August 2003 

BUTTERFLY WEED - F011

(Asclepias tuberosa)

Oakland County, Michigan, USA - July

Macro 3.5/180mm  – ISO 100

Digital Capture 

[1]

A cold night in July and August can create wonderful effects with dew early in the morning.

To get this kind of pictures you have to be on site well before sunrise. During this "magic hour" no breeze shakes the flowers and the wonderful droplets are not blown out by the sun.

The butterfly weed is typical in fields, roadsides and generally in open soil more or less throughout USA. Its highly saturated orange makes it very easy to find in nature.

Not so easy was it for me that morning to capture a small area of those clustered flowers in order to obtain a picture without confusing elements.

So I "inspected" a lot of flowers in order to find the less messy ones and eventually I encountered this fortuitous arrangement. In this case it was much easier to isolate the main subject from the background by putting the camera's optical plane parallel to the five flowers and setting the depth of field accordingly.

Additional possibilities to isolate the main subject are given by the the combination of a 180mm macro lens with the EOS10D (i.e. with a 1.6 "multiplier" factor). In this case focusing at the minimal distance opens the world beyond the 1:1 magnifying factor and confusing details can be easily cropped out of the frame focusing the attention to only one element. A good example for that is given in the picture below.

Go to the Dragonfly with dew pictures to see another two examples of what I call "diamonds of the morning".