blandcanyon

The Pearl Street Mall in Boulder is one of my favorite photographic destinations, especially in spring when the tulips are in bloom. I'd like to share several photos I took today, and describe the techniques I used to capture them.

The first one I call Three of a Kind. I used the Pentax FA 77mm Limited lens to capture this shot. My favorite aspect of this lens is the amazing bokeh (background blur) when shooting at wide apertures. In this case I used f/5.6. Not wide-open, but I wanted the depth of field to capture the first flower. A wider aperture would have made the background more buttery, but only part of the front flower would have been in focus.

The second one is This one bugs me due to the tiny bug on the tulip which you can see if you click the link to a larger version of the photo. Also shot with the FA 77mm, I used f/8. I probably could have gotten away with f/5.6 to blur the background even more and still keep the bloom in focus, but I probably had it set to f/8 from a previous shot and didn't really think it through (I do that a lot).

Next up is Look, up in the sky! For this shot I used the new Pentax DA 15mm Limited, a compact ultra wide angle lens. I held the camera just a few inches below the bloom and aimed up. Since I can't look through the viewfinder at this angle, I just point the lens in the proper direction and hope the framing is decent. How do I know the flower is in focus rather than the background? I look at the distance indicator on the lens. While I can't tell exactly what the auto-focus locked onto, I at least know that it's not focused at infinity or at something even 3 feet away.

Finally, here is Flower in the City taken with the Pentax DA 35mm Macro Limited. This lens is capable of some extreme close-ups and also works well as a "normal" lens. This shot is a close-up, but not an extreme macro close-up where you can see the individual "hairs" on an insect's legs.

Thanks for looking!