Kells Bay Garden, County Kerry

 

After a week fighting a flu I went out for the first time for a walk to Kells Garden. There are more photos from a recent visit on the German blog. A wonderful place to see again.

Water, Stone, Light, Discover Kerry!

Our Coastline in Ireland is full of interesting places. If you
walk around near the sea, you´ll find all kind of micro landscapes with wonderful simplistic settings. A few stones, a rock that was softened from the waves and those roundish stones everywhere,  will get you great photos. You will discover that arranging and organising the different shapes and colour or greyscales in your frame is an easy way to learn composing your images. I have noticed that a lot of photographers forget to turn the camera for a portrait shaped photo but it is actually the easiest way to create something completely different. The options are endless, I´ve reduced the 30 photos of my selection to those 13, all photos were taken in a space of about 5 m² near Whitestrand, Over the Water, Cahersiveen with a Canon 5d, 50mm macro and 17-40 lens, with Polarizer Filter. Tripod mounted.
Be careful, the ground is uneven and if wet very slippery!

Killarney National Park in May

Yesterday was a very fine day, with blue sky and white clouds.
I went to Killarney National Park to take some photos of the Bluebells and to my surprise the Wild Garlic was in full bloom as well.
The green of the leaves looked fresh and really juicy and like a new beginning. If you are into macro and flower photography go there soon.  Be careful when you walk in to the forest, I tried not to step on too many of the flowers.
In some of the photos you can observe different depths of field, with flowers especially I really like a kind of shallow depths so that more of your attention goes to details on one or two flowers. Then again I was so overwhelmed by the blue carpet of flowers, that I tried to capture them all with a bigger depth of field also.
Flowers are a great subject for experimenting with all kinds of setups so have a go with your camera in your garden or a ditch or Killarney´s National Park.

Joy in the Morning

Camellia flower

To  take pictures of flowers, which is especially rewarding now in Spring, I use my 100mm macro lens and aim for a shallow depth of field with a big aperture, so as to blur the surroundings of the main subject - I only want the flower and the dew drops in sharp focus.

Macro lenses tend to have a shallower depth of field anyway, so for this photograph I used an f-stop of f/6.3 in aperture priority, the resulting shutterspeed was 1/300.

I had set the ISO to 100 first and of course I used a tripod, which is a habit of mine, not that you would need it by all means with this fast shutter speed.

I was also lucky, that there was absolutely no wind that morning, so the flower "sat" quite still.

If you cannot set your camera manually, there is actually a little flower on most compact cameras as a scene mode, so you want to use that for close-ups of flowers.
For a shallow depth of field the portrait mode is the nearest option but you might not get near enough to your flower, so try to experiment with these settings and then choose what you like best.