Canon EOS 40D ,Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM
1/400s f/14.0 at 115.0mm iso800

Sorry, I’m afraid I’m rather late posting this Picture of the Week. The main reason is that I’ve been very busy working on a video of the Velveteen Rabbit play. More on that perhaps in another post soon.

This is a photo of chamomile flowers my wife Michele is growing on our patio. It was taken early in the morning, with the flowers being backlit by the relatively low sun.

The photo illustrates a lighting trick to isolate a subject from the background which often works particularly well for flowers. While the flowers are brightly lit, the background is still in the shade and hence very dark. You can barely see for example the outline of a big flower pot. Otherwise, the background would have been rather busy and distracting.

Note also that I’m using a small aperture (f/14) to ensure sufficient depth of field to have all the flowers in focus, even at a relatively short subject distance. Normally, I’d use a larger aperture (e.g. f/5.6 or f/8) to blur the background, but since the background is so dark, we don’t have to use blur to make sure it doesn’t compete for attention.