Large-flowered Bellwort, and some plant photography thoughts

 

As always, click the image to enlarge

A Large-flowered Bellwort (Uvularia grandiflora), a personal favorite spring wildflower. This plant was long placed in the lily family (Liliaceae), but taxonomic splits in that family have led to the bellworts being placed in the Colchicaceae family, and apparently now it's been shifted to the Convallariaceae family. Wherever we humans decide to place it in our organizational schemes, this is a superb-looking plant.

Shauna and I made an epic trip to southern Ohio last Saturday and saw many species of spring wildflowers. We were mostly in Adams and Scioto counties, where the spring flora comes on significantly earlier than here in central Ohio. We were pleased to encounter many flowering specimens of this bellwort species at the Chalet Nivale Preserve. I find bellworts photographically irresistible and the specimen in the photo was in a particularly good spot for clean imagery, other than being hard to reach.

Shauna snapped this shot of your narrator making the image of the bellwort in the previous photo. It is not far from the base of the limestone cliff, right at my eye level.

While macro lenses are often standard fare for wildflower photography, I went off the reservation for this one. One, that slope was slippery, and scrabbling into position to shoot the bellwort with my 100mm macro lens would have awkward and probably hard on the other plants emerging around the bellwort. So, I bolted the Canon 400 DO II lens to my R5 and attached the rig to my big tripod (A Gitzo, with Wimberly head). While I normally use that tripod and the big lenses for birds and other wildlife, I discovered a long time ago that the big lenses can be superb for plant photography.

With no disturbance to the habitat, using this rig allowed me to get my lens at eye level to the subject. Even though the bellwort was too far for macro photography, I could frame fill it with this lens. As the subject is vertically oriented, I rotated the lens within its collar for a vertical perspective. The position that I liked best put me just inside the minimum focusing distance of the lens, which is about 11 feet. So, I slipped on a 25mm extension tube, and that problem was solved. FYI, in case you aren't familiar with them, extension tubes are just short hollow tubes (no glass) that fit between the camera body and lens. They create a bit more distance between lens and camera which reduces the minimum focus distance. I would highly recommend getting tubes with electronic connectors, so that they don't kill your ability to autofocus.

Once positioning the camera was accomplished, it was time to shoot. Another enormous asset of large prime telephoto lenses is the gorgeous creamy bokeh (background) that they create. Even though that cliff wall wasn't very far behind the subject, the 400 DO obliterated it into a grayish-brown blur. I helped that by shooting at f/5.6. In general, wider apertures are better, in my opinion, for floral subjects. Even though the 400 opens to f/4, I decided I liked the slightly increased depth of field by stopping down one stop. The shutter speed was 1/60, plenty fast enough. But shutter speed is largely irrelevant in plant photography. I have shot multiple second exposures and achieved tack sharp results of wildflowers. As there was a bit of wind this day, I chose to use a slightly higher ISO than normal and set that to 400 so that my shutter speeds could be a little faster than they would be at my preferred ISO of 100 or 200.

Another way to help freeze movement would be the use of a flash. For me, that's almost unheard of with plants. I think flash generally imparts a harshness to the subject and its environs that looks bad. I can assure you, that had I used flash on the bellwort pictured above, it would not look like that, and the look would be worse. I know there are ways to mute lighting from flashes, and I have all manner of diffusers. And corrections can be made later through editing. Nonetheless, flash-free images just look much better to my eye.

To further assist in removing possible movement caused by me, I had the camera's shutter on two-second delay. I also have the R5 set so that a touch of the rear viewing screen will instantly focus the camera on the spot that you touched and automatically start the two second delay. So, I just tap the bellwort's flower in my back screen, move away from the rig, and the camera focuses on the flower, the camera starts beeping and two seconds later it takes the photo. There's no way that I can accidentally bump or otherwise jostle the rig.