Good morning everyone and I hope you are all well. 

I am delighted to say that my latest image is of the most beautiful pink Orchid blooms. The reason I am particularly pleased about this is because I am renowned for not being good with house plants - well any plants really - but particularly bad with house plants.  So to see our Orchid bloom so magnificently this year is most encouraging.

Orchid Flowers - Pink Naturally my thoughts turned to photographing these amazing flowers, not only to create a lovely piece of wall art, but also as proof that I do have some success with house plants.

For this blog post I thought I might also briefly mention my photography techniques to create this image.

We are very fortunate to have a conservatory which is a great room for plenty of diffused light owing to the opaque roof.  I placed the Orchid on a stool in front of the closed conservatory doors and selotaped some white card to the glass of the door. I use a Canon EOS 5D camera and for this shot I used my Canon 100 mm macro lens.  There are three options I utilize for most of my close up photography and did indeed use for this shot, 1) tripod, 2) mirror lock-up and 3) self timer - or remote switch.  All of these options will minimize camera shake and thus create the sharpest image possible.

I tried the shot with several different f numbers as I do so love shallow depth of focus and artistic blur in images, but I decided that this particular image looked best at f9 so that most of the two blooms at the front and the new buds were in focus.

I did do some post capture editing in Photoshop which included cloning out a couple of blemishes on the petals and also perfecting the whiteness of the background. 

If anyone has any questions about this image and/or the way I went about photographing it, please do not hesitate to contact me as I am always happy to help out where I can.