Archive for the 'lily of the valley' Category
Happening
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 commentsThe other side of the lily
I’ve been working extensively on this lily of the valley pic so I thought I’d post it. Nothing has been removed or added in the content (no cropping either), but I’ve used gradients, exposure adjustments, curves and all of that all over again with the adjustment brush, while trying to be careful not to over-do it. All I wanted was to bring everything to balance and enhance the buds and the droplet. There’s really just one colour in the picture, in different hues, adding to the simplicity. But effective, I hope.
Slug
It was raining today. I waited patiently for the raining to stop so I could train my camera on the lily of the valley buds and wood sorrel, but of course it doesn’t always help that the raining stops. It was still overcast and the wood sorrel didn’t like it at all and stayed closed. But there are other things to find in the forest – I came across this huge black slug. 
Everything is relative… slugs are supposed to be slow but when you’re working with a shallow depth of field, they move really fast!
Yesterday I mentioned the lesser butterfly orchids, today I had a look at a place where I know there’s always heath spotted orchids. Sure enough, found plenty of leaves, I didn’t even try to count them because they grow in a kind of a cluster so the leaves were all entangled. It provides some nice opportunities when they’re in bloom because you can fill the frame with the flowers. That would be in about one month…
1 commentBuds
All April I kept complaining how I don’t like spring (or April, anyway). Now that we’re in the 2nd half of May, things are definitely starting to look better. And by things, I mean everything green and all the other colours! Today’s catch was still mostly just buds, but I’ll happily photograph them as well. 
Give them another week, you bet I’ll be there with the camera again.
In the morning I checked out the duck pond and was disappointed to find it empty. An elderly couple having a picknic breakfast at the table (yes, there are tables by the pond, it’s not a wild place in any stretch of the word) but not even a feather of a mandarin duck. Dare I hope that they (the ducks, not the elderly couple) will be back? Photographers talk about “eye candy” and if the mandarins don’t qualify as such, then I don’t know what!
No commentsFlower of the day
Probably not a combination you’d normally see, but that’s a lily of the valley with ice drops on it, surrounded by snow. You can see in the leaves that they are suffering from the weather, and it’s not getting any better – in fact, it just started snowing even more than it did in the morning when I took the picture. How can something that makes me so happy in the winter, make me so mad in the spring?
It should stop snowing tonight and the temperatures should creep up tomorrow. Here’s hoping.
1 commentFleur du jour – Lily of the valley
Convallaria majalis
- English: Lily of the valley
- Swedish: Liljekonvalj
- Finnish: Kielo
Lily of the valley is the national flower of Finland. It was voted such back in the 60s and it’s no surprise – it is a truly elegant flower with a scent that is hardly surpassed in the natural world. I don’t know why I only had one picture of the lily in my photo database because it is a fairly common flower, but I was determined to fix the issue after I found several places where the flower grows abundant. So much so that I became a little bit overconfident – I had an idea in my head and I thought that the photo would pretty much take itself if I just pointed the camera in the right direction. Well, I crash landed in that respect and the photos seem to be hard work but I have a few days left to improve my efforts, until the short blooming season of the lily of the valley comes to an end.As for the light, it doesn’t really matter – this is one of those subjects which looks equally good in the sun and in shade. In this case, the patchy light in the forest provided a spotlight on the flower itself, while shading the leaves around. It’s just a matter of waiting for the right moment.
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Image specs: ISO 200, f5.0, 1/1250, Canon 300mm f4L w/ 31mm ext. tube
1 comment
