Vegetation

The vegetable kingdom is a fantastic subject for photography. An endless variety of shapes, colours, sizes and textures delight the eye and the lens. Everyone's favourite shots are flowers of course, and I have allocated them their own gallery, this gallery is for everything else: The trees, grasses and shrubs, the leaves, bark, seeds and fruits, and the plant as a whole. I have also included fungi and lichen here although strictly speaking they belong in their own kingdom.

Vegetables are generally simple to photograph since they are generally a convenient size and they can't run. They do however move in the wind which does make things difficult and they are the only subjects that are universally disrupted in this manner. (There are of course specialised exceptions). Photographic problems when dealing with vegetables are normally matters of getting the light right, getting the framing right and locking focus.

Setting correct focus is not generally a problem with contrast detect auto focus units such as you find in compact digicams but the less intelligent SIR focal sensors found in SLRs can often baulk at the low contrast target offered by tree foliage. If your camera exhibits this problem you can try some work-arounds like manual focus or referring focus from a better focal target at the same distance. Neither of these kludges are very satisfactory I'm afraid but that's the sad reality.

If you like my pictures, make sure you look at the full image and zoom right in. I make sure that my shots are sharp to the pixel. In a sense this is the only truly accurate way to see them. When you condense the image to fit the screen, the pixels are interpolated and although this is generally fine yet something is lost, (especially if your image viewer is using a quick and nasty algorithm). It is only at 1:1 that you see what the camera saw.