I grow old, I grow old...

BBG_051708.macro.6U
Originally uploaded by Digital Sasquatch

OK, just middle-aged, but still. The weather was, once again, psychotic last weekend: approaching the 90s on Saturday. With gas prices slowly approaching what Europe already pays, and with a workshop coming up on the Palouse in eastern Washington, I've been practicing frugality and staying close to home...so it was back to Bellevue Botanical, this time with a tripod and with the new extension tubes.

Macro shooting is a whole different set of skills...I've shot close-ups using my 28-70L or my 70-200L, but that's nothing like using the tubes to cut the minimum focusing distance from two to three feet down to two to three inches...or closer. Actually, I wasn't that daring: of the 12-, 20, and 36mm tubes included in the Kenko set, I used only the 12mm with my 50mm f/1.8 II lens. That got me within five or six inches of my subjects.

The tripod and an angle finder become essential, at least for me. The DOF becomes very thin, so it's also important to ensure that the camera is as close to parallel with the focal plane of the subject as possible. In the posted image, the petals are fairly well in focus, but some of the flower's business in the middle are out...and the petal at the top is bending back just a bit, so it's pretty soft. I checked: the whole structure of that blossom was less than a quarter-inch thick.

Oh! About the whole "I grow old, I grow old..." line from The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock: macro shooting is probably not for the bad of knee and vast of belly. Even with the big thunder gel knee pads, it was a painful b**** crouching and crawling and staying still while peering through the angle finder. In my landscape shooting, I try not to fall off of things; macro seems to be all about not falling into the subject! The quality and interest of the images, however, will certainly tempt me to clap on the kneepads again...but I'll try to remember to get the anti-inflammatories down my neck before I go.

Legless at Bellevue Botanical

Daffodils at Bellevue Botanical Gardens. 2008.2U
Originally uploaded by Digital Sasquatch

After the adventure in the snow out on the coast, I ran into a little tripod trouble, and had to send my legs back to New Jersey for service. Since it's been beaten into me that, as a landscape shooter, All Photos Are Better Taken From A Tripod, I felt a bit at sea without my legs. I tried to 'knit' a new tripod from bits and pieces of two older, @#$%ier sets of Amvona legs, but then couldn't get my ballhead off the center post. But the sun was out, and stuff was poppin' over at Bellevue Botanical Gardens.

I am constantly reminding myself how lucky I am to have a world-class botanical garden within five minutes of home...I know the name of maybe one out of every 50 items that are cultivated there, but for a photographer, it's an incredible place to practice working with light and to see a landscape—even a manmade one—change through the seasons.

Spring is, as may be surmised from previous posts, running late this year in the Pacific Northwest...it was almost May, and the daffs were still up and fresh-looking. So, slightly bereft without tripod, yet still needing to capture something, I decided it would be a good time to practice my hand-held shooting. I loaded up my 4XL photo-vest (a vast thing, capable of smuggling an ultra-compact car in its various cavernous pockets) with the essentials, and drove over to the gardens. Turns out 'essentials' did not include memory cards, as I forgot the wallet and had just the 1-gig card in the camera.

That turned out OK: I found that shooting hand-held made adjusting compositions easier, and more spontaneous, which in turn encouraged faster shooting: knowing I only had 95-110 shots available, however, persuaded me to slow things back down and compose with care. It all balanced out, and I had a great hour and a half, and got some fine images, including these bashful backlit daffs.

I went back the next week, early on a Monday morning (my flex day), and shot most of four 1-gig cards in about the same amount of time. Have yet to process those images but, based on what I'd learned this day, I was able to really concentrate on using the morning light and DOF, so I'm looking forward to see what came of it all. The next day, of course, my tripod arrived from NJ, and the weather and my free time have been uncoordinated since. As a result, I haven't had a chance to play with the new set of Kenko extension tubes I purchased for close-up work.