Flowers

These pictures were taken on July 30th, 2009 in our back yard. The rose is a Peace Rose. I don't know the names of the other two flowers. Taking pictures of flowers is new to me and requires a different technique from bird photography, but I find that some of the techniques don't change, such as compose your picture before you shoot. What I was attempting to do here was to get a shot of a pretty flower and have a fairly dark out of focus background that wouldn't detract from the flower. To do this I used a flash with a Better Beamer to concentrate the light on the flower and under expose the background. For these, I was shooting at F7.1 but this caused parts of the flowers to be out of focus. Today I tried shots at F16 and F22. Hopefully this will achieve more in focus flowers but this made it tough to get a nice homogenious out of focus background (good boca). I'll probably post the results of that tomorrow. Double click on these photos and you'll find that they are very sharp and you can really see the detail and beauty of these flowers.