I got up this morning and checked my phone to see that I had a text from my client. The delayed opening is delayed further. This winter weather is affecting my revenues. I expect to have a 25% financial shortfall this quarter. Sigh!
I had a strange night. I went to bed around 10 PM but had difficulty falling asleep. I had weird dreams about wide-angle zoom lenses. The entire night! Perhaps because I was reading through some of the photography articles on my iPad right before bed. I'm not sure, but I was not too fond of it. I woke up feeling tired.
As I made my breakfast, I thought that perhaps I needed to get something out of my system. It's been a while since I used my camera equipment. Using the 35mm meant going outside and walking around. Perhaps I could find something inside to shoot with the 85mm. I saw the flowers on the dining table and decided to shoot that. But then I realised the 85mm has a long focusing distance. I wanted to shoot something close-up. I remembered I had Frank Veronsky's Lensbaby Composer and macro kit.
I experimented with different f-stop settings until I found one that gave me the depth of field that I wanted. f/8 didn't give me the results I wanted, so I tried f/11 and f/16. I lit the flowers from above using three 60W daylight compact fluorescents. I shot in manual mode on a tripod and a Sekonic lighter-meter to set the exposure.
The images were processed in Adobe Lightroom and Color Efex Pro.
