Making the most of it – whatever the weather.

I happened to be in Birmingham the other day and decided, as I was only a short walk away, to spend the afternoon at the Botanical Gardens – well, I have a camera, I like flowers, why not?

The sun was shining, the sky was blue, I had my macro lens, but had forgotten my polarising filter  – never mind.  I had visions of autumn leaves (they have acers!), late flowers all brilliantly captured by my macro lens.  Then the sun went in – macro opportunities limited.  I opened up the lens, shifted to ISO 400 and did my best, after all f/4.0 should give a lovely fuzzy background.  If you want to see the most decent effort then you can find it on my Flickr stream.  The picture I have decided to post was taken with my Ixus.

Reflections in the Water at Birmigham Botanical Gardens

I was initially taken by the colours and the reflections (nothing like a little bit of water to boost the light levels) and took a couple of quick shots with my compact.  I then tried to get the same with my SLR – nothing doing, so I concentrated on the ferns using my macro lens – I was pleased with some of the pictures, but prefer the one pictured above.

What I like about this is the colours and the dark reflections as well as the way the green plant moves along the diagonal.  It is also ‘held in’ by the ferns at the bottom left, apart from the colour and texture that they provide I think the photo would be unbalanced without them.

For those with an interest in the settings of my mostly automatic compact, I chose ISO200, it came up with f/2.8, 5.8mm, 1/50 secs.