Starfruit; that's what this reminds me of. I can almost taste it...

I was going through my photos from the past months and ran across quite a few photos that I had intentions to post sometime in the future, but had never gotten around to it. And since I haven't been able to get out and shoot much, I decided that now is a wonderful time to tap into these reserves. Unfortunatly (or fortunatly, however you want to look at it), most, if not all of these shots, are macro/nature photos.

For any of you who have vertically oriented monitors, this makes a killer wallpaper. Vertical wallpapers are so much fun because they basically don't exist, so you have to make your own, but when you do, they are usually quite stunning. My mom uses a vertically oriented flat panel, so I have fun making wallpapers for that. Unfortuantly, it doesn't do much for the rest of us.

So you're probably wondering why there are two quite similar shots. They are quite similar, but not the same. The framing, especially is different. The second one also gives me an excuse to post a larger scaled image of the flower. On a side note, a smaller aperature (larger DOF) would have been more desirable, but I was already shooting at ISO-400, and would have had to have gone up to ISO-800 to shoot with smaller aperature. So yes, it would have been better, but it wasn't practical in this particular situation.

This is one of those cases where higher ISO's came in very handy. I usually try to shoot at ISO-100, 200 if I have too. Sometimes, however, you just don't have that kind of light. In this case, I could have shot at ISO-200, but that would have halved my shutter speed to 1/50, which is far too slow for my 100mm (160mm effective) telephoto. A sharper image (higher shutter speed) is always more important than noise. If your image is blury, unless that is what you wanted, there is no point in even taking it. This is where the higher ISO's (400-800) become very handy and useful. I try to reserve 1600 for low-light indoor shots. Anyways, I was able to use the flexibility of my Rebel to shoot at a higher ISO and maintain decent image quality. As you can tell this image is not lacking in contrast, yet the noise is still fairly minimal. While not quite as smooth as a ISO-100 or 200 image, if extensive post-processing is kept to a minimum, the noise is not even an issue.

categories: flora macro nature