Quill

If you like photographing flowers, and happen to travel to the big island of Hawaii, you really owe it to yourself to make some time to walk through the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden. Just a few minutes’ drive north of Hilo, it’s home to all sorts of beautiful tropical plants.

Here, for example, is a Pink Quill (tillandsia cyanea) bromeliad. It’s native to Ecuador, but apparently also available as a houseplant (although I doubt it’d do well for us here in Colorado):

Quill

More to come…

Still life with pinhole

So yesterday, April 25, was Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day — I thought I’d contribute a shot using my Lensbaby Composer and its pinhole / zone plate optic:

Still life with pinhole

This is a shot of some flowers on our dining room table — the exposure took forever (OK, 20 seconds) since the pinhole has an effective aperture of f/177. It also needed some serious noise filtering, since sensor artifacts really start showing up on long exposures like this. Still, I like the dreamy, abstract sort of look that it gives the shot.

Just for fun, I also used the zone plate (f/19) function of the optic on the same scene — far dreamier:

Zoneplate flowers

So which do you like better?

BTW, once it’s been reviewed by the powers-that-be, my pinhole submission will be on display as part of the WWPD 2010 gallery here.

Pink carny

OK, I’ll freely admit it. A side benefit of buying my wife flowers is that I get to play with them too. In a few spare moments, I did a little macro experimentation on some of the “survivors” of the crop I bought her for Valentines Day.

Pink carny

I like how the DOF worked out in this shot — gives it a semi-abstract feel.

Remembrances

Another shot from the Yampa River Botanical Park; Steamboat Springs, Colorado. This one’s a bit more processed than the last one:

Remembrances

I basically turned up the blue saturation a bit and turned the green down to a similar degree — sort of a “poor man’s selective color,” because I didn’t like the look when I took away everything *but* the blue. The end result isn’t too gaudy, I don’t think…