even considering of trading the long macro for this shorter IS macro. Maybe it’s not possible to take exactly the same pictures with these lenses, but who needs that anyway? If it’s not possible to take some particular picture, then you just come up with another one and don’t dwell over the might-have-beens. You work with what you’ve got!
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