Everyone takes pictures of flowers. I usually try to take a different kind of flower photo... I try to view the flower from a different angle, or emphasize a part of the flower that usually goes unnoticed. I'm not sure how successful I am, or if other people appreciate this kind of photo. Nonetheless, here is one of my favorites from yesterday.

This photo was taken before I left Saskatoon. I wanted to line the vertical stems of the lilies up with the vertical lines of the fence. Graem commented that it must have taken a long time to line up this shot, but it didn't really. The hardest part was ensuring that the fence would be slightly blurred in the background, but not so much as to be obliterated. I probably should have taken a few shots to make sure of this, but I only took one. I guessed and got lucky.

I really like the color orange.

More fun with the macro lens and teleconverter! I like it when sunlight strikes a flower petal at just the right angle and makes the petal sparkle. This is a rare thing to capture in a photo (at least for me). I think this is the best "sparkling flower petal" macro I have taken so far. I'm hoping for more this summer!

I got a new teleconverter for my birthday! Of course I had to go try it out. My macro lens can take close-up photos with 1:1 magnification... so an ant, for example, will appear actual size in a photo. The teleconverter attaches to the macro lens and provides an additional 1.7X magnification.

I used to be scared to photograph lilies. They're beautiful flowers, but also very complex. Lilies are huge, and their various parts extend outward in so many different planes... It's hard to get the whole flower (or even part of it) in focus. It didn't help that I started out with a little point-and-shoot camera that had trouble focusing at close range and struggled in low light. I'm sure I have close to 1000 lily pictures on my computer from last year, and maybe 20 of them aren't blurry.

The teleconverter seems to allow me to take the kind of lily macros I've envisioned in my brain all along. I'm sure I'll have a lot of fun with it this summer. I can't wait to see how it does with dragonflies and butterfly wings!