Garden Macro, Early Morning

I go through these phases where I get REAL interested in taking photos and can't seem to think about anything else. I need to spend 10 minutes figuring out which camera(s) and lens(es) to bring when I leave the house (even if it's just to go to the store), and which bag is the perfect bag to carry them all in. Then other times I'm a little less interested and am fine leaving the house with just my iPhone in my pocket and without my eyes constantly scanning for something that looks interesting the whole time I'm out.

I'm deeply into one of those times of great interest right now and as a result, I've been out for some very early morning walks with my camera almost every day for the last week or so. I think I've started to reach "photo mode overload" though and am feeling like it's harder and harder to find interesting subjects. Then my macro lens caught my eye as I was heading to bed last night...

In the morning, I found myself in the garden as the sun came up, where I was quickly reminded that I haven't made any macro snaps in quite a while and I was rusty!

"How does this tripod lower all the way to the ground again?" "Why isn't F8 getting this whole scene in focus?" "Isn't there something about focus stacking... ?"

It took me a few minutes before I got back into the swing of things. There were certainly a few duds to start out with (not shown), but muscle memory took over and it all came together again.

The daylilies were looking pretty good and the light was sort of screaming to me that this was the one to photograph. Overwhelmed by trying to work out the technical details, I wasn't really paying attention to the fact that this wasn't the perfect specimen. It's beautiful, but looking back, there were probably better examples to immortalize in a photograph.

I used the focus shift feature of my Nikon Z6 and these two photos are the result of me experimenting with the number of images it would take to get the whole flower in focus. I think this first image was 50 or 60 shots and the image below was 100. I used Helicon Focus to put them together and I think they both turned out pretty well. I included both of them here because I go back and forth trying to decide if I like the image better with the leaves behind the flower in focus or out. The top one feels less cluttered to me, but the detail in the leaves in the second one is cool too. This website is about documenting my process, not showing off perfect photos, so you get to decide which you like better!

Next up were the coneflowers. These are a great example of things that look slightly interesting as you walk past them but seem like they're some exotic plants on another planet when you point your macro lens at them.

The one above was lit naturally by the sun and I like the way the leaves sort of frame up the flower. Then there's that hairy stem! Seriously, straight from another planet.

These next two seem like the same photo, but they're not exactly. They are in the sense that I didn't move the tripod. Well, not intentionally anyway. They were not lit naturally. I was experimenting with a tiny LED light and moved it around between shots. I think the position of the light gives the leaves in the photo below more of a glow and seems to light the background a little less. I like them both.