May Image of the Month

Oh my goodness! May was such a treat for me, colour starved after the never ending winter. The tulips exploded out of the ground and started showing off. I'd been curious about the difference between my new full frame camera and the first APSC camera when it came to flowers. I certainly believe that the colours are richer, and a bit more of the delicate texture is being captured.

One of my thoughts was to use the same lens (100 mm) swapped between both cameras, and take as nearly as possible the same shot of the same flower. You can't just mount the cameras on a tripod because of complicated camera stuff I won't get into, mainly fallout from the one camera having to be 1.6 times further away, but I'm curious to see the image quality differences. This working full time has put a bit of a cramp on some of my photo projects.

In any case, you may have seen this screen shot of my initial choices. Most of those star ratings were done along the way, on a limited data set, in variable frames of mind. Several people commented, thank you very much! Photos 4, 5, 11 twice, 12, 17 twice, 20 twice, 22 twice, were mentioned.

I've gone through the 145 edited photos (out of 1678 photos taken) and eliminated the ones taken for the community association. Here is the revised list of 4 and 5 star shots for me to choose from for IOTM. Just to save you flipping back and forth, the 4 and 5 mentioned above are the same below, the 11 above is now 13, 12 is 14, 17 is now 19, 20 is 22, and 22 is 25.

First of all, honourable mention to what is perhaps the bleakest of the bunch. Dead plants left over from last year. What gives? The full story is here. The summary is this is the first time I'd 'seen' the photo I wanted before I ever clicked the shutter, and had the camera capture it. Normally chromatic aberration is something photographers remove, but in this case, the slight tinge of it in places adds to the image.

Another honourable mention to the first time I've really been happy with a red and the texture at the same time.

Here we go into full scale dither. I love all the photos. I think most of them would look great printed out large. After the success of last year's white peony that was first runner up for image of the year, I've been working on shooting flowers backlit by the sun. This is a bit tricky, finding a compelling narrative of lines and shapes, colours and textures lit up but not blown out, and most importantly, not blinding myself or the camera by looking directly at the sun.

There have been several times I've been gobsmacked by the purity and quality of the colour. 19 (see first runner up below) was amazing for this, and I ran out of light before I finished trying different settings, I'd have loved to get both the texture of the petal, and that ring of yellow into perfect focus. And 27! I nearly burned the BBQ trying to capture that yellow in the evening sun. The photo shows a tinge of orange that I don't remember being there.

Here's the second  runner up. The first backlit photo of the month that I was really happy with.

First runner up. I've already talked about the colour for this one. I can just see some person who suffers from SAD wanting to get this printed big to help get them through the winter.

And the winner! It isn't quite as spectacular as some of the others, but I keep coming back to it. If you missed it the first time around, this shot has zero editing in Lightroom. Zero.