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Giant Allium Summer Bloom

Giant Allium Summer Bloom
Giant Allium Summer Bloom

Giant Allium Summer Bloom

Taken just after a gentle spring rainstorm. The air was fresh and drenched with moisture. 99 percent relative humidity has everything wetted as you see here. A drop of water with it’s little moon following dropping from the flower’. A strong scent of wet sage was lofting across our homesteads lawns, the tips of my tennis shoes wet from the grass. Green Green Green, the “Bokeh” (good google word) here was ideal for a gentle background to the Giant ornamental onion from the orient. This one is just starting to bloom and had pulled back a little with the rain falling. The Allium flower isn’t a terribly long lasting bloomer but boy are they great in clumps of 8 or 9 bulbs in a spot you want conspicuous for a few weeks a year.

Allium giganticum means Giant Garlic interestingly. Probably from the similarity in shape of the bulbs and not the taste I’m thinking. Otherwise the classic Crocodile Dundee reference would be “needs Allium”. … (if you get that I’m worried about you😜😜) Even Bumble bees were temporarily grounded due to the rain. I went out just as it let up. Rain and Cameras = Hazardous duty pay + overtime. I’m pretty careful with water. Taking photos next to or over water with a good camera is like taking photos next to a flame with plastic clothes on.

I could take this photo with the background in focus or not in focus. High f-stop numbers will put that in focus. Low f-stop numbers give you a thin field of focus and you only get the flower sharp. It is a good tool in your Manual mode tool kit to actually decide what and how much of your image you want in focus.

Title: Giant Allium Summer Bloom

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Icicle and a Warm Day

Icicle and a Warm Day
Icicle and a Warm Day

Icicle and a Warm Day

Some warm(er) winter days present the sun directly on a snow covered roof and melting starts. If the air is still below freezing, icicles will of course start to form in the run off stream Of course it depends on how warm the roof is, how well insulated from below.

I took this to sepia intentionally as I have enough blue icicles in my pile of image to do lol. So perhaps this is considered art with the color not being photorealistic to the scene as I experienced it. I go nuts if I don’t vary my routine every once in a while lolol. One has to have a bit of variety now and then .

Photographic Musings:

Most of you have the ability to do this shot with any good DSLR or Mirrorless Camera on Manual mode.

Here is my thought process on pretty much every image I ever take.:……. You have to decide what your first priority is. ….. Freezing the water droplets so…. Shutter Speed is your FIRST priority. To freeze motion of a falling water drop start at 1/1000th of a second and you might have to wander to 1/1500th or there about shutter speed.

OK, Second priority… Adding light. Since the fast shutter speed cuts the amount of light entering the camera, you must add some. Opening up the lens by turning down the f-stop (aperture or pupil size of the lens). Lower fstop number will open up the lens and let a lot of light in. This has the double edged sword effect of thinning the focal depth of the camera. Take a photo of someones nose and his ears are out of focus thin focal field sort of thing. Well this is a flat surface so I don’t need focal depth, F4 or about as low an f number as your lens will go to. This will also BLUR the backcountry to a uniform “Bokeh”. (Good google word).

Only three things to adjust in Manual mode, so your first two priorities were satisfied above. Last is ISO or camera sensitivity. With a mirrorless camera, I would just adjust it to “get the image to the exposure you want” live real time on the video screen. You can see your adjustments before you click. Lower ISO is better IF YOU CAN. High ISO gives you grain AND artifacts in the photo but you have to resort to it in some dark environments.

With a DSLR, you guess, take the photo, look at what you got, adjust again (guess) and repeat until you get the desired result.

You now know everything I know about taking this photo for yourself.

Location: Bliss Dinosaur Ranch, Wyoming/Montana borderlands

Icicle and a Warm Day