The unexpected dry weather continued through this morning. I went out with my cameras in the late morning to see if the flowers from last week were still in good condition. About half of them were, as I discovered.
Today I took along my EOS-10D outfitted with the usual EF 20/2.8 and my Rebel XTi outfitted with the EF 135/2.0L. It's been perhaps two years since I used the 135. It was great getting reacquainted with an old friend. The only problem with it is that it won't auto-focus closer than 1.6m. I recall having this problem the last time I used this lens, so it's not a new problem. I ended up manually focusing most of the time. That was probably just as well since the breeze would have caused the auto-focus severe problems.
After I had just gotten out and set up my first shot, a person living across Nordic Drive from where I was came by to chat about photography. It turns out he is interested in getting back into still photography after quite a number of years' absence. I gave him a little of what I know about the Canon digital SLR system. Since we're basically neighbors (just a short block down the road), we might be seeing more of one another in the upcoming months.
For close-up floral images with the 135mm, after reviewing the frames, I saw that f/4 to about f/5.6 works really well and fits my tastes and vision. Anything less than f/2.8 just doesn't have enough depth of field unless I'm going for an artistic (almost Impressionistic) effect. Above f/5.6, the background clutter begins to become noticeable. I did use smaller f-stops for a few frames where the background was basically the sky.
I spent most of the rest of the day working the images in Photoshop. I took some artistic liberties with a few of them.
Here's the gallery (click on image to go to the site):
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