Plum Tree Blossom... 2
Spring is changing rapidly
After only a few days of beauty the blossom which covered the plum tree branches in pure snowdrifts of blooms now lie scattered as confetti in the long grass of the orchard. April showers and new leaves bursting out signal the change of the season as "spring has sprung."
At 7 o'clock this evening, just before I started to make dinner, I noticed the setting sun was almost behind the forested hillside horizon a kilometre or so from the house. I thought the plum tree would again make an interesting subject for my camera... and quickly attached a 300mm lens to a Nikon D200 - with a Gitzo monopod screwed into the tripod collar of the tele lens rather than into the camera's tripod socket. This configuration gives me the ability to take vertical shots, by loosening the lens' collar and twisting camera and lens through 90 degrees, rather than using a cumbersome 3-way pan-and-tilt, or ball-head, mounted on the monopod. I like using the monopod as a basic telescopic stick without any additional contraptions on it... if I need panning, tilting and every-other-which-way-but-loose then I'll get a tripod out which has all those facilities as well as two extra legs.
Only having a few minutes at most, before the sun set, to create an image worth uploading here... I took a series with and without using the camera's pop-up flash as fill-in against the contrejour effect of shooting into the sun. Having to work quickly I dialled-in various "+" exposure compensation settings from +0.5 to +2.0 stops and fired away without studying the effect on the camera's playback screen. I had in mind that +1.0 of a stop would be about right... and that what I was really after was more of a Japanese impression which could be helped along with PhotoShop.
The strip of three thumbnails shows an interesting effect when using telephoto lenses (in this case a 300mm which on a Nikon DSLR with a x1.5 crop factor equates to a 450mm lens)... the left-hand pic shows the size of the setting sun with the lens focused at infinity... the middle pic shows the apparently 'bigger' sun when the lens if focused on the tree branches... and the right-hand pic shows the sun 'growing' more so when the lens is focused in front of the branches.
Looking at the results I can honestly say that I didn't get very near to what I was after... hopefully I'll have more opportunities to try this technique again soon (and get better at it) because the apple blossom is starting to appear... watch this space, as they say!
10:58:20 PM 
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