Nikon D7000 – Page 2 – Different Isn't Wrong, It's Just Different

Last Friday I wrote about shooting Iris on Earth Day at Boyce Thompson Arboretum. Another flower that I photographed was an odd find and quite the surprise.

Tucked away in a shady spot was a large container with an Amaryllis in bloom. The Amaryllis looked out of place, as if someone had just put it there without any rhyme or reason. There were so many beautiful orange-red blooms! I think of this as being a Christmas flower, not something you would see in bloom in late April.

The first image was shot in full shade with no reflector or flash. Although the light is even and soft and the red blooms vibrant, it seemed a bit flat to me when making the image. The background has a nice blur, but the image looks 2 dimensional and not what our eyes would see.

For the next two images I pulled out my 5-in-1 reflector and chose to use the gold side. I held the reflector up and to the right of my camera creating side light. In these images you can see shadows giving the images the look of 3 dimension as our eyes would see. The orange-red is a richer color and by using the reflector on the flowers, the background is darker making the flowers pop even more.

This third image I was able to get rather close and really show the texture on the stamens.

I chose to leave the images untitled for now. Leave me a comment if a title(s) shouts out at you!

You can click on each image below to see a larger view:

This week I have had the pleasure of shooting night blooming cacti both at night and early in the morning. These images were all taken early in the morning at the Desert Botanical Garden. At the end of this post will be gallery so you can see larger views of the images.

white night blooming cactus flowers I had been watching this particular cactus for a few weeks watching the blooms get larger. It had been several days since I had last visited the garden and thought I may have missed them. I was hoping they would be pink, but alas they were white. There were three blooms on the top and two more at the bottom of the cactus. Using my 50mm 1.8 D lens, I was able to get the entire cactus in the frame along with the surrounding area to show the scene. Certainly not an artistic image, but knew I wanted to share here in a post so you could get a better visual of the cactus as a whole. When making this particular image, it reminded me of a strapless mermaid style dress with frills along the top and the bottom. Does anyone else see that?

The close-ups of the three flowers on top and then another image of the two bottom flowers, I used my 105mm 2.8 macro lens. Fortunately I had quite a bit of room to move around in order the get all three flowers in the frame. These flowers are approximately 6 inches in diameter requiring a fair amount of distance with my macro lens. My camera is a Nikon D7000 which is a crop sensor of 1.5 making the focal length approximately 152 mm on a full frame sensor.

white night blooming cactus flowers