If you go down to the woods today,
You’re sure of a big surprise.
If you go down to the woods today,
You’d better take your digicam.
For every photog that every there was
Will sure have been there before you because
Today’s the day the blue bells, the white bells and fungii look pretty awesome…
OK, so I guess I ought to make a couple of apologies, firstly for plagiarising the old rhythm and secondly, it wasn’t today I went down to my local woods but a week or more ago – it’s just that it taken me a bit to catch up with the post processing. Anyways, in a little over half an hour I managed to grab some quite nice stock shots of the woods.
Now I need to say straight up that, whilst I’m at one with nature, I’m definitely at the shallow end of the pool when it comes to IDs for wild flowers. Bluebells are a common site across the
And in case you’re wondering, I used one of my oldest chunks of glass for these shots, the Nikon 35-70mm AF f2.8D zoom. This lens was considered ‘best in glass’ a decade or so ago and although it has a short zoom range now compared with many of the new mid-range zooms it still has a couple of really useful features which means I use it every once in a while. Firstly it focuses right down to less than two foot (16” from the front of the lens) in ‘standard mode’ as well as having a ‘macro’ setting to get in really close (4” from the front of the lens). It also has a 62mm front filter so I can drop a Nikon 6T close-up lens on and get even closer and nearer to the macro holy grail of 1:1. And for anyone operating on a budget but thinking of upgrading from consumer to pro-spec lens this is a great little lens which is readily available for around £350 second-hand, ie a 1/3rd of the cost of some of its modern counterparts – which isn’t bad considering that you get plenty of bang for your bucks as the 35-70 still turns in a neat image despite being as old as the ark…
Firstly, the (blue) bluebells which were deliberately underexposed (2/3rd of a stop) to increase saturation and contrast against the green background which dropped nicely out-of-focus given I was shooting at f3.5 with an effective focal length of 72mm…
Then the (white) bluebells with the odd (blue) bluebell mixed in. Again this shot was deliberately underexposed (1and1/3 stops below the matrix reading) but then I used off camera flash (fired remotely) with the on-board flash as a fill, to set the flowers against a dark background. Using f5.6 kept quite a decent depth of field…
And finally, the BIG fungus which incidentally, was around the size of a dinner plate – not that I’d want to eat off it. Once again the ambient light was underexposed and flash used to pull the detail of the fungus out against the background. I went for f8 as I was zoomed right in (effective focal length of 105mm) and wanted to get a reasonable depth of field to keep the top of the fungus and the moisture droplets underneath in focus…
