chrisleighphotography.com

My wife loves gardens and gardening – in the summer, at any rate.  She also loves looking at other people’s gardens, so I often get the chance to take photos of flowers.  I used to find the Sony DSC H9 very good for getting in close especially with its tilting lcd screen and its ability to focus really close-up.  I haven’t taken all that many flowers with my a350 yet but I’m hoping that the tilting lcd on that will be equally useful.  With flowers I’m looking for strong colours and shapes, but also interesting details like the veining of petals and leaves and the contrast between black stamens and bright petals.  The simple shot above was taken with the a350 last summer, just round the corner from where I live.  I like the strong orange against the deep green out of focus background – with the drop of rain providing a little highlight.  If you look at the EXIF data you will see the settings were all wrong on the camera, mainly because it was very breezy and the poppy was waving around in the wind in somebody else’s garden (but I probably forgot the ISO was too high!).  As far as I remember, hardly any processing was done with this image.  More flowers can be seen on my gallery here, or by following the flower tag on my flickr stream (over 500 photos), or my flowers collection on flickr (14 sets).