One of my favorite spots to take pictures is our local botanic garden, which is on the west side of town tucked between a highway and a small creek. As much as I enjoy taking photos near Theta Pond, I mostly just go there because it’s convenient. The botanic garden is stuffed to the brim with flowers, plants, native grasses, decorations, artwork, and offers a huge variety of photo opportunities you can’t really get anywhere else. One evening in late May my wife was on the phone with her parents and our kids were getting a bit restless, as kids tend to do, so we hopped in the car and drove down to the garden where they played in the treehouse and I walked around with my Nikon D750 and 105mm macro lens to look for some photo opportunities.
Believe it or not, this is a cactus. A very close view of a cactus, but a cactus nonetheless. I don’t know what type or variety of cactus you’re looking at here, but my kids would probably describe it as “large and in charge.” It might be something called a Grafted Moon (which, in turn, sounds like something out of Elden Ring) but I’m not sure and, to be honest, it doesn’t matter a whole lot to me. What matters is that this is a pretty cool picture and I’m glad I got the chance to take it even though the particulars of the plant evade me at present. The orange bulb looks a bit like a flame frozen in time admist a sea of otherworldly spikes and spires, and while that’s a far cry from the truth it is fun to use photography to see somewhat normal sights in a slightly new light like this.
As for the particulars of the picture, I went back and forth between f/11 and f/18 (with a few at f/4 just for fun, and as you might imagine those did not look good at all since the depth of field turned the entire image into a blurry mess) and while my f/18 shots turned out nice and sharp, I did like the slightly thinner in-focus area of this shot compared to its smaller-aperture counterparts. The sun is behind me and to my right which gave everything a bright even lighting effect, though I do wonder what this scene would look like if I re-shot it late in the day when the sun is low on the horizon to get a backlit scene. I didn’t want to take too long getting this shot and eventually just went back to wandering around looking for more pictures and, of course, my kids who were happy to get a bit of unsupervised playtime :)
Lisa Moyer says
very pretty and ethereal
Simon says
Thank you Lisa!
Tom J Frye says
When I was a kid, my mom and dad dug up a cactus from the deserts of California. They brought it all the way back to Nebraska and planted in our backyard over on Benton Street. Surprisingly, that tough old plant survived five Nebraska winters! I think in the end, my dad dug it up to plant flowers back behind the house. I wonder if that cactus would still be growing to this day.