All pictures are taken with my 50mm/1.4 and manual focus, no macro gear used, simply because I don’t have any macro gear… I would love to have one of those macro converters, but there are just so many things I would like to have… And anyway, the 50mm is still a wonderful lens!

If you are missing my pics, you can find my day-to-day shots at instagram, @mettelindbaek.

For now, here are some flowers shot with my iPhone 4, which isn´t too bad actually. In fact, using only the iPhone is kind of an exercise of composition, since the camera isn’t that great and I don´t have any chance to edit the pictures, composition is everything. (Only edit used are instagram filters).

Bushes in winter

Snow covered bushes in winter wonderland

Ok, so I like flowers, and I like trees, and turns out I like bushes as well. Maybe I should reconsider my career choices and look into something cool like gardening or landscape architect…? Now that sounded very weird, taken that I can’t keep a plan alive for my life. I even managed to kill a cactus!! It did take me a few years, but it was dead in the end. So I think I am best of sticking to taking pictures of them. I don’t think it is possible to  kill plants by shooting them, right..? (Pun actually not intended…)

By the way, none the pictures I am posting this week are edited in Photoshop which I usually use religiously. I have only mini-edited them in iPhoto, and turns out you can actually do quite a few things there, among them I corrected the exposure a tiny bit – even if I was overexposing the pictures as I shot them. It looks easy to take pictures of snow, but it is actually a little bit tricky because it is so bright and you want it to be just the right nuance of white, and not grey, yellow or blue. So shooting snow I always overexpose with 1 or even 2 stops right in the camera, and I pay attention to the white balance. But again, those are things that are possible to correct quite well even in easy photo editing programs like iPhoto. And remember to not overexpose too much, because then you will lose information in the picture and the shot is useless. And if you take pictures of people in the snow you have to pay attention to that to, making sure they aren’t overexposed either. Oh, so many things to consider…. That is what makes it so much fun, right?

Just a few days left in Norway before I go back/home (where is home…?) to Guangzhou.

Flowers on Instagram

Also, with a picture like this you can make nice cards and other creative things, maybe a poem? (But probably something more creative than I came up with here…). Anyway, the only limit is your own imagination!

Flowers