Title • lily (1)

One of the things that always seemed difficult when photographing flowers with an SLR was gaining sufficient depth of field. More often than not some component of the flower would be unintentionally out of focus, spoiling an otherwise reasonable picture. With this camera the opposite seems to be the case. This was taken with an apeture of f2.0 – i.e. wide open – but I still had to blur the background. I guess this is a feature of compact digital cameras and think I remember reading that there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence between an apeture value for a compact digital and an SLR; i.e. an apeture of f2.0 on my camera is the equivalent to a much higher value on an SLR.

That said though, I’m reasonably happy with the result. This version of the picture is more tightly cropped than the original. I originally left a border around the entire flower but, when I came to look at the image, there was just too much empty space. I suppose this is one of the problems with staging shots such as this; i.e. it’s difficult to get something that doesn’t look artificial.