Some Recent Close-Ups

I’ve not had much time for photography the last couple of months. It’s all due to the usual things: yard work, laundry, cooking (I cook a lot and love making bread), finishing up some woodworking projects, and so on. I think you know the drill.

But I needed to make some photos for my photo club’s monthly competition and of course I left it until the last day. The topic for the competition was limited depth of field. That meant close-up photos. I’ve got lots of them in my Lightroom catalog, but for my club, the images need to be fresh, and that meant getting out with my camera and doing some quick work.

I really didn’t have time for much. I had an appointment in a nearby town so I took my camera with me, along with my ultra-sharp Nikon 105mm Z lens. I left a half hour ahead of my appointment, thinking I could find something in the parking lot to photograph. Well, I was in luck, because right beside the building was a small but colorful garden of flowers, mostly cone flowers and zinneas.

I’m shooting with Nikon’s wonderful Z9, which lets me shoot bursts of up to 20 frames per second. With the camera hand held, I leaned in toward the flowers and began shooting bursts as soon as I thought I had my subject in sharp focus. Some 500 images later, I had what I thought might be good raw material for entering the camera club competition. I’ll share my entries; see what you think.

I’ll share one thing about the process. I was amazed at how many of the images were in sharp focus. I did throw out a good many of the shots, but in the end I kept around 150 for further use.