My calendar indicates it is spring … but my garden says it isn’t! Overnight on Saturday, we got a dusting of snow, so when I awoke on Sunday morning, there was a dusting of white powder all over the place. Hoping to find some purple crocus in the white snow (that should make a nice, contrasty image!), I headed out to the wildflower garden with my camera and tripod.
Unfortunately, I found no crocus in bloom … only green plants sticking out of the snow covering. But as I wandered the garden, I did find an extremely small weed/wildflower … and it was a blue-purple color … sticking through the snow. I have never seen this little beauty before, so any assistance on the ID is requested, if you know what it is. The blooms were very, very small (maybe 1/4″ in diameter).
I had to work quickly as the sun was coming over the trees and I knew the snow would not last long. Working quickly, I made one large mistake that was not discovered until I was editing the images. The ISO was 1600, where I had it the other morning when I wandered around the nearby meadow just after sunrise. Even so, this high ISO worked out pretty well with the images. This first image was made using a small Depth of Field (DOF) to keep the background out of focus:
After capturing a couple of images, I decided to make a few images for later “focus stacking”. For this, I made 4 different exposures, varying the focus, from front-to-back, combining them in Helicon Focus software, to get an image with greater DOF on the flower, but keeping the background out of focus:
The DOF of the second image shows the background is starting to come into focus, a result of the lower parts of the wildflower being closer to the snowy background. Which one do you like better?
Photography Equipment Used:
- Canon 7D body
- Canon EF180mm macro lens, f/3.5, with a Canon 1.4x TC attached
- Gitzo 1258-LVL carbon fiber tripod, with Kirk Enterprises HD ballhead
- ISO 1600
- Aperture f/5
- Shutter 1/800 sec.