Gardening Gone Wild: May Photo Contest

This month, celebrated nature photographer Alan Detrich challenged the readers of the Gardening Gone Wild blog to use a macro lens and to utilize light  in close-up photogrpahy in our garden photography.

This exercise has once again taught me to pay attention to light when I am taking photographs in the garden. It also pointed out to me that there are two things that should be at the top of my Wish List:  a macro lens, and Mr. Detrich's book on digital macro photography. But most of all I "discovered" many things that I often simply look at but don't actually "see".... some aphids, a lady bug, an ant on a pear blossom, pollen in the center of a flower - and pink pollen at that! (Okay, so it probably wasn't pollen... time to review plant anatomy LOL.)

Appreciating that many of us might not have the lens designated for the contest, Mr. Detrich encouraged us to try our hand nonetheless.  Using the mediocre 55 mm lens that came with my Canon Rebel XT, I surprised myself with what I could do with a lens that I have long sought to replace with one of "better" quality. (I'm thinking maybe this is a keeper?)

Anyway, after shooting no less than 600 photographs of everything from red lily leaf beetles to our fish eating Cheerios, here are some of my favorites as well as my entry for the contest. I don't know how anyone else's computer works, but on mine, if you click on an image and then click on it again, you get a super-enlarged version of it and can see the most incredible detail. I hope these look as good on your monitor as they do on mine!

First, my contest entry:

I love how the light plays on the stones in this picture of the water cascading over the waterfall of our koi pond.

Here are the "runners up" - the ones I thought carefully about but didn't submit.

I must have spent a full half hour (and over 100 images) wishing this little ant would get out into the light more, but every time he did, something else in the image wasn't quite perfect. This exercise left me with profound respect for photographers who spent much time and money perfecting their craft before the age of digital photography.

As always, my favorite subjects to photograph are the flowers in our garden, and two of my springtime favorites are grape hyacinths and hellebores.

 

 

Okay, so that last photograph wasn't even close to a "close-up, but aren't they beautiful!  

And here is one of our butterfly koi, Sherbet, scarfing down a Cheerio.This little gal (okay, she's two feet long so not so little) pushes her face right out of the water to snatch her nuggets of food.

And last but not least, my absolute favorite spring flower ever, the lovely lilac. Here are some gorgeous double blossoms that I couldn't get enough of either in the photographs I took or in the vases of them that I have throughout the house.