Flower Pictures

Flower Love

2011-11-07T05:30:00.000-08:00

This shot came from a wonderfully happy and life affirming event - a wedding. The romantic connection between these two intertwined blossoms characterized what flowers and love are all about for me.

Randomness

2010-10-04T07:13:00.000-07:00

Yellow flower power

2010-09-22T00:12:00.001-07:00

The white daisies are done. We're into yellow flower power now. With a smattering or purple. I really like the Polaroid effect of this iPhone app.

White turns to yellow

2010-09-16T11:08:00.000-07:00

So white turns to yellow. White daisy flowers are on the way out to be replaced by a fusion of buttercup yellow and purple wildness. Beautiful. Are we lucky or are we lucky!

Spring is Sprung!

2010-09-10T07:36:00.000-07:00

Spring has sprung, gathered up its skirts and raced on through. We've had fields of white daisies, sauntering on in to yellow, purple swathes of colour.

My new best camera is my iPhone. The saying goes: The best camera is the one you have with you!" Ain't that the truth.

I tried carrying around my compact, it proved to be too bulky. If it doesn't fit easily in my pocket then it gets uncomfortable after a while but more than that it's the thinking ahead all the time. My phone I have to have with me, the habit is deeply ingrained and so automatic.

It works too.

Audio Books Rule

2008-01-08T08:29:00.000-08:00

I discovered the incredible world of audio books before Christmas and now that I'm back driving the fifty kilometres into work most mornings at the moment having an audio book to listen to is making it all worthwhile. I LOVE IT! Audible are running these great offers at the moment:

Flower Pictures New Stock Photos

2007-08-10T01:59:00.000-07:00

Cape Gooseberry by Damian

We've been hard at work at A Flower Gallery converting all our art galleries of flower images to be available as instant downloads, so now you can come and browse the new stock categories for each of our photographers and download your favourites from as little as $1 for a 72 dpi web ready, royalty free image. If you are looking for larger print-ready flower images they are still there in the main gallery for instant download too.

Check out the rest of Damian's collection of stunning black and white images for a brooding, moody masterpiece.

Flower Images - Royalty Free

2007-07-24T09:34:00.000-07:00

If you need some royalty free flower images for your website, I've just finished uploading the new version of my flower pictures site at www.aflowergallery.com

The stock flower images are available under Stock Photography with web ready images (72dpi 800px wide or high) available at $1 an image. I'm adding new flower images to the galleries all the time so it's worth having a look each week.

I'm currently working on creating an upload section for other photographers to upload their images to the flower stock galleries too.

Enjoy!

Digital Photography Books

2007-01-04T11:13:00.000-08:00

A friend who, has just graduated to a digital camera, asked me to recommend a book on basic digital photography. Completely at a loss, since my books are mostly classics from the age of tranny and SLRs and I am lucky enough to get my training straight from the horses mouth, I hit Amazon and made an exhaustive search among customer reviews for a book that sounded helpful. I came up with this one: The Betterphoto Guide to Digital Photography. The reviews stressed that it contained lots of useful info about learning to use your digital camera to its full range of capabilities and that it was easily accessible for beginners. So there you go. This is the one I would buy if I didn't have a tame professional photographer happy to share his expertise, available 24/7! posted by Kit

Tall Flower Stories

2006-10-17T01:34:00.000-07:00

Watsonias, the last of the spring flowers, heralding the imminent arrival of summer heat. Tall sentinels scattered orange or pink among the restios of our farm. How tall?

This tall!

Is this the tallest flower or is there another even bigger one over there?

Maybe my children shrank in the wash and this is really just a small spring flower! This one is actually taller than me, at about five and a half feet (not quite 2 metres). When the evening sun catches all the orangey red flowers they look like bright tongues of fire illuminating the bushes. That will be the next flower picture to catch with my camera, but I’ll have to be quick, the heat of summer has already invaded the spring, making watering necessary again and drying up the last flowers to mere wisps of seed heads.

Spring Flowers

2006-10-01T11:38:00.000-07:00

The essence of spring - flowers, the discarded blue eggshells of hatched weaver birds, guinea fowl feathers, all collected together into a stunning, spontaneous art installation by my six year old daughter. The carpets of daisies that covered our farm in early spring are now all seeding themselves. Warm dry days have put an end to the pypies, but brought out the majestic watsonias, some of them as tall as I am. Strawberries and mulberries are in full flow and we have the luxury of berries for breakfast, home-made berry ice-cream and berry smoothies. The joys of photographing carpets of flowers, have been superceded by the culinary delights of the cornucopia of our early summer harvest and pure greed! I'll be wielding my new digital camera to capture the watsonia flowers soon though. They are the last in line of the spring flowers before dry, dusty summer hits us, with just the occasional relief of the deep blue agapanthus flower and sky blue plumbago to gladden the eye of the flower pic afficionado. After that my digital camera and I will be off flower duty for the summer, though I'm sure I'll be able to find some flower pics from the archives to brighten up this blog!

Birthdays go Digital

2006-09-07T11:59:00.000-07:00

This is the first shot I took with my surprise birthday present, which was a Canon Powershot A620. At last my own digital camera again. The downside of being married to a professional photographer is that cameras are regarded as tools, so just as I would get the hang of my camera, it would be traded in for an upgrade. Professional digital cameras are great, fine quality, wonderful lenses, but they don’t tend to slip into your pocket, while you go for a walk with the children, so many photo opportunities get missed, just because you can’t be bothered to lug a camera bag with spare lenses around with you.

Anyway, my new Canon does a fine job, sharp as sharp macro facility, fine metering and focus, so it does most of the work for me, which is what I want in these days as a distracted mum photographer. Gone are the days when I could spend hours on one shot. Now before I’ve clicked the shutter once I’m being dragged off to look at something else, a newer, better flower, insect, leaf. So it’s just as well that I can point the camera in the vague direction of my chosen subject and tell it to get on with the rest. I am also visually challenged nowadays, needing my reading glasses to fine focus on something myself, but this clever camera doesn't really need me to do that either. Its tilting screen allows me to hold it at arms length, where I do have a hope of seeing what's what, the focussing zone system tells me what it's looking at, then I click. If I've left my glasses at home, while I'm out photographing arum lilies in a ditch beside the main road, I do have to wait to look at my shots properly till they are up on the computer though, but all in all we've got a good thing going, my camera and I! posted by Kit

Digital Cameras - tools for creating flower pictures

2006-08-17T11:42:00.000-07:00

Kit and I have spent the last few weeks pouring over all the digital pics we shot with our particular digital cameras during 2005. A good AND a bad thing about the digital world is the rapid and I mean rapid accumulation of images, in our case, flower images. Thousand and thousands of them! And for the most part where do they end up? Nowhere or rather stuck in a filing system on your PC. Just sitting down to look through for old times sake is a daunting task. Aaaaahh! Too much information, give me a break!

Digital cameras are wonderful though if one has a purpose, a real purpose, something to work toward. Our focus is the royalty free stock photography library that we have just created on A Flower Gallery. We're adding more everyday.

It's glorious spring here in the Swartland. Glorious it is! So each day we grab our digital cameras and head out to capture a tiny bit of the beauty around. Man it's beautiful to stand in a field of daisies and look out over endless white and yellow to the mountains jagged, majestic in the distance. Old men gone to sleep many moons ago but still showing plenty of attitude in repose! In fact it's hard to keep focused on the job in hand - taking flower pictures.

And it doesn't cost a cent. It's a digital world and I love it. Digital cameras rule!

Flower Photos in Springtime

2006-08-10T12:42:00.000-07:00

We had a perfect spring day yesterday to go forth with our digital cameras and shoot the daisies. They're not at their thickest yet, next week our farm will be carpeted in white, but enough to start trying to capture this year's 'children in the daisies' pictures. Every year I have a bash at getting the elusive perfect shot and am frequently foiled by the bright contrasty sunlight (which is what makes the daisies unfurl their petals) and the glare from all these white flowers. The kids are usually squinting in the brightness, with dark shadows thrown by their hats on their faces. I'm aiming for an album with a page for each year, full of our children frolicking in the flowers, growing up in the daisies.

This year we had an ulterior motive too. We're setting up a photo library on our A Flower Gallery site, where you can download photos for a small fee, hence the letters on this pic. I've been learning, more than I ever thought I would, about Photoshop - resizing, retouching, adding letters to the sample photos so that they can't be used so easily without permission, and staring at my computer screen, instead of the enticing view through the window, to the daisies and mountains.

The kids were cooperative models for a short time, but as it got closer to lunch time patience wore thin, and the appropriate captions for the resulting pictures were more likely to be 'Stomping off in a grump through the daisies'.

We had decided on a policy of using only the generic pictures of them for the library, not portraits where they are easily recognizable. So trying to get pictures of them walking away through the flowers hand-in-hand was the aim...and we did get some...but how eloquent backs can be! Some of the shots clearly say, 'my Mum made me do this and I actually want to go and pick up pine cones over there and now I think about it I'm hungry'. Still there's always next week and the beauty of digital cameras is that you can snap away without counting the cost of film and either delete the grumpy shots or save them for embarrassing the kids in ten years time! posted by Kit

Digital Cameras - flower pictures with a snappy snap!

2006-08-03T12:47:00.000-07:00

Canon Powershot A620
7.1MP Digital Camera

I said yesterday choose the best combination for you whether it's a point and shoot snappy snap camera or a magnificent DSLR that requires you to mortgage your house in order to buy just the body. Well maybe you shouldn't go that far...

In doing endless hours of review reading and forum searches I settled on the Canon A620 digital camera as my snappy snap 7.1 megapixel camera of choice. It has loads of manual controls which appeals to the professional side of me, a swivel screen not so large as others but allows ultimate flexibility of shooting angle but best of all a truly crisp 1cm close focusing distance for macro photography. Perfect for flower pictures! This is an exceptional feature in any digital camera let alone a point and shoot not very expensive model $260 to $300 really good value. The A620 digital camera has been replaced by a newer model the A700 - keeping the 2cm macro facility increasing the zoom with a 6x zoom. Unfortunately the flip out screen has been replaced with a bigger fixed screen, good for lots of applications but believe me when you're on the ground trying to get the right angle on a tiny flower bud you need all the help you can get! A flip out screen helps a lot!

And the images on the Canon A620 are sharp, what more can a flower photographer ask for...

Posted by Patrick A Flower Gallery

Digital Cameras

2006-08-02T12:33:00.000-07:00

Digital cameras give such a sense of creative freedom to flower photographers. To be able to point a snappy snap digital camera or a full on DSLR at a gorgeous flower and shoot away without counting the cost. Unbelievable stuff.

But which cameras and lenses really make the difference?

If you're serious about digital photography or rather if you're serious about flower pictures photography then there are a number of good options with digital cameras even at the relatively cheap end of the scale. But be selective - research and consider what's best for you carefully because the choice is overwhelming. At least I found it so in the beginning.

I found reviews of digital cameras helpful while at the same time making my final decision more and more impossible to make.

This is what I mean!

Camera A in the $250 to $350 bracket and camera B are really similar but one is slightly bulkier than the other...'A' has better focusing capabilities whereas 'B' has better a better whitebalance facility. 'A' has slight edge softness at the longer end of the zoom and with 'B' the flash is a bit underpowered...and so on. How is it ever going to be possible to make a decision, without suffering system shutdown first? OVERLOAD CITY!

The truth is probably never! Digital cameras like so many other bits of eletronic wizardry are subject to endless learned people's earnestly written, well intended and often useful opinions but ignoring what I want to know is what was it like to use? Really use, every day usage?

Go to the forums is my advice, get a vague idea about which digital camera might suit your pocket and needs from an excellent review site like www.dpreview.com and then read a bunch of opinions on forums too. Normal people writing about a bit of equipment from a "I had fun with my digital camera today but this dial on the back really drove me crazy!" point of view.

Also try to pin point early what you would use the camera for most. Snapping away at daisies in a field on wide angle or capturing the majesty of the heart of an orchid in close up detail.

Digital cameras are fun and useful but always remember the fun should come first!

Posted by Patrick A Flower Gallery

Flower Pic Fantasia

2006-07-26T12:05:00.000-07:00

A flower fairy pixie, spinning and whirling, arms flung out in magical dance? Or a fiery-hued leucadendron in midwinter South Africa? Flower pictures can take you past botany and into fantasy at the click of a shutter, through a macro lens. Alice in Wonderland eat your heart out – Disney’s next hit could feature the Protea family in animation.

Pincushion Protea

2006-07-15T11:58:00.000-07:00

Winter flowers in South Africa like to be seen! Bright orange, shouting at the sun, this pincushion protea brightens even a dull day, with its mad, punk hairstyle. The bees were buzzing around it, crawling into its depths to retrieve their nectar. The bush is heavy with blooms. I had to cut a bunch for the house, to relieve the weight on its branches, lest they break beneath the burden. An avant garde flower arrangement resulted - something the London florists would kill for, here just prunings from our garden! Pretty special prunings and a rich source of flower pictures for a photographer.

This is definitely the busy season for flower photos. The flowers will be coming out in droves to party from now through August till mid-spring, when a bout of hot weather sends them into hiding, to weather the hot summer months. posted by Kit

Zanier Gazania Picture

2006-07-07T23:57:00.000-07:00

Gazanias look so much zanier through a proper macro lens...I was really happy to be able to get results even from the snappy snap, as in the last post, but playing with the professional camera yesterday was such a joy. Nice blurry background, sharp point of focus on the flower sepals, capturing all the bright winter colours here, in the contrasty, late afternoon sunshine. I have to confess to going mad, snapping away at all the flowers I could see, rather than doing an orderly structured shoot, covering all angles of each flower before moving onto the next and bracketing efficiently. But then I'm an enthusiastic part-time photographer myself, married to a professional and just stealing off with his camera for the afternoon to get some bright, winter flower pictures! The proteas are starting to come into flower now - the orange pincushion proteas and the grand, heavy, pink, sculptural flowers of the king protea. I'll borrow the camera again soon and post some pictures of those flowers. posted by Kit

Snappy Snaps

2006-06-19T11:36:00.000-07:00

Flower pictures on a snappy snap point and shoot camera? You can do it! Even with my retired, old-technology Fujifilm FinePix 1300, which has been languishing forgotten in the loft, I achieved this picture of a gazania sporting its stripes. The only settings to choose between were one for mountains or flowers! The lapse time between pressing the shutter release and it actually clicking could have made me a cup of tea, but if the clever camera is unavailable, then I can still take respectable photos with it. The main thing I miss with any point and shoot camera is the control over depth of field. Taking flower pictures, that is the one irreplaceable technique, blurring backgrounds into artistic mists. Too much sharp grass and sand in the background detracts from the flower subject and gives a lot of work to do in Photoshop afterwards. It is nice to know though that I have photographic capabilities even when the professional camera is off on a job. posted by Kit

Smiling flowers

2006-06-08T12:27:00.000-07:00

Winter here is green and sunny.

On a walk round the farm with our two daughters, we stopped for every jewel-like yellow oxalis that sprinkle the sand, like stars in the night sky.

I admired the way the flower just popped straight out of the sand, without bothering about a stalk, just a few flat round leaves circling it.

My daughter, ever one for linguistic accuracy, pounced on the word pop. "How do they pop?"

I tried to think of a better image - " Well, they poke their faces out of the sand and smile at the sun"

This has caught their imagination, so now and forever, the yellow oxalis will remain the flower that is happy and smiling because the sun is shining. When it doesn't they stay asleep with petals furled. That's pretty much how I feel too!

Flower Pictures - Purple Heart

2006-05-23T10:50:00.000-07:00

Winter's coming! Here in my part of the southern hemisphere rain is falling, the fields are turning from dead summer brown to emerald green. One of the things that I love about winter here is the sense of promise, of hope, of burgeoning greeness and there is a strong feeling that all plants are sprouting away in preparation for spring. Our spring flowers are absolutely beautiful on our small farm...carpets of daisies for hundreds of yards, and nestled in amongst them, these little (and I mean little - 1/2 an inch across max) samples of spring's flower grace. One of the Swartland's sparkling flower pictures if ever there was.

Visit A FLOWER GALLERY to view our Flower Pictures Galleries!

Flower Limerick No.6 - Crazy Daisy

2006-05-09T11:34:00.000-07:00

A commonal garden daisy
had a reputation for being lazy.
But when she shook her petal
to the beat of heavy metal
they unfairly started calling her crazy!

A Flower Gallery

Flower Limerick 5 - Cinderella Bulbinella

2006-05-08T11:59:00.000-07:00

A succulent leaved bulbinella
one day encountered Cinderella.
"With no thought for my feelings
she nicked my leaves for healing
a cut on the thumb of the Prince, poor fella!"

A Flower Gallery

Flower Limerick #4 - Zanier Gazania

2006-04-12T00:12:00.000-07:00

So this one came to Kit in a dream. What can I say...

An African yellow gazania
did wish for a climate much rainier
"For if I could bloom
without fear of doom
my colours could be even zanier!"

See the beauty!

www.aflowergallery.com

Flower Limerick - Musician Hydrangea

2006-04-07T12:42:00.000-07:00

We be on a roll. Kit she be dreaming 'em...

A budding musician hydrangea
liked to sing Away in a Manger
She really did savour
Every crotchet and quaver
But the tune sounded stranger and stranger!

A Flower Gallery

Flower Limerick #3 - Bourganvillia

2006-04-06T13:41:00.000-07:00

The girl's on a roll. Bourganvillia limerick time! Thanks Kit...

A magenta, young bourganvillia
wished her blossoms were a bit frillier
She grew some more sepals
and lacier petals
and ended up looking much sillier!

http://www.aflowergallery.com

Photosynthesis Photographer

2006-03-30T02:56:00.000-08:00

Kit came up with another another mad limerick, involving photographers and photosynthesis...Que???

A bright young expert in photosynthesis
is also a photographer too (in parenthesis!)
he can't shoot a close-up
so cents he must save up
until a one-to-one macro lens is his!

What synthesis occurs in a persons head that leads to creation? It's mystery to me...See the beauty!

A Flower Gallery

Flower Limerick

2006-03-29T11:39:00.000-08:00

There once was a perky young flower
who just loved every fine April shower
'cos now every petal
is in much finer fettle
everyone can feel a surge of green power!

Another offering by Kit. Have you got any flower limericks to share?
Send us an email at A Flower Gallery Limerick Mail

www.aflowergallery.com

'Arold - The Reluctant Crocus

2006-03-22T12:12:00.000-08:00

'Arold...come on out!
Raise your 'ead all about,
Show a bit of pride
To this springing world so wide.

'Arold...be you no son of mine
If never you don't come out and shine,
Glory be, boy, where's your yella...
Oh do come on out little fella.

'Arold are you truly there
Unfurl your petals if you dare...
Mother, mother speak to the boy
Is it he's just green and coy?

'Arold...be you no son of mine
If never you don't come out and shine,
Glory be, boy, where's your yella...
Oh do come on out little fella.

'Arold sprightly now, what say you?
'Tis no fright for you in the dew,
Glory be child, what matters a hint of frost,
Never a moment to count such a cost.

'Arold...be you no son of mine
If never you don't come out and shine,
Glory be, boy, where's your yella...
Oh do come on out little fella.

'Arold sweet 'n shy, bide your time then,
But, be sure to be out by ten...
Ours is to bring much joy and hope,
Of promise given free to those that barely cope.

'Arold...always a son of mine,
Gentle ever heart of thine,
Glorious forever in saffron yella...
Be it shy or coy little fella!

Patrick Heathcock (March 2006)

Flower Poetry Synergy

2006-01-19T11:13:00.000-08:00

A great, short but sweet addition to the flower poetry page!

"Synergy" (by Kit Heathcock)

flower pictures energy,
chakra colors synergy!

It works for me! Keep up the creative work Kit, look out Stevie Smith.

See the beauty!

www.aflowergallery.com

Flower Poetry

2006-01-18T03:08:00.000-08:00

Just posted a flower poetry page to the site http://www.aflowergallery.com/main/flower-poetry.asp, please submit your own creative masterpieces if they're about flowers and flowery things. I'm really hoping that we can get a really active page going on this one.

Check it out and start writing!

See the beauty!

www.aflowergallery.com

Leaf Lattice

2006-01-08T11:23:00.000-08:00

You want ethereal... this leaf epitomised ethereal. Astonishing! One of the most beautiful bits of decay I've ever seen. Nature has so many faces how is possible to view even a fraction in our lifetime.

Seeing the beauty isn't always that easy in the clutter.

Oh by the way, I've just added the articles I've written so far on photography and a few tips I've picked up along the way about good professional working practise and a bit of lighting stuff too...More to come...

A Flower Gallery

Flower Picture Illusions

2006-01-06T05:22:00.000-08:00

Are they real? Not likely, but they sure are pretty. That kinda sums it up...see the beauty! What makes a stunning flower picture anyway, reality? I don't think so, not always...altered perception, illusion...yes...that sounds about right.

I was wandering through a lighting manufacturers premises and saw this light made of recycled plastic - multitudes of many coloured flowers cut out of plastic bottles and strung together to form a gorgeous light. Made for close-up pics. Creative fairies came down and grabbed me and wouldn't let me go till I'd taken a couple of shots.

Thanks little fair folk!

Keep on seeing the beauty...

www.aflowergallery.com

GooseBerries

2006-01-04T10:58:00.000-08:00

Hi, happy New Year world - 2006 is set fair to being a good one. Hope yours turns out good too!

Had a look at a Cape Gooseberry the other day, pleased with what I got. I have this little streak of light that comes through my window late in the afternoon, great for back lighting a subject...a few fill cards and there you go.

I do love creating! Don't ever let anyone tell you that you need masses of equipment to create beauty...

See the beauty!
www.aflowergallery.com

Wing

2005-11-09T11:23:00.000-08:00

Finally went to see some galleries about exhibiting my flower images and hey what do you know got lots of interest. Two galleries are definitely going to take them - 3 images per gallery - which is cool.

The favorite is "Wing" a black and white canvas printed daisy shot. The one above! I do like the feel of movement in it. Seemingly every one feels it when they see this image, good to see feelings being translated from brain, to eye, to print and back to the brain through the eye again as an art viewer.

Quite good this art biz!

http://www.aflowergallery.com is where they're all at!

Chakra Colors Screensaver

2005-11-08T10:52:00.000-08:00

Finally put up the Chakra Colors Screensaver on Saturday last. For all of you who need a bit of help keeping your work life, or your home life for that matter, in balance try outthis screensaver.

It's a color therapy meditation tool that soothes and energises as is needed. Made up of eight chakras of the body, each color represented by a beautiful flower picture followed by a mantra pertinent to that particular chakra. Simply gorgeous!

Please give it a try, let me know how you get on!

Find the screensaver at: http://www.aflowergallery.com/main/screensavers.asp

Tin Flowers

2005-11-07T09:38:00.000-08:00

Took some shots of these cool painted tin flowers today. Literally tin shaped and cut, shaped to make petals, stamen and stem. The guy who makes them had a dream that he should be doing something with his fantastic ability to work with his hands, so he did!

Awesome. Jobless to job creator in three easy moves!

I think I'll add it to my site www.aflowergallery.com

Chakra Colors Screensaver

2005-11-01T13:15:00.001-08:00

It's finally up. Checkout the chakra colors screensaver @ A Flower Gallery

Use the screensaver every day for a few days, a week say. It's great for meditation. Little moments of peace amidst the chaos of work!

Enjoy!

Chakra Colors Screensaver

2005-11-01T13:15:00.000-08:00

Chakra Colors Screensaver

2005-10-28T08:02:00.000-07:00

Hey world, about to post a gorgeous chakra screensaver on A Flower Gallery this weekend. Been trying to get it finished for a while now but it's finally done. Check it out tomorrow at 6pm GMT.

I think it's a really good meditation tool for anybody glued to their screens 16 hours a day. Take a break once in a while and let the chakra mantras roll over you...

Check it out tomorrow. I'll post the link then.

Flower Pictures - A Mild Obsession #1

2005-10-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

What does one need to do to get the perfect close-up of a wild flower? Set up a tripod, clip on camera, then snap, snap it's in the bag, camera, chip.. whatever? Maybe... but consider a few unexpected impediments first. Finding the perfect clump of subjects (mostly the easy part), stopping suddenly or rather screeching to a halt (sometimes interesting along a busy highway)...parking and gathering up the necessary gear (easy) - then my least favourite part, lugging everything over hill and dale. Tripod, camera bag with several lenses which never seem to get any lighter and then fun, fun, fun...It seems, seemed a short distance across three fences to where the wild, gorgeous yellow number (nothing exotic - a simple daisy but a beauty!), nods in the gentle breeze..but...

Have you ever tried to climb over a fence with tripod in hand and weighty camera bag over shoulder? "Just pass them through the fence and follow", you say! In theory perfect but as is often the case when I'm out ready to shoot I have tripod ready, camera clipped in, slung over right shoulder legs extended, spread ready to go (the fact that I look like a giraffe with ungainly neck protrusions goes unnoticed) and my camera bag is old, slightly smelly and large!. So, how do I climb through the first fence, let alone the second or third in pursuit of the perfect daisy without a lot of folding of legs pushing and shoving, and unclipping of my precious digital genius first? Simple answer - I don't, I try to get through regardless. Result? The air rapidly turns blue around my head and expletives neither original nor inventive start erupting unbidden from my person. And then the final indignity as at least one part of my favourite jumper gets snagged by an ever vigilant barb! My alternative solutions: throw the gear over and hope for the best, find a gate (how many miles to the nearest?), or simply leave it all in the SUV...barring the digital genius and one's favourite 1:1 lens of course!

My final decision? Leave tripod and bag in the SUV, take the necessary, and hope that the ravages of the previous night haven't wrought havoc with traditionally rock steady hands. So then leaping like a gazelle over fences one, two and three, I stride toward the perfect clump of yellow. It's late in the season, so all the white daisies are pretty much done - rich, golden yellow it is.

Selecting the perfect specimen is next. I need to decide what I'm trying to say in the pic. Perfection with clarity - nature's form, sublime in its attention to detail or organic soft colour merging into more colour with shadowy bits - a bit of both perhaps. The magic of digital, the freedom of digital - the ability to try everything because one can! I love it. It's a revelation, a deepening of the creative urge to explore new realms without cost ...or end sometimes.

Sure, one can always argue that it leads to lack of direction, lack of planning but one can also argue in return that it extends one's vision, increases one's output and ability to see the world from different perspectives. I relish the challenge!

Back to the world of yellow! Perfection...mmmm. Unable to settle on which of the perfect choices is THE perfect choice I decide to shoot anyway, putting pen to paper or rather index finger to shutter button in order to get the creative juices flowing. As always seems to happen, I relax into it and my mind opens up to the possibilities: depth of field, front edge of a petal in focus back edge out and vice versa but mostly my mind is consumed by warm yellow. Kneeling on the ground head down intensely focused - the butt in the air angle would not be an attractive sight for any passing observer but I don't need to worry about such considerations as this mild obsession most often leads to splendid isolation.

A bit of advice - bracket everything (1 either side in ½ stops or thirds if you have the choice), shoot at the highest resolution you can achieve with whichever model of digital genius you possess and take at least half a dozen shots per chosen angle. Give yourself the best chance of capturing the one you really wanted - the perfect image, beautiful enough to grace your wall, a wall anywhere. One feels such an idiot when one has to declare it didn't quite happen because of trigger finger meanness! Digital genius is defined by trigger finger generosity or put another way - repetition is the basis of professionalism. Whatever it takes I say. Get the shot! The satisfaction is immense.

More advice - check the first few images carefully on the preview screen just to make sure everything is working as it should. Don't end up taking twenty splendid black and white shots of a gorgeous yellow daisy - do the greyscale thing in Photoshop! Slow down, check the first few brackets. Check that the ISO is set to 100 not to 1600 from last night's fun and that all the exposure compensation overrides are back to normal (or leave the settings at 1600 over by two if weird and whacky is what you're after). Little things but in my twenty years as a photographer these little things become mortifyingly large things if ignored!

So perfection captured, 0 and 1's secured in the land of Flash wizardry it's back across the three fences leaping not quite so enthusiastically now, the gazelle's knees are a little creaky from kneeling on the damp ground - back to the ever patient, ever reliable SUV. Gear stowed, key in the ignition, we're off ...A glow of anticipation washes over me!

But never forget the first things to do on your return? Download and backup!!! Forget at your peril. DOWNLOAD AND BACKUP just in case you didn't get it the first time.