One A Day – 545 – Flashy Flowers

Mary is Gold

MiniGolds

Color Competition

Feeding on Wild Sunflowers

Really Wild Sunflowers!

Cosmo is not Alone

• Parque Tecnologico
• Tres Marias, Morelia, Michoacán, México
• November 1o, 2014
• Copyright, all rights reserved

Last Friday the central shaft in my monopod broke. Fortunately, my camera was not mounted at the time. It fell a short distance and hit the ball head. The shaft was brittle and it broke down inside the monopod. It wasn’t expensive, but I wanted to find another because I have really come to enjoy using a monopod when shooting low light or telephoto shots.

I found another that was very similar at Luminaria, but I didn’t have a chance to try it out until today at lunch. The sky was overcast, but not dark, giving a sense of omni-directional light. I had my telephoto with me and I really wanted to try it fully extended and on some macro shots. These pictures were taken at lunch, on the hill behind our office in Tres Marias.  All of these were shot with the monopod and some at more distance than others. One of the things you can do with a telephoto is shorten the depth of view and use focus to isolate the subject. I took full advantage of that with these photos.

There is only one tone-mapped single in this set, “Really Wild Sunflowers.” All the rest are post-processed for color and impact, but no special techniques were used other than my eye. The sharpness of the central subjects is quite high considering there was a small, variable breeze and some of these are more than 25 feet from the camera (the sunflowers with butterflies). The macro shot subjects (“Minigolds” as an example) are quite small and a less than a foot from the front of the lens.

There are many flowers in Mexico that have been bred for gardens. These are all examples of the wild forms. And yes – I am very happy with the monopod and telephoto. Very happy.