Lady Slipper Orchids

Sorry. I've been a little busy and will continue to be for awhile. I am managing, barely, to do some posting but my blog reading is a little hit and miss lately, with more missing than hitting.

To answer one question from the previous post: I shoot fireworks at ISO100, 4 seconds, and f11 — on a tripod, of course because you can't really do it any other way. I set up the camera and don't change anything once the fireworks are in progress. I just take a lot of shots and hope for the best.

That was Monday. Wednesday (yesterday), Bob and I were on the road at 6:30 to visit the Purdon Conversation Area where the ladyslipper (or lady slipper) orchids are showing. It's about an hour away, so we began photographing around 7:30 and stayed for an hour or more.

It was hot enough in the gully but we did shoot in the cool of day even though it wasn't cool.

I went along the boardwalks once with my macro lens, crawling around down there and being a little disappointed with the results once I had them uploaded.

Here is one result. I like much about it but wish I could have nailed the focus better. I thought I had it, but it's a little soft. Still, I like the photo quite a bit.

Here is Bob's photo of me in a typical position. It's buggy down there, so I was wearing light long pants and shirt. I changed to shorts and tee later at the restaurant.

I returned to the car, changed lenses and went through again with the 70-200mm lens. I mostly shot standing straight up and without a tripod. As I type this, I have yet to look at this round of images. Hang on.

Thanks for being patient. I quickly edited this one image.

Unlike the first, this is highly cropped because even at 200mm, I was still too far from the flowers that I wanted to photograph as we are restricted to the boardwalk and many of the blooms are back a piece. The new 100-400 lens would have helped, but by then I was too tired and hot to go back to the car to change lenses and then make another trip around.

Instead we went to the pancake house for breakfast before Bob took me on a tour of some many of his favourite county backroads.

Hopefully, I will return to the ladyslipper photos at a later date, but we have company coming today followed by a busy three-day Celtfest.