So close, and yet so far…
posted in Flowers, Photography |One of my Christmas cacti bloomed, the pink-and-white striped one. The Christmas cacti live in my office window, in the window in the front landing/entryway, and some babies in the kitchen window. They provide a bright splotch of color at odd times; historically it seems that we can get them to bloom by stressing them (in other words, by forgetting to water them for a while).
So I took out my new camera and fiddled with it for a while, trying for some macro shots of the blooms.
And, as always with macro shots, if I had a composition where most of the flower was on one plane, it turned out well:
But, alas, when I tried a different angle, where the camera was aimed down the lovely shimmering throat of the flower, and the yellow pistols dusted with pollen were fountaining towards the camera and the purple stamen was drooping away from the camera…well, it didn’t work.
Bummer! I want more depth of field! Those dainty translucent petals came through very nicely, though. (Those are actually two different flowers above, but the last picture, directly above, is a different view of the first in the post.)
It would work, I think, if I had a narrower aperture (f-more-than-8, which is the limit on this camera). So I am investigating the CHDK (Canon Hackers Development Kit, I believe, though I couldn’t find it specifically defined), in hopes of getting a higher f-stop. If that won’t work, they have auto-bracketing, producing multiple pictures with different focal points which you can then merge into a single file with a program called CombineZM. The CHDK was recommended by Jen From Alaska in one of the comments to my first post about my new toy–many thanks, Jen!
It’s such a pretty flower! I really want to get it all the way!
