Pink Camellias

The nearest condominium across the street has been occupied for a while now, and I noticed yesterday that the occupants are packing the car, snowbirds preparing to fly back North.  I also noticed the camellia bush next to their front door, full of pink blooms rather than the more common deep red I’ve seen here in Inverness Village.   When the snowbirds flew, I moved in with my camera and tripod to photograph those beautiful blooms.

Earlier this month I attended a lecture by Les Saucier at the CNPA Annual Meeting in which he described macro photography using telephoto lenses and teleconverters, so I was eager to try out his suggestions using my own equipment.  I have a 70-200mm zoom lens and the Nikkor TC-17EII 1.7x teleconverter which effectively makes the lens a 340mm telephoto with a close focusing distance, a tool Les recommends for getting closeup shots of flowers and small critters.

The setup requires a tripod for sharp focus and some experimentation to determine the optimum exposure.  I shot using aperture-priority mode, choosing a setting (f/11) that gives good depth of field so the entire flower would be in focus.  In this mode the in-camera meter suggests the proper shutter speed for optimum exposure, but I used a -1/3-stop exposure compensation to prevent loss of detail in the highlights of the flower petals.  Post-processing in Lightroom 3.3 then gave me photos which I believe capture the full beauty of these magnificent flowers.  Click on the photos to view larger images.

 

About Tom

Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, Appalachian State University.
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2 Responses to Pink Camellias

  1. lucy says:

    love all the pinkies in this post and the last. tally is in full bloom. guessing you are, too?

  2. Billie says:

    Not quite. But these lil beauties are so pleasing to the eye and more so because the photographer took effort make them shine.

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