White Rose

Recently, I took a trip to the Florida Botanical Gardens. The Roses are in bloom and it smelled so good at the garden. This is one of my favorites taken that day.

Florida has been going through a drought and it's really affecting the plants, flowers and even the trees in my yard. Thank Heaven we've had rain the past couple days. It won't help with the drought unless we get rain for many days, but our grass is starting to come back and the trees are looking a lot healthier. I was afraid we were going to loose our Avocado tree. That would've been a shame. I love Avocado.

Anyway, back to the Rose. My friend brought a spray bottle of water and sprayed this flower just before I made this photo. What a difference it makes. It made the flower come alive! Spray bottles also help when photographing butterflies, insects and dragonflies, by the way.

While I admit I'm a lazy photographer, this day I set out to get some great images. I brought along my closeup filters and used them. Most of the time they just sit in my camera bag adding weight to an already heavy bag. For this shot, I added a +1 closeup lens and it was just enough to allow me to fill the frame with this beautiful Rose. I also chose to use an fairly small aperture because closeup lenses tend to make the depth of field really shallow and I wanted the whole rose to be in focus. This was shot with my Canon 40D, 75-300mm lens at 190mm, +1 closeup filter, at F8, 1/250th, and ISO 400. I'm including the technical data because several people have asked me for it. Just keep in mind that different cameras and lenses react differently to the same settings. These settings are just a starting point. You'll have to judge the results for yourself with your own equipment.