Old Passion Flower

In an attempt to keep my post rate up I had to scrounge the back catalogue again, this was taken a while back when the passion flowers were in bloom, there's nothing remarkable about it, I think it just caught my eye as I had processed it in sepia, which I have to stop doing really. Depth of field is very important with macro subjects, this was taken at f/8 as I knew I would be working close but I still wanted the eye to be drawn to the stamens (the male bit of the flower for all you botanists) so I needed a reasonable amount of DOF. I was going to do a bunch of smoke photographs today but I have lost all my incense sticks but I'll hopefully do some of them soon.

Flower Macro photography

Macro photography is where the subject is recorded at actual (or larger) size, and as most sensors (in digital cameras) or film don't exceed 35mm (corner to corner) the subjects have to be very small. I really enjoy this side of photography as you can get some great results from fairly ordinary subjects and you don't need to travel to far off locations. Flowers and insects make really good subjects. One aspect of photography it helps to know about in macro photography is depth of field, this is the measure of how much of a subject is in focus, this can vary from miles, as with landscape photography to millimetres, in macro photography. One factor when dealing with depth of field (DOF) is working distance, ie how close the camera is to the subject as the closer you get, the thinner the DOF. To combat this it is often necessary to stop down your aperture (to say f11 or 16), this results in longer shutter speeds as there is less light getting in (remember smaller apertures = smaller hole = bigger f numbers). and therefore a tripod is often used, especially if shooting indoor. A really good DOF simulator can be found here

This image was taken at f8, 1/50 at 180mm mounted on a tripod and I used a black background to really draw the viewers eye into the picture.