Mini Marshmallows

I don’t have a clue what these flowers are, but I do know that they are small. Very small. Each of the little white pods you see here is about 1/4inch from front to back, and this plant was absolutely full of similar clusters like the one in the picture. When I saw them I immediate knew I wanted to take a picture but I wasn’t really sure how to go about making that picture look particularly interesting. I mean, it’s a bunch of white flowers. What am I trying to get you, the viewer, to look at? Is the subject of this image the whole bunch of flowers or just one single flower? Where should I focus: the flowers in front, the flowers on the side, the green stalk holding everything up, or something else? And, perhaps most importantly when shooting close-up, what aperture should I use to get the right depth of field?

So many questions, so little time. Seriously. I didn’t want to spend an hour contemplating all of this! I just wanted to take a picture and get back to doing other things.

I quickly decided that I wanted to get the frontmost flower in focus, and shot with an aperture of f/22 in order to err on the side of caution and also make sure enough of the flowers were sharp and easy to see. And even at f/22 the depth of field was still pretty shallow, enough that the front of the flower in the middle is tack sharp but the back is not despite the entire flower being smaller than my little fingernail. I am pretty happy with how this turned out and I quite like that you can see right down the middle of the flower in front.

Editing this image in Lightroom proved surprisingly easy, thanks to the new Select Subject feature that debuted about six months ago. Originally the sky was kind of a dull gray but I wanted to add a bit of vibrance to the image, so I clicked the “Select Sky” option and…well, it really was that simple. It immediately gave me an editing mask for just the sky, and a few quick adjustments of the White Balance slider gave me the final result you see here. Note that I’m not shilling for Lightroom here, but as someone who has been using that program for about six years I continue to be impressed with how well it fits my particular workflow.