Misty Morning Bluebells…..or are they?

Bluebells flowering in English woods is a widely anticipated spectacle that many photographers look forward to.  For the last couple of years we’ve pitched up and taken our pictures and whilst some of them are pleasant images, it’s difficult to do anything outstanding or more creative than before.

So we hatched a plan!

Last seasons Photoshop fake!

As with most of our plans, it hatched at the pub, and went along the thought process of “how could we do it different”.  All sorts of ideas surfaced, but one developed from the recognition that pictures in woods where there is a mist in the air with sun behind the trees creates light shafts and dappled light on the ground.  Wouldn’t it be good if the ground were strewn with Bluebells! I’d faked one in Photoshop last year but wasn’t happy with it. 

Leaving it to our fickle weather was unlikely to deliver the right conditions when we had the time to go and take pictures.  Then someone said “I know a bloke with a smoke machine for his disco”……

Of course to run the smoke machine meant we also needed a generator, luckily we had access to one and off we went.

Sadly the Flowers are not fully out yet but we may try again when they are more fulsome.

You can see our setup in the pics below.  I’m not overly happy with my efforts 1 and 2 we could have done with the wind blowing the other way, so we’ll take an electric fan next time!

Generator in the distance,
waiting for smoke machine to charge up.

Instant mist!

Taking our pics as "mist" clears.

As always comments hints and tips welcome.

Peter.

Live View Macro tip

One of the great things for me about photography is the way you can experiment and get unexpected results.  I've recently been doing a bit more macro stuff see The Wasp here and have been playing around with extension tubes and extenders.

A boon to Macro shooting on my Canon 7D, is LiveView as it allows you to move the point of focus to exactly where you want it, and with some of the shallow DOF's Macro work has, this is essential and easier done in LiveView than peering through the viewfinder.

This is fine if you are working with continuous light (maybe LEDs), but using external Flash, the Liveview screen is black, even with the modelling lights on.  (see below).

However, I found accidentally that if you pop up the on camera flash whilst in LiveView, for some reason (not sure why, happy to hear from someone more knowledgeable why this works) the camera recalibrates and the subject is clearly visible.



















This means that you have access to the LiveView ability to zoom in tight and get focussed where you want to be, lock everything down, lower the flash, carefully put the external flash trigger into the hotshoe and start snapping.

Oh and if you'd like to see what I was snapping its Here.

Cheers, Peter.


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Flowers, not that easy

For a challenge I decided to try taking pictures of a flower sprayed with water.  I purchased a bunch of flowers, with some exotic types in it for us to work with and armed with a couple of LED lights, off we went. 

It soon became clear that to do them justice was not going to be as simple as I thought.  I deleted all of mine! the best one is here so you can imagine what the others were like!

I used a Canon 100mm f2.8 Macro lens, but somehow was not getting the results I wanted.

 

I'll have to read up on technique and have another go at it.

In other news I put my first "tip" video on to Youtube the other day. 

I'd been helping a friend with a shot of some flying Gannets he'd taken on the Farnes Islands.  It was a great shot but there was a gap in the shot where there were no birds and it looked odd.  We tried slecting birds and pasting them in but that didn't look right.  Somehow we found that you can use the Patch tool in Photoshop CS5, in reverse and in this case got perfectly blended birds to fill the empty space.  It was particularly pleasing as it took seconds and blended the different shades of sky perfectly.

You can see what I mean on the video here on a shot of Manx Shearwaters flying in Wales.

So if you have any tips on taking flower pictures, or comments on the video clip, please let me know.

Cheers, Peter.

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