Warning… photo talk ahead!
I was not particularly satisfied with the photos of fiddleheads that I got last week; the light was too harsh. Ferns tend to grow in sunny spots and thus fiddleheads are thereby often in lots of bright direct sunlight.
I knew the light was harsh yet I photographed anyway — a failure of my “patience filter”. I should have come back when the light was softer or made a trip back to the house for a diffuser and stand!
Resolving to do better this week, I headed out in search of fiddleheads again.
There were broken clouds aloft so all I needed to do for “good light” was to carefully operate the “patience filter” and wait for the sun to go behind a cloud. A bit of flash (with a small plastic dome diffuser) off to one side allowed me to stop down the lens for the depth-of-field needed when shooting these small objects. I think that these photographs are better… what do you think?
While “out and about” in the woods, I noticed that the trillium were in bloom so they had to be captured as well! Trillium tend to grow in heavy shade so here I switched to “Strobist mode”: put the camera in full manual for exposure, use the shutter speed to “dial in” an appropriate level of background illumination, set the needed the aperture (dictated by required depth-of-field) and control the exposure of the subject by adjusting the flash power.
Here are the weekend’s “keepers”:
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Very nice illumination, Frank! I never realized those things were so damn fuzzy.
Comment by Dana — 9 May 2011 @ 10:08 PM