I've mentioned the photography club at work previously on the blog, but haven't said much else about it. I hadn't made it to any of the actual shooting events (though I did take photos at the picnic on behalf on the club), so I was excited for the first lunchtime outing!
But it was raining...
The focus of the shoot was the basics of aperture, ISO and shutter speed, so those of us in attendance decided we could just do close ups of the flowers in the atrium.
I liked the orange ones because they were *so* vibrant! But after taking a few I noticed something weird... These flowers were fake! I felt so robbed! I suggested we could shoot some real flowers outside under the safety of the awning - it wasn't raining that hard...
Of course, I had my rain coat on thinking we were going out, so I couldn't resist getting close to the flowers anyhow. And I managed to find a bee having her lunch!
Ok, I know this is blurry... But the cute fuzzy bee turned on me! I was super close trying to focus on the bee and it flew right at me. The only reason I have even a blurry photo is probably because my finger twitched as I was running away.
Bees and I do *not* mix...
Back to shooting flowers after the bee was safely gone. As the other shooters crouched under the awning, I braved the misting rain to get some close-up photos of some of the bigger flowers. Anchorage may not have a long summer, but they plant vibrant flowers to make up for it - I love all the colors!
Of course, there is nothing wrong with some pastels and creams to offset all of the colors. And you can see here I am obviously shooting on the low end of my aperture - my background is all blurry. This was intentional, the side of the building isn't that exciting...
The point of the day was to vary up the aperture and I wasn't doing a good job of that. Crazy, considering I used to give Theresa a hard time for always shooting wide open. It wasn't like I didn't think of it, but in my head I didn't care if the background of the flowers was blurry. Of course, it didn't occur to me that a shallow depth of field doesn't just affect what is *behind* my focus point - thus the blurry purple flowers in the front.
Photo fail! While I normally would have just deleted the photo, I am leaving it as a reminder to pay attention to what your (my!) shooting parameters are!
Someone came up with the idea to try and catch a water drop falling off a leaf. This was as close as I got - they would drop as soon as I pulled the camera away from my eye. Argh!
I did notice that my 35 prime lens certainly has a limit on how close it can focus - and it's not as close as I thought it should be. Maybe I need to invest in a macro lens. Or maybe rent one to see if I like it first... Theresa has rented lenses before and she seemed to think it was a worthwhile venture.
One thing I didn't get to do was to try any puddle photography. I had read an article about it the other day and kept wanting to try it. Unfortunately that only works once it stops raining and the puddles are still. Instead I just have big fat clusters of rain water on the roof of a car...
But I thought those were pretty neat looking too - hey, you have to take what you can get when your city is in the middle of an abundance of rainy days. :)