Foray into Nature

A friend and I recently took our children to Olbrich Botanical Gardens, ostensibly to enjoy the beauty of nature. However, since my baby is too young to appreciate such an outing much and my friend has a snazzy new camera, it was actually just an excuse to take some pictures. I recently discovered (after six months of procrastinating actually reading my camera's owner's manual) that my little point-and-shoot has a macro setting and I wanted to get a better handle on what it could and couldn't do. Here are some of the results:

I've never actually watched a bee in the process of pollinating before. It was interesting.

Many of the flowers were freshly watered, which made the pictures more interesting.

Trying to be abstract...

There's that narrow depth of field we were looking for. Macro at its up close best.

A lot of interesting colors.

This is actually a crop job on what turned out not to be that great of a composition. My dad always tells me stories of taking his photography students on field trips and letting them take only one photo. In today's digital world, it's way too easy not to be careful about your composition and instead to allow quantity to substitute for quality. I didn't take a large number of pictures at the gardens, but I did try to be very careful in my composition. For the most part, I was quite pleased with the result and most of these have not been cropped. This one, however, just needed help.

Hydrangeas in black and white. I guess I'm trying to be Ansel Adams. It's not working.

There are many beautiful leaves in Wisconsin. I don't know why I always used to think of leaves as needing to be green. It would seem I didn't listen to enough Harry Chapin growing up.

Well, it's sort of breaking the rule of thirds, but I like this one anyway.

Yet another misconception from my youth. I always thought petunias weren't that pretty. I'm not sure where I came up with that, but I was obviously wrong.

I like the lines in this photo.

Near the end of our trip, my friend actually let me use her camera for a few minutes. This was extremely generous, considering that she used to avoid even taking the camera out of doors. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I hurried a bit more with the SLR, however, so the results aren't quite as good as they might have been. Here are some of my favorites (sorry, it's another collage):
My favorite is the one in the middle. Ah, fancy cameras. Someday....