I recently got my camera back from the repair center where they had replaced the shutter, upgraded the firmware and given the whole thing a service. This did, unfortunately, mean that a lot of my settings had been played with or reset. Since I couldn’t remember half of the settings I’d used I decided to just take the camera out for a day and fiddle.

The day in question was a friends birthday meal, followed by a quick drink in the pub, a film and, finally, a drink in the local. I finally realised why the camera completely blows some images when the flash is on (if the flash isn’t properly seated the TTL light doesn’t go on and the flash fires at full strength) which was useful.

It was unfortunate that the weather wasn’t too great and the walk to and from the restaurant was a little rushed as Long Melford has some wonderful photographic potential. The group of people I was with were also no overly keen on being photographed which made getting relaxed, natural photographs hard. That said, I did manage to get a good shot of almost everyone who attended plus a random macro of the table decoration.

All images in this post can be found at images from… under the portraits and random images galleries. The images from Lee’s birthday can be found under the protected section in the gallery: Lee’s Birthday.

Good photography can be found just about anywhere if you know what to look for. Quite a number of my best images have come from my own back garden (in the days when I had one), other peoples gardens and public gardens. Places like Kew Gardens and RHS Wisley are a veritable treasure trove of colours, textures and shapes.

Spring is an excellent time to get some fantastic shots of the garden (or local park if, like me, you don’t have your own garden). Grab your camera, a lens with a nice big aperture (long lenses and macro lenses help no end here) and let rip for a couple of hours. That’s precisely what I did when I took my daisy picture, I’d just got my shiny new 70-200mm f2.8 IS L lens and wanted to try it out. I went straight out into the garden to take a couple of hundred shots. Back then I was still very much learning but the afternoons shooting taught me a lot about photographing flowers. 3 years later I’m still taking random shots of giant daisy’s, albeit yellow this time.

One of the biggest problems I find with nature is that it’s messy. If you look at the daisy picture you’ll notice petals out of place, dead flowers and other gumph that, for me, detracts from the image. You’ll often see me tidying up round flowers clearing away damaged petals, dead flowers and the like just to neaten the shot up. this isn’t always possible, as was the case with the roses at Kew. Here I gave up on the flowers all together and concentrated on the branches instead. The resulting image was far better than any of the flower shots I could have got. Also choosing which flower to shoot can make a massive difference. The pink flower shot is one of about 20 from all different angles.

A good macro lens can open up a whole new world of photography allowing for real closeups of insects and tight depth of field. Where there are flowers there are invariably bees. I’m still chasing the perfect ‘in flight’ image, but in the mean time my image of a bee on a lavender bush will have to do. By throwing the background out completely I’ve managed to get a lovely purple colour and hide the fact that this was actually a lavender bush in a pot on a balcony. Similarly with the wheat photo the macro allows a good closeup of a stalk of wheat while throwing the background out to a lovely golden colour.

All images in this post can be found at images from… under the in the garden gallery.