Photos from yesterday back to the 1970s.
The Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #34 is Close-Up.
After giving the challenge some thought I decided to concentrate on a single species, in this case the annual herb Borage. Traditionally a garden plant in Britain, it is now being grown commercially to produce Borage seed oil.
A Borage flower bud.
A Borage flower.
A stalk of Borage flower buds and a flower.
Borage seeds.
Saturday morning of week 38 saw me down at Colpoy’s Bay at dawn. There was thick cloud over Colpoy’s Bay and the Niagara Escarpment.
When the rising sun started illuminating the clouds I noticed a small group of Yellow flowers on the shoreline so framed a shot to include them. I used a graduated neutral density filter to balance the exposure for the sky and foreground.
A shot from a walk last week. It has been a bad summer for a lot of plant species in the area. Winter dragged on well into spring and summer has been hot and very dry.
I noticed this small group of Coneflower blooms in the soft, evening light. The plant was much smaller than previous years.
A Chicory flower photographed on the side of a road on the South Bruce Peninsula, Ontario.
I like the delicate blues in the flower but I found the greens in the background overpowered the blues. So I desaturated the background until it was close to how I remembered the flower appearing when I took the photo.
A Coneflower, also known as Echinacea. A rather attractive flower that I overlooked in the past.
Taken 5 years ago with a (relatively) modern digital camera and a vintage lens. The lens is a Vivitar 35mm f/1.9 that I picked up used when I was a photography student in the late 1970s. Eventually I replaced it with a much smaller and lighter f/2.8 model.
The Vivitar 35mm didn’t get retired for a few more years. It was the lens I attached to the nest boxes I used to document the nesting cycle of various species in the mid and late 1980s. It was retired after that although I kept it around for a couple of reasons. Firstly as a backup should anything nasty happen to my f/2.8 model. Secondly, having purchased it used and with the rubber grip on the focusing ring having disappeared it wasn’t worth very much.
Five or six years ago I rounded up all my manual focus lenses from the film era to try them on a digital camera. I rather liked the way the ancient Vivitar renders backgrounds (sometimes, other times the backgrounds can be quite ugly) so it found a place in my manual focus prime lens kit. When I’m feeling particularly retro I leave the modern zoom lenses at home and take a small bag containing three or four manual focus prime lenses. Basically going back to the way I shot film as a student.
A Virginia Spiderwort flower after rain. Wort used in the names of plants and herbs can mean that the species was traditionally used medicinally or as food.
The plant is native to eastern North America. It is commonly grown in gardens and this flower was photographed in Cheshire, England.
