Spring Flowers

 Just a short Feature this time of some mostly wild spring flowers to be found along the banks of the Ladybrook, a tributary of the River Mersey that runs close to my house in Bramhall.

Technical points: I used the Canon macro lens 100mm 1:2.8 L IS USM, with narrow apertures to obtain depth of field, a set Tv of 1/250 or 1/125 seconds, and a floating ISO.

As usual, given my limited botanical knowledge, the names of the plants are not necessarily correct and I bow to those with greater authority in these matters. I'm pretty sure the first is a buttercup. I have used the spot metering of exposure evaluation to highlight the flower itself and underexpose the background. The second image is of forget-me-nots (?). This is a very tight crop of very small flower heads, so we get some noise appearing. The third image is of wild garlic, again with spot exposure to accentuate the white flowers, stamens and shadows, at the expense of the background. As with the forget-me-nots, these flower heads are about 3 times actual size.


    



My fourth shot is of a feather! Well, a feather caught in a hawthorn blossom. I have made a slight saturation tweak to this shot. Because the magenta stamens are surrounded by lots of "white" tiny flower heads, the original colour was slightly washed out. Thus, I have increased the magenta channel to restore the colour to the stamens. The fifth image is of a mallow (?) plant with one bloom having burst and another about to. I quite liked the whole configuration of leaves with the diagonal composition adding a bit of movement. My final shot is not of a wild plant but of a species of peony (?) growing in a neighbour's garden. I thought the shading in the leaves quite spectacular.



    



All the images have been worked up via Lightroom and most with Google/Nik sharpening software.


Many Thanks for looking.

David Okavanga