Garden to Table to Camera

Come On, Spring!

What could signal the arrival of spring more to a photographer than to photograph some fresh blooms? Well, this past March, Calgary was still very much in the grip of winter. The spring we were waiting for was still some weeks away, with a few blasts of cold, large dumps of snow — and some back-breaking shoveling! — yet to come. Normally I enjoy winter, but this one was long and I was ready for it to be over; the continuing cold season wasn’t inspiring me to take the camera out, either. Not to worry! One day, Deb bought a lovely bunch of tulips to brighten up the dining room.

It wasn’t long before I brought the Pentax 645D upstairs along with the manual focus 120mm Macro lens. I used my new Joby GorillaPod Focus — a handy little tripod with flexible, grippy legs — to position the camera in close to the flowers. This GorillaPod is a heavier one, designed for loads up to 5kg, and it was able to keep the big 645D steady. I combined a set of extension tubes to allow focusing from an even closer distance, with a wide aperture to create a very shallow depth of field. With the ambient light down low in early evening, I used a small pocket LED flashlight shielded in my hand to provide a bit of selective spotlighting. I also made multiple exposures of each scene and combined them with HDR technique, to extract every ounce of delicate color and detail from the rich Pentax image files. I spent a pleasant hour or so trying out a number of compositions.

From (somebody’s) garden to our table to my camera… a little splash of spring color to help chip away at the chill clutches of winter.