Spring Has Sprung in West Texas
Here in west Texas, the flowers are popping and the yuccas and agaves are sending up their stalks loaded with food for pollinators. While walking the grounds of the Judge Roy Bean Visitor Center in Langtry, I snapped a series of images in nice, soft light due to an overcast sky. I wanted to focus on the flowers and allow the beauty of each to speak for itself. People often ask, “When is the best time to come to the Big Bend area for flowers?” The answer is that virtually any month can have some species of perennials, cacti, yucca, agaves, trees, grasses, or annuals blooming! Many of the smaller cacti often bloom early in the year and many prickly pear species bloom in summer, and then there is the late bloomers like Living Rock Cactus that bloom in late October/early November.
Diffuse light caused by an overcast sky can provide some wonderful, soft lighting allowing you to photograph well beyond the normal “golden hours.” To focus the images on the flowers and avoid distracting backgrounds, I used the Canon 100-400 f/4.5-5.6 L II lens which has a wonderful close focusing distance of 3.2 feet providing .31 maximum magnification (true macro is generally considered to be 1:1 magnification). The quality of this lens is excellent and offers a truly affordable, high quality professional lens with lots of reach! A few more images of the flowers from today.
Diffuse light caused by an overcast sky can provide some wonderful, soft lighting allowing you to photography well beyond the normal “golden hours.” To focus the images on the flowers and avoid distracting backgrounds, I used the Canon 100-400 f/4.5-5.6 L II lens which has a wonderful close focusing distance of 3.2 feet providing .31 maximum magnification (true macro is generally considered to be 1:1 magnification). The quality of this lens is excellent and offers a truly affordable, high quality professional lens with lots of reach! A few more images of the flowers from today.
The first image below shows the deflexed spines of Mackensen’s Prickly Pear. I love the “bird foot” structure of these spines and the pattern they form on the pads. In the bottom image, Candelilla is a well known plant found in the Trans Pecos region of Texas as it was harvested very heavily to produce wax. Many people are not aware it produces beautiful, tiny white and red flowers.
If you would love to learn more about shooting flowers and other macro subjects, consider booking one of pre-scheduled macro photography workshops. Watch for them to be posted soon!
