#5 Best of 2010 for Blue Gecko Images

Yellow Gazania © Dave Cracknell 2010

I love it when nature lends you a helping hand to produce a better image. This image of a yellow Gazania (Thanks to Di for pointing out the name of the flower) was taken at Shute Harbour. There is a car park looking over the ferry terminal. I was there with the family just showing some visitors the local area and I spotted tyhe garden bed.

I had the Canon EFs 18-200 IS on the Canon 7D in Aperture Priority mode set to 400 ISO and at f8. There’s always a breeze when taking flower photos, have you noticed? To combat this I set my camera to continuous shooting and AI Servo focus. I activate all the AF Points. As I focus, the camera detects the movement of the flower and starts predicting where the flower will be as the shutter mechanism opens. Gotta love technology. With continuous shooting I can wait for a lull in the wind and blast off several shots and hope for the best. I call this the machine gun method, keep firing until you hit something.

I  lined up the shot. This flower was all by itself with no other flower nearby and no Lady Beetle. I snapped a few rounds off. Then some more. I didn’t see the beetle until I uploaded all the images and saw that the little bugger had flown in, walked around and then flew away. This was the best image from the series just because of where the beetle was. Nature working to make my images better.

Happy Shooting