Tips:
- choose a good subject
- light it well (get the plant out from under the mixed Kelvin shop lights!)
- put the camera on a tripod or some other stable contraption
What I did:
- picked a flower that is obviously damaged
- leave it under the shop lights and direct a flash gun directly onto it with my left hand
- hand-hold a macro lens (equivalent to 210mm in 35mm speak) with extension tube in my right hand and stand with my body weight on one leg (Not Stable or Steady)
Result? This photo won't stand up to printing. It won't even look ok on a big monitor. The composition is blah. The flower is a bit ugly. There's a distracting stripe of light in the background. And this image is straight out of the camera and probably the color of the flower could use some adjusting. Oh, and the in-camera jpg is set to a lower-than-usual saturation because I was shooting reds the other day.
But... it'll do for illustrating a blog post, the point of which is to say that I have a soft spot for Petrocosmea formosa. I wish I could get it to set seed but so far no luck. I also wish I could grow it well, but no luck there either. Still, if I could only grow one Petrocosmea, I think it would be this one. It's got an odd growth habit, sometimes sending out leaves on long petioles, a bit floppy and not as neat as many of the plants in this genus.... (And no, I didn't think to take a photo of the leaves!)
