//Spring Blooms//

Winter has finally passed and spring has arrived.

For the last few days I feel that spring has finally came. I see young green leaves are starting to sprout out of the branches. I hear birds chirping a way  and finally I bought annual flowers to plant on the planter outside and the back of the house. And I am happy that winter is behind us, well at least for now.

I am very sorry for I have not posted anything related to photography. Things has been very slow lately especially during winter but I will get back to it. I promise.

So yesterday I was driving around doing some errands and passed by a beautiful street that has trees on both side that covered with white and pink little flowers on our neighborhood. As soon as I got home and waited for the sun to go down on the horizon a little like 5.00 pm, I went back and shot some pictures of the spring blooms. 

Let me talk about how I took the picture technically a little.

I shot with my Nikon camera and only with one lens; 50 mm f/1.4 G Nikkor Nikon lens (here). Let me make a confession that I love this lens too much! It is fast and sharp. I owned f/1.8D before and used that a lot but this is by far the best lens I ever own.

The first 11 pictures wwere taken at 2.00 pm on a different location than the rest of the pictures. If I can make a suggestion please avoid shooting before 4.00 pm during bright sunny day. The pictures will look a little washed out. That is because the sun is high up and very harsh so the highlight is very strong on the picture especially on the tip of the petals. You can avoid the harsh light by shooting under a shade like with a lot of trees around it. But try to avoid shooting in an open area during that time.

I tried to higher the aperture a little but there is nothing I can do about it.

The rest of the pictures were taken around 5.00 to 5.30 pm where the sun shine has became softer.

I shot with 100 ISO and with different size of apertures. If I wanted to focus on one particular flower I like to shoot with the smallest aperture like 1.4.  If I wanted to get the whole  picture sharp I set the aperture higher like 4 or 5 something like that. Explore with different setting of aperture to see what the lens can do.

Composition is also important since when you look at a tree covered with so many little flowers, you tent to get confuse of which area you want to be as a subject in the picture. First of all, do not afraid to move around a little. Walk around the tree and look straight up. And don't be afraid to sit on the ground and point your camera straight up to get an interesting composition with a little bit of blue sky on the background. A tip of group of branches sticking out is also a good composition. Also look another color of tree as a background next to it. As you can see some of these pictures below I shot deliberately with the pink flower tree as a background while the white flower tree on the foreground and as my object. Then you can decide the aperture of which how blur you want the background to be. It is a good idea as well to carry a plastic stool for you to step up because I am 5'1" and sometimes I can not get a composition I want because I am not tall enough so to have that little stool would help a lot.

Once you have finished taking pictures than it is up to you to edit to get the perfect picture you like. I used Lightroom 5 and I did not use any presets for below pictures.

So here are the pictures.

Note; Please don't use these pictures without my permission. These pictures were taken by me and only used for blogging purposes. Thank you.

Thank you for reading!