Up Against the Wall

Having brought things up to date with my previous post, I've gone back in time a short way to the end of August, just before we left Somerset. At the time we made a couple of abortive visits to the walled garden at Cannington, on the second of which we turned up to find the place closed.

However, I noticed these plant, which were growing in front of the white wall of one of the college campus buildings. I made several images and these are the best of bunch, as I didn't manage the depth of field very well. I was using my Olympus Pen F, which I find less intuitive to use than the Sony, so that's my excuse.

 

Cactus Spiked

Yet another image from the Cannington Walled Gardens set - scraping the barrel a bit now, I think.

Match of the Dahlia

Two more dahlia images from the Cannington Walled Gardens set.

Mono-Mania

I decided to post the mono version of the colour image from previous post, on the basis that I really like it.

On The Ball Dahlia

I like photographing dahlias, especially the ball variety shown below. 

I made both of these images at Cannington Walled Gardens and I've gone for a very different treatment of each. This is unusual, as I generally try to match images in an individual post.

Anyway, first up a mono image.

Now, a colour image.

I do have a mono version of this second image, which I also like - tbh, I think that this is much the stronger image of the two.

Leaf, Inverted

I don't usual go in for heavy post-processing, but my son encouraged me to try inverting this image after desaturating it, and it kind of works.

As an aside, it was originally an image made during the Cannington visit.

Take a Leaf Yada Yada

A couple of images from a Halloween trip to the Walled Gardens of Cannington.

Completely in Vein

Yet another image from Mothers' Day, which doesn't, to my knowledge, feature a mother.

In a Different Vein

Another image from the Cannington Walled Garden set.

In a Similar Vein

This image was made in the greenhouse at Cannington Walled Garden during a Mother's Day visit.

Canned Finale

Yet another image from the Cannington set. There are only so many images like this that anyone can take, so this is the last one that I'll post. Probably.

Canned II

Another image from the Cannington visit - I think this is also a tulip, but I'm not entirely sure.

Canned

The Easter weekend saw us paying a visit to Cannington Walled Gardens in the sunshine, where I made this image of a tulip. I like to think that this has a similar look and feel to that of last year's images from Tyntesfield, which is as close as you get to a house style on this blog.

Again, I was working with my Alpha 550 and again I found myself niggled by its limitations. In this case, I was shooting hand-held, using live view and holding the camera at waste level as I felt slightly inhibited about sprawling full length on the formal lawn. Back in the day, the live view implementation was considered to be amongst the best, but now...For one thing, you have to switch between live view and the OVF manually, using a switch that would be right at home on a tractor. The screen tilts, but doesn't swivel, so shooting in portrait format was almost impossible. And talking of the OVF, it has 95% coverage only, which means that extraneous things creep in at the edge of the fame, like that leaf on the left of this image.

<rant>As an aside, it strikes me that those people who go on about the superiority of an OVF over an EVF are camera snobs who have lashed out on top end gear with >99% OVF coverage and need to justify the expense. An EVF gives 100% coverage and is a real step forwards for the rest of us plebs.</rant>

I could go on, but I think that you get the idea - I suspect that the A550's days are numbered.