Friday, January 22, 2010

Back into photos!

Gosh it feels so great taking photos every week! Even with the sun and heat of summer as my enermies, the photo sessions still fill me with a great sense of satisfaction and joy - somehow the heat and sun aren't as bad as they seem during my photo sessions even though we usually go out during the middle of the day.

I haven't had much quality sleeps over the last few days (or the entire week for that matter), the heat was so unbearable that I had 2 almost sleepless nights - followed by sleeping from the moment I get home the day after due to exhaustion...

Yesterday was a day like that. I slept for max. of 2 hours the night before as I tossed and turned in my bed trying to find a cooler spot, so the moment I got home around 6pm I went straight to bed and fell asleep. A phone call woke me at 11pm, it was my dad on the other line, his news brings my sleepy mind straight back to full alert: his friend's Queen of the Night flower is blooming!

Queen of the Night (Epiphyllum), is a flower with many names. It is known officially as Tan Hua in Chinese, but also known as Yue Xia Mei Ren (Lady Beneath the Moon) or Wang Qing (Lost Emotions - it is said that the flower possesses such beauty that one cannot help but forgetting everything to admire the flower. Another story is that if one wishes to forget a painful memory, you can achieve this by eating the flower of this plant). In China, the blooming of the Queen of the Night is seen as both a rare and short lived occasion. The flower opens only at night and for a short period of 2-3 hours before it wilts away. The flowering process is easily missed if the plant isn't monitored every day during the budding period.

I found out that the Queen of the Night is of the cacti family, that's why its flowers are very similar to the torch cactus I photographed late last year.

The first photo is shot with my Canon IXUS 70 compact camera, depth of field is quite amazing for a compact camera.


I'm not sure why but the depth of field from my Canon 500D with the 18-200mm lens (photos below) does not achieve great depth of field, only one small part of the shot can be focused.




Finally, the shot I have been trying to achieve: a dragonfly headshot from the front. This is only a first go so the shot is still not perfect...I hope dragonflies continue to roam the garden so I can continue to improve on these shots.

1 comment:

  1. Yay, you got a shot of the Queen in the Night, well done! I'm confused too why our compacts have better depth of field than the SLR's?? I guess We'll figure it out someday :)

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