Spring arrived in the last couple of days (despite the snowstorm on Saturday), and was unmistakenly harkened by the arrival of the bluets. These are perhaps the lovliest spring flower, and they pop up all over our yard in May. We often mow around the best clusters, to make sure they reach maturity and disperse new seeds.
A few days ago, my friend Simon Booth produced a video on his YouTube channel of his top eight tips for macro photography. All of Simon’s videos are wonderful, not just for their content, but because of Simon’s peaceful, endearing, humble, and kind character. You don’t just subscribe to his channel, you become his friend. I’ve been a fan for a long time, and if you have any interest in lansdscape and nature photography, you need to become a fan, too.
Anyway, after watching Simon’s macro video, I got pretty jazzed on the idea, and this morning went outside to see if I could find a worthy subject upon which to inflict his techniques: hence, the bluets. I was going after a moody, approaching-dawn (the shot was taken before 6:00 a.m.), and very painterly effect. I wanted not a clinical, textbook version of Houstonia caerulea, but rather the essential essense of this beautiful tiny flower. Not the pithed-frog version, but the on-hands-and-knees-I-love-these-things version. And it is for that reason that I used the ridiculous macro aperture setting of f/2.8 (typically macro photographers are looking for all the depth of field that they can get, and stop way down; I wanted the opposite: just the stamens are in proper focus).
And I didn’t want an enormous grove of bluets, either, but a single flower. A representative, not a riot (although a riot of bluets is gorgeous, and I’ll do that at another time).
It took many tries to get something passable, but I finally found a frame that caught what I had seen in my mind (the photographer’s endless quest). Simon would have nice things to say about this picture, because that’s just the way he is.
Here is the big Flickr version.
Meta: Pentax K-3, 100mm f/2.8 macro a=@ f/2.8, ISO 200, 1/200th of a second, bean bag, large diffusion panel to cut down on the blazing sun, right hand held over bluet to block the slight breeze
