Two White Globe Lily Flowers. Almaden Quicksilver Park, California. April 26, 2008. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Two white globe lily flowers growing in a narrow canyon at Almaden Quicksilver Park, California. I make a point of hiking through this canyon with my camera equipment every April, when many wildflowers are in bloom.
A couple notes on this photo and some other wildflower photos that will soon follow… I know the location of these flowers very well – they grow along a trail through a canyon at a nearby park where I hike many times each year. I shot these photographs without a tripod. In fact, I travelled very light when I did much of this flower photography this season – on this day I was carrying only my Canon 5D and a 24-105mm zoom. The lens choice might catch the attention of some readers, since this is not your typical macro lens – but I’ve found that it works quite well for this type of shooting, and that it is possible to get a pleasing background blur in many cases if I use a large aperture and pay attention to what is in the background.
keywords: chinese lantern, flower, wild, wildflower, spring, canyon, blossom, plant, leaf, nature, almaden, quicksilver, santa clara county, park, san jose, stock
Rob, since I was shooting at f/4 (and probably upping the ISO to 200 or so – though I’d have to check the EXIF to see for sure) I was able to use a sufficiently fast shutter speed, and I was very careful and methodical about holding the camera quite still and releasing the shutter smoothly. With IS, I really did quite good sharpness – in the original files the small “hairs” on the edges of leaves and flowers are quite sharp. I don’t doubt that they might have been a bit sharper with the tripod – and composition might have been a bit easier as well – but these really did turn out quite sharp.
In most of these photos I was shooing pretty close to or at the close focus limit of this lens and often shooting at 105mm and f/4.
Interesting background info. I know the IS helps, but I find my shots like this are much sharper from the tripod and using MLU. Perhaps you got sufficient shutter speed here for no worries? Your comment on the one lens hike is well taken, and yet another reason I lust after a 5D to throw my 25-105L on. I agree it’s a sweet focal length range on full frame.
It’s a beautiful shot, nicely composed with the soft light.
Thanks for the comment, Inge.
Yes, the 24-105 actually seems to work quite well for this sort of thing. For most of these I was shooting at f/4. While not the sharpest aperture on this lens, with the flowers isolated against the OOF bokeh background there is plenty of sharpness.
The bokeh of the 24-105 is in general not a good as that on some other lenses. I notice when the background is just somewhat out of focus that the blur is a bit angular and not as smooth as I might like. But when you can really throw the background out of focus with a very close subject shot at f/4 the result is actually quite nice.
Dan
Dan,
You talked about using the 24-105 mm lens before and I tried it out at a large aperture and I have to agree that it does work as a “macro”. BTW lovely Chinese Laterns. – Inge