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!

When the cherry trees bloom in Washington DC, everyone and their momma runs out and takes pictures of them.

Well, mostly.

Some of us are crazy, serious photographers (professional and amateurs) and we'll get up at four in the morning to watch the sunrise, or we'll stand in 7* weather to get that clear shot of the... whatever... and we'll stand in the rain taking 500 pictures, just to get one like this:

That's the Jefferson Memorial, viewed from across the Tidal Basin. I didn't manipulate this photo in anyway- no sky blueing, fake cloud inserting, sunlight adding or anything of the sort.

Can't help it. I'm a total purist. If I can't take a good picture of it, I'm not going to "fix it in post." I'll try again :)

The purpose of the shoot was to take pictures of the sunrise, and then the resulting day (this photo was taken at about two in the afternoon) to be used as potential postcards or "this is the lovely Washington DC!" prints. This was my favorite, and will indeed be made into prints, matted, and sold off to the (hopefully adoring) public!

The Smithsonian Institute has odd requests sometimes. At the moment, they are requesting submissions of bug closeups... um... I don't have any bug closeups.

I went to the Botanic Garden hoping to spot a spider, or a big fly, or, well, even an aphid- but alas, there aren't any bugs zooming around in the Botanic Garden! How weird is that?

Well, I did get some pretty awesome photos of flowers, as you can see. This particular pretty one is a lily. There was an entire room of orchids as well, and it was really, really dark in there. I didn't have a diffuser on my fill flash at the moment, so, the ones I took of the orchids didn't come out to my liking.

Outside the Botanic Garden was this massive field of tulips! Ah, I love April and May. There were all sorts of them, spread out like little tufts of spun sugar everywhere- orange, pink, yellow- and those thick green leaves are great contrast!

I've got an affinity for flowers, it's true. I absolutely love flowers, and at every wedding, event dinner, or hotel I'm sitting in is likely to have at least four or five shots of something-growing-in-a-pot.

Can't help it! Nature is gorgeous!

I also tend to never manipulate these photos. WIth most photos, I tend to crop things, or perhaps change the exposure to make things more visible, but I'm not one of those people that is a PhotoShop junkie that mangles everything in sight. A couple friends of mine are trying to convince me to "shoot in the RAW" (an unprocessed photo) so that I can open it up and adjust things (make an overcast sky blue? Make a black and white photo with someone's eyes in color?) but I'm one of those old timey types that just can't wrap my brain around messing with nature.

I mean, the two photos in this post have absolutely no adjusting at all, and I'm inclined to say that Nature is pretty all by itself! :)

Step One: Insert cats.

Step Two: Arrange flowers.

Step Three: Adjust lights.

Step Four: Snap away merrily.

Well, that was the plan, anyway.

There is nothing quite like stuffing two cats in a small lightbox, poking them with long stemmed red roses, and pointing bright lights at them in an attempt to make a greeting card.

They climb on each other, climb out of the box, bite the roses, and pull the background down.

These two black and white cats, Hal and Mo, were actually quite cooperative. The lightbox was actually a small 2’x2’ cube, and I propped it on a table on the far side of the room because I was going to use my zoom lens on them.

The "zoom in!!" idea was necessary due to the odd lightbox- it had this strange small opening. If I wasn't stepping back all the way, it wouldn't let me see all the way in without showing the doorway. Not such a great design for a lightbox, that's for sure!

Since cats are normally inquisitive, it wasn’t hard to get them to smell the roses and sniff them appreciatively. At one point, Hal took a great big bite of the rose that was being shoved near his nose. I cracked up.

Cats always look like they're smiling when they fold their ears back half-way, close their eyes, and carefully poke their little pink noses into things.

Hal died two months after this shoot, and this photo was used in his memory. He was a beautiful tuxedo cat, with a deep Siamese sounding meow.

The cats put up with this odd treatment for about twenty minutes. I ended up taking about a hundred shots of them in that time, and I wasn't doing that fancy multishot thing, either. Point click, point click- voila! Kitties with roses!

Along the way, Mo decided to take a nap. This, actually, is one of my favorite pictures I have ever taken of a cat- and I’ve taken lots of pictures of cats!

None of the photos actually ended up being used as a greeting card, but apparently they did end up being quite a few people’s wallpaper.