Just Sitting in the Garden

 Yesterday afternoon the weather was nice enough to sit in the garden.  While not a national treasure, it is our garden and there are some interesting and rather beautiful pictures to be taken.  I was interested in the use of depth of field and bokeh to experiment with a couple of shots.

First was this picture of a bramble flower caught up in bindweed.  

  

I have found that if I use f/6.5 from about ten feet away and focus on the flower, the background blurs out and I need only a minimum of post-processing.  Here, I only needed to crop.  

Next, a picture of a fruiting shrub - just one branch of a larger bush.  

This was taken a bit closer, from about five feet.  Again, f/6.5 and a minimum of post-processing.  However, although the detail of he cobweb is clear, I feel the image is a bit stark and perhaps the background could have been more interesting.  Perhaps a narrower aperture setting next time!

Finally a picture from the gooseberry bush. I put this on 365project.org as a daily upload.  Again, I was about five to seven feet away and needed only minimal post-processing.

This was a dark corner of the flower bed and is a study of light and dark.  Taken at f/6.3, the shallow depth of field intending to bring out th caterpillars on the leaf - see if you can spot them!

There was quite a bit of activity in the garden and not, it seems, just wildlife!