Well, the Christmas cactus 2nd blooming season is just about done. Four or 5 buds yet to open and it will be over until Christmas 2007. By the way, it takes more than a plain old camera & macro lens to make this image. Without a diffusion disk to control light/shadow contrast and a circular polarizer to control the reflections from this plant you end up with a very contrasty image complete with lots of blown out highlights. Also, I've gotten into the habit of doing a custom measured White Balance every 30 minutes or so (to keep current with changing natural light) using a coffee filter as a poor man's Expo Disk and my color renditions have *never* been better.
It's getting hard to come up with different angles, perspectives, views of this plant. In its 1st bloom cycle in December, I did the 12 Days of Christmas Cactus and struggled toward the end. This cycle is just as hard, but you can't just keep repeating the same old shots. I'll have to ask myself - How would xxx yyy approach this and substitute maybe Freeman Patterson for xxx yyy one day and someone else (Ansel Adams? did he ever do extreme close ups? I've seen portraits, picket fence closeups - but not something like this. I'll have to google that & see how Ansel might have shot this plant. Back tomorrow - excuse the rambling.)