One of the challenges with shooting flowers is how small they can be. This particular photo, above, is of a Pink Pickerelweed. You can't tell, but those flowers are smaller than dimes! The whole sprig was about three inches long.

I went to the Botanic Garden with one goal in mind: zoom in tightly to the tiniest flowers I could find.

I've discovered the most amazing details and features in the littler flowers, instead of the big, normal sized ones. There are numerous problems in shooting tiny things, however: distance, light, and focus.

Light is only an issue because I choose to shoot without flash almost exclusively. It's a problem only if you can't use a tripod, and, in the Botanic Garden in DC, they don't like photographers to use tripods. You can trip people with them, and, there really isn't a lot of space in there.

So, when there is low light, I tend to brace myself on the nearest wall/tree/my knees, and hold as still as possible. Usually this works. With the beautiful curly plant to the left, it worked.. mostly. As you can see, this dinky little plant (which was about half and inch wide) decided it really didn't want its pistil in focus. Ah. Next time, plant! It was, however, obliging in that you can even see the pistil dust perched on top of the curly leaf part (look at the top one).

The second problem is distance. I don't own a macro lens. A macro lens is like putting a magnifying lens in front of your camera, which allows you to get extremely close to things. Normally, you can't focus if you're really close to something- not even manually.

As you can see, distance and focus tend to go hand in hand.

I solved this problem by changing to my 70-255mm zoom lens. Although that sounds like the totally wrong thing to do, almost all these photos were shot with that lens.

Why? Because I stepped back about four feet from the flower and zoomed all the way in. That way, I could get right up the snoot of the white orchid and have it still be in focus!

It was a slight problem, because people would walk in front of me (they couldn't tell I was trying to take a picture of the flower on the OTHER side of the path), but overall, it was the better choice of lenses.

I was actually thinking to myself that an even BIGGER zoom lens would be even more cool to try, if I don't get a macro lens first.

The fourth picture, of rare orchids, have blossoms about 3/4" across. They were hard to get a shot of, since they were in the middle of a spiny mess- you can see what they were surrounded by in the background. Having my zoom lens on enabled me to carefully select the blooms in the middle of a tangly mess of plant-stuff.

Since I tend to take pictures of people, having a macro lens doesn't make much sense. But, if you're like me and you like to take pictures like this, take heart: step back, prop your elbows up on the wall, and zoom in.

You can click on any of these photos to see a larger version (in my Flickr stream). To browse all my photos taken that day, see the viewer below!