Not Our Flowers 2024

Our yard in Colorado had a plethora of flowerbeds, and hence I had plenty of opportunities to head out with my trusty 105mm macro lens and capture flowers and bugs macros.

Readers can relive those wild days either by searching the blog (for example, HERE) or by going directly to the SmugMug folder dedicated to flower galleries (HERE). Of course, many of the posts had a mix of bugs and flowers, so it’s worth visiting the SmugMug folder dedicated to insects & bugs (HERE).

While we have a few annuals in pots, they don’t offer the variety I was used to with a mix of annual, perennial, and wildflowers.

Still, if I’m somewhere like Home Depot or Lowes, I take the opportunity to stroll through the garden center, phone in hand, and snap a few pictures.

By the way, all of the color images have a corresponding monochrome version at the end of the gallery. I might even link them all here.

For example, the above looks like this in monochrome . . .

While preparing these images, I remembered it’s been a while since I’d done any animations. Since I don’t want to forget how to animate stuff, I played around with animating transitions between the color and monochrome versions of a few flowers.

Not all, because it takes a bit of time (and time is precious), but I was happy with the results of the ones I did.

Specifically, I envisioned using irregular brush strokes to create the transition masks. I only did four, and they turned out well (except for the one I’ll show below).

Here’s one I was pleased with . . .

Most photos are just as they were shot, but a few have a touch of sharpening, and a few have a touch of noise reduction. Mind you, they are not print quality (depending on the kind of print you want), but good enough for the blog.

Here are the other two animations. I mentioned I wasn’t all that happy with one, and that’s because I tried a geometric pattern (a spiral), and I wasn’t as pleased with the outcome.

As mentioned, I don’t think the spiral effect looks as interesting as the random brush strokes, but I wanted to try something different, so I tried another approach. . .

I like that transition, but by the time I finished creating it, I was done with doing animations.

Still had flowers to share, though, so . . .

I then saw a few more interesting leaves . . .

Then I saw a bunch of lilies, which I photographed both in deep and shallow depth-of-field settings . . .

It’s one of the rare instances where I don’t mind a shallow depth of field.

There are a few other photos in the gallery and — as mentioned — monochrome versions of each flower. Here’s a small sample of those . . .

Anyway, that’s my small flower sample for today. The gallery can be perused HERE, and the slideshow — 34 images — is below.

Slideshow (randomized)

That’s it. This post has ended . . . except for the stuff below.

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