Flower Tree of Retiro
I’m currently on the hunt for a ‘Red’ themed photograph for the Fauxtog Challenge (Click here!) against my good friend Matthew and so I set off into the heart of Madrid to find the winning shot.
I have no idea what type of tree this it...
En route, I walked through Retiro Park, a large and especially green area filled with trees, monuments and a boating lake. I was hoping to come across some especially red flowers or plants that I could isolate against a dappled leafy background. Bokeh + Flowers can do disproportionately well in popularity contests like 500px, so I felt that was something I could bank, if I can’t find anything better before the contest deadline on April 30th.
Sadly I found no red flowers...in fact the only red object I found in the whole park was a red van delivering Coca Cola to a refreshments kiosk. It wasn’t very photogenic. What I did find were purple flowers. Lots of them, in fact. All attached to a single tree.
Bokeh is the aesthetic quality derived from the out of focus/blurred areas of an image
I’m not one for sticking with my own plans particularly well, so the search for Red went out of the window and I set upon the tree like a wasp on a picnic. Not having a Macro lens in Spain with me, I’m somewhat hamstrung when it comes to getting close to a subject, but what I do carry around with me at all times is my manual focus Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 prime lens. This is a lens that I wish I knew how to use better than I currently do. Wide open at f/1.2 it’s virtually impossible to focus on anything as the plane of focus in wafer thin. And if you do nail the focus, the image is so soft that you probably can’t tell anyway.
Whilst that sounds very down beat, what it does mean is that any image taken is given an unreal, almost dream-like quality. It’s for this reason that this lens gained its reputation as one of the kings of bokeh, not for its undoubted quality elsewhere in its aperture range, but for the magical looking flaws it has at its most extreme.
This is all well and good, but they weren't really what I was looking for...The hunt for the Red Photo continues...