Snow in March

Having a full time job not involved in photography (2 full time jobs if you include being a parent), one of the biggest issues can be actually finding the time to go out and take photographs. Which is why it is great to get the opportunity to go and take photos of a single subject.

This came about recently when my local photography society  organised a walk to take photos of the snowdrops growing locally.

It is quite liberating to go with a single purpose and have no pressure on you to achieve results. It means you can experiment to your hearts content and see what works and what doesn't.

It also benefits having other photographers with you since it allows you to feed of there ideas and hopefully try them out.

I won't pretend the results of the trip produced anything stunning. This was after all an experimental session. But it means that I have learnt a little more.

Things I learnt.

Macro photography outside is hard, especially on plants with little contrast like snowdrops. I spent  a long time trying to get a good close shot. However  even small amounts of wind caused movement.

This shows how strong a green colour cast can be. Green is a very strong colour

Foliage produces a lot of green colour casts which is especially strong on a white flower like a snow drop. This is the 1st time I played around with photo filters in photoshop to try and remove it

Generally it was a dull day. Actually this is OK for this sort of photography. However for a brief instant the sun did come out allowing some back lighting. What I would like to try next time is put a flash on a long lead and back light it using that

This was probably the best group shot. You could argue the background could be more blurred, but it does provide context.

 I tried the technique of zooming out, while taking this. It worked reasonable well and worth having another go sometime.

Getting low down works well but you need to keep anything above the flowers to a minimum 

I tried some long exposure photos. I wanted to capture movement. Unfortunately there was not enough wind to make it work. Next time I will take something like a reflector or a piece of card to artificially generate a breeze.

After a while you get bored of photographing plants and start taking photographs of your fellow photographers

The other thing to look out for is other locations. This site had some great dark limestone pits which due to their position of quite still. A place to revisit in Autumn when the leaves are yellow.