Another mixed bag this week starting with blackberries on Monday:
These are cultivated blackberries that are now ripe. In this image, I have chosen to show both ripe and unripe berries along with stalks showing where we have already picked some. If you look carefully, you will also see some fine dew on the berries and some of the leaves: like many of my photos, this was taken early in the morning.
Tuesday’s photo is of the dew covered flowers of a succulent:
I like this due to the sheer amount of dew on these flowers. As for the photo itself, the background is not the best, but, I needed to photograph the side facing the sun and leaving it to later in the day means the dew would have evaporated. Compromises do have to be made…
As with most compact cameras, the close up setting is at the wide angle end of the zoom; for me this has two downsides: 1) more of the background shows than with a telephoto setting. 2) wide angle views combined with the short focal length of lenses on compact cameras puts more of the background either in focus or closer to being in focus. With a ‘professional’ macro lens, these tend to be short telephoto lenses to help overcome these issues.
On Wednesday I took this photograph of a Victoria plum:
Here, I wanted to show the fruit in context with the garden by incorporating some of the background. This year, this plum tree has produced very little fruit – about a dozen or so compared to the buckets full we usually get. This meant my choice of subjects was limited.
Again, this was an early morning photo with low sun but I like the lighting and by leaving it much later the fruit would have been shaded. One little touch I like is the drops of solidified juice that has leaked from the end of the plum.
For Thursdays photo, I wanted to show that not all the flowers are pristine: Autumn is upon us and most flowering plants are now past their best.
And on Friday I am showing the Pineapple Flower plant (Eucomis):
Another early morning photo, but I wanted a background as plain as possible. This meant that I had to take it early in the morning while the sun was in the right direction to use the wall of our cottage as the background (My wife and I have just spent the whole week repainting the cottage. ‘Twas hard work but worthwhile even though I did break one of my teeth in an argument with a piece of falling mortar!)
Larger version of these can be seen in the Garden Gallery.