When I was younger, we had a rule: begin the new year like you ended the old one. So here’s Mitchie’s amaryllis again. Same camera, but different light (it’s even more overcast than yesterday, and slightly raining), different angle, and a different lens – I took the old and manual OM Zuiko 1:1,8 50mm lens this time, which works like a short “portrait” tele on the cropped 4/3rds sensor of my cameras, comparable to a 100mm lens on a film (or “full frame”) camera:
Because I filled the frame with using this short tele, this time I couldn’t crop it to a 16:10 format; it’s pretty much unaltered except a light increase in contrast (which I reduce in-camera to get more tonality range). The aperture was f=5,6 – and like the one I took last year with my kit zoom, I overexposed this a full stop because the white wall in the background confuses any in-camera metering. The wall would therefore be turned into a 18% middle grey, and consequently the flower would be too dark.
With this, let me wish you all a happy new year 2013. And thanks for reading.
Happy New Year to you and the family as well. Nice flower. I haven’t had a holiday amaryllis in a long while. I call it the miracle plant because it grows so fast and becomes beautiful almost overnight. They are amazing.
Thanks Libby – and yes, these plants are beautiful. Love their color, tho under artificial light it’s a challenge to get them right (I still need a color checker for profiling my cameras under different lighting conditions). Nothing like window light, especially on overcast days (or reflected, like with windows to the North).