Snowdrops 2019

I took my annual trip to photograph Snowdrops at Garston Wood on the 16th February – which is my kick off for shooting outdoor macro photos.  My normal gate was not open, so I had to walk over a mile to find the patch.  As I am suffering from a bad back, this meant I had to leave stuff behind – including my heavy tripod, and backgrounds.

However, I did have with me a new “phone” gorilla tripod (shown below).  Which was helpful in balancing the camera and lens.  It is not as stable as my main one though – and additionally the light was very dull – so I had to shoot the images at a much higher ISO than normal to get a reasonably sharp image ( ISO 1600 ).  With my normal setup I would of been able to shoot at a much lower ISO and get better sharpness in some of the shots.

As well as take some “normal” macro photos of the flowers, I also experimented with some shooting through some close snowdrops.  I also took some out of focus images to use, later with Topaz Texture Effects to merge with these ones.

Here are the before shots (straight from camera) – and the processed images.

The next image I just used Photoshop to blend this out of focus image with the in focus one, to give a bit of a glow to the image.

And finally onto some photos, that are straight from camera. (Only some normal post processing on them).  With one exception – which I turned into a B&W.

All images taken on a Canon 5D Mark IV with Canon 100mm USM F2.8 Macro Lens