Spring is Here

The incredibly mild winter is ending and spring has arrived to provide us with relief, and around here that means that the bluebonnets have arrived. People in Texas generally love these wildflowers and can often be found photographing their children with them along the sides of country roads. I did the children in bluebonnets photos when my girls were children but these days I generally go out for a few close-ups in the spring and try to get interesting compositions of the flowers themselves.

With the photo below, I was trying to isolate a single bluebonnet with a pair of bluebonnets out of focus in the distance. Once I found the bluebonnet I wanted, I had to make sure that the morning sunlight was acceptable and the background was clean. I wanted the background to just be blurred out bluebonnets so I had to hold the camera at the correct angle to avoid the weeds and trees behind this patch of flowers. Then to get a shallow depth of field, I shot at a very wide aperture (f/1.6) and got in as close to the flower as I could and still focus. See the image below.

The problem is that with such a wide aperture, most of the flower itself is also out of focus. So, you can stop down a little to get more of the flower in focus, but then more of the background comes into focus. So you have to find the right amount of physical separation for your subject flower against the background flowers. In the image below I had the aperture stopped down to f/4 and you can see that more of the subject flower is in focus and that background flower is better defined. I think it still works though.

This compromise between aperture, camera-to-subject distance, and background separation makes shooting wildflower close-ups into a problem-solving exercise. I wandered around near a couple of bluebonnet patches in my neighborhood park trying to find just the right flowers against just the right background. I then tried different apertures, pulled the camera forwards and backwards and up-and-down. Fortunately for me, digital photos have almost no marginal cost so I was able to experiment a lot to find something that worked. I shot the image below vertically because there were some ugly weeds just out-of-frame to the right.

Lastly, I saw some prickly pear cactus out amidst the bluebonnets and weeds and so set about trying to make something work with that. There were a lot of weeds around this little scene that I pulled out of the way so they wouldn’t be in front of the flowers and cactus. There is also a park service road just beyond the weeds in the background to the right and my shadow to the left, so I had to shoot with the camera just about on the ground to get only what I wanted in the shot. I think that the photo is quite representative of spring in central Texas.

Thanks for reading and happy spring.

19 thoughts on “Spring is Here”

  1. Yeah, the ol’ aperture/distance compromise. I remember those days before I just started relying on auto-focus, and taking whatever I got. Great shots, but I do think the second one is better than the first. Looks like you found the sweet spot.

    Liked by 3 people

  3. I like the use of the depth-of-field in the second photo. I bought an APS-C format, 13mm F1.4 last year, thinking in terms of some dawn or dusk landscapes. But messing around with the aperture in some closer photos really allows for the exaggeration of depth. There definitely comes a point where it’s possible to lose context. 

    Liked by 1 person

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.