Spring is here

After a nice winter, what we haven’t seen from some years, here in the North-West of Bulgaria, we finally got spring. Everything was blooming, becoming more and more colorful, the air was full of nice flower smells, so I decided to take my camera and shoot some spring images. I went to my village Valchedram with the task to prep the vineyard for the upcoming season.


Cutting the vineyard was one of the many tasks for those 3 days. How ever I managed to take some shots of the many blossoms and flowers that were blooming in the garden. I didn’t thought I would have been thoroughly watched…

So, being watched almost all the time I managed to sneak up and take some shots of the blooming cherry tree, I was trying several different ways to take pictures – only with UV filter, with CPL filter, with macro filters, etc.





Trying to use everything I’ve learned about composition I even used my 55-200 mm lens in order to get more simple shot like the one above.
Using just 10x macro filter I got this image:

Then I decided to make some HDR shots, however this wasn’t an easy task because my camera doesn’t have AEB, so I’ve had to do it manually. I’ve taken 5 exposures: -4, -3, -2, -1, 0 and +1! Using Lightroom and Photomatix to process them the end result is this:

From several years we have a bush looking plant in our yard, which has extremely nice looking blossoms. However I have never known the actual name of this plant. This is one of the biggest plus sides about photography for me – since I started to learn more about photography and take more images, I started to learn more about different plants. So this bush is called - Cydonia japonica. Chaenomeles japonica, known as Maule's quince, is a species of flowering quince. It is a thorny deciduous shrub that is commonly cultivated. It is shorter than another commonly cultivated species C. speciosa, growing to only about 1 m in height. It is best known for its colorful spring flowers of red, white, pink or multi. It produces apple-shaped fruit that are a golden-yellow color containing red-brown seeds. The fruit is edible, but hard and astringent-tasting, unless bletted. The fruit is occasionally used in jam, jelly and pie making as a substitute for its cousin, the true quince, Cydonia oblonga. C. japonica is also popularly grown in bonsai. (The smart information is taken from Wikipedia à https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaenomeles_japonica ).



Sill being watched:

I continue taking pictures each time that I’ve had a spare time…
In the garden we have those beautiful tulips, all of them red, but still beautiful.

I was wondering how to compose them so that they will have bigger impact. At first I just took ordinary shots with the 55-200mm lens so that there will be a nice bokeh effect. I managed to take some with the kit lens too.
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I tried taking some shots looking down to the tulip’s cup:



And I even took an image with 10x macro filter inside the cup of the tulip.

At the evening I pulled out the external flash. I’ve put an extension cable to it and went out to experiment with the tulips again. I wanted to take an image were the flower will be visible, but the background will be black. After some processing of the image this is the end result:


One tree caught my attention in the yard – the Peach tree.

So being watched again by the curious ducks

I continue my tries to take some nice shots. The end result of shooting the blossoms of the peach tree can be seen bellow:

This is taken with 10x macro filter with different focusing points that were combined later in Photoshop into one image (stacked). I don’t know about you, but I really like the end result – for a novice like me this is big accomplishment and a nice end result.



And here are some images that I’ve taken with all macro filters stacked together (10x,4x,2x,1x):



The wind wasn’t hard, but was enough to shake the blossoms a little bit. Then I tried to take some more simple shots of peach blossoms:












As a reward for my attempts of photographing the blossoms I saw a lonely flower blossom hanging on a spider’s web and swiveling around. It was high enough to use the tripod, so I tried to take some handheld shots.

The pear and apple trees weren’t missed also:





While getting ready to leave the village and head up to the other one I saw those small little3 flowers hiding in the grass.

For a while I didn’t know their name, but blind luck lead me to a person who has photographed them and wrote their name – Veronica Persica. As I said before, Photography can teach you a lot, not just how to take pictures, but if you like flowers this is a nice way to learn more about them.

This image is taken handheld with all the macro filters stacked together.
So after almost 3 days of work and shooting flowers and blossoms I finally left to my other village – Varbovchets. There was lots of work to be done, so shooting time was set to a bare minimum. However I did take some shots that I am willing to share with you.













So there goes 3 days of hard work and photographing in the free time. I am not proud of all the images I took à from almost 900 shots only 380 made it to the final selection and only 100 or so are good enough to be posted online. I am not professional photographer – for me it is just a hobby, that make me feel free and helps me express myself. I am learning little by little for how to take perfect images, so don’t judge me so hard.
About this blog – I am still looking for a way to develop it, so each post is an experiment. For now I will stick to such posts and we will see where it will lead.
If you want to use any of my images from this post or the others (from the same shoot) that I’ve posted to 500px and Dreamstime, you can contact me with the form bellow or just go to my 500px gallery where you can find more images.

If you are for the ones that have read all this, than you deserve a huge à Thank you!!! If you have just looked at the images – I can’t blame you! I hate reading long materials online too,, but still THANK YOU VERY MUCH!