Sunday is often the day people wash their cars, but today was my day to cover it with dirt. It was weed-whacking day which, for the more civilised people in the UK, means mowing the lawn. My yard isn't conducive to the use of a lawn mower and even the bit that looks nice and level has now destroyed three lawn mowers. So it's a powerful weed-whacker instead. It's fun to use, it has the power to bring down small trees, but it also sprays debris all over the place, including on my car. Hopefully it'll rain again soon and wash all that stuff off!While out in the yard I noticed the `Ohi`a trees were flowering. I hope I don't offend anyone by saying this, but I find the `Ohi`a tree quite ugly even if it is endemic to Hawai`i, but when they flower they look quite attractive. The problem was, none of the flowers were below eight-feet, at least a couple of feet above head-level.
Never mind, I thought, let's try something out. So I screwed the camera to the tripod and then held the tripod above my head and tried to take some close-up shots of the flowers. This was quite tricky: I had to set up the camera beforehand and then use the timer mode to give me 10-seconds to hoist the camera up into the trees and hope the pictures would look OK. It took several attempts, but ended up with a couple of nice pictures. Camera shake is a really big issue when holding the thing so far above your head!
Afterwards I used the tripod to take a picture just a foot or so off the ground. I have no idea what this flower is, it belongs to a large bushy type thing in the front yard. That's one of my problems - I have many plants growing in the yard but can I name any of them? Well, maybe a couple...
Next week: how to use your tripod to take pictures around corners.
6 comments:
I believe that's a gardenia.
Thanks, Brad! I'm sure someone has told me that in the past, and I'm sure I'll forget and be asking again in a few month's time ;)
Odd name, wonder what the origin is. Sounds like Latin for yard work...
I'd say you and your tripod were successful!
I thought the 'Ohi'a (pardon my spelling; I know those are apostrophes) looked like the bottle brush flower/tree, and found out it is a relative: They are all members of the myrtle family.
It's a gardenia, and should smell quite lovely.
As it happens, I am horribly offended by your lack of appreciation of the noble 'ohia, but I expect I'll get over it.
Keera - I'll have to look that up. Thanks!
John - good to hear from you again and I'm sorry for causing such great offense ;) I hope you're recovering from your injury by the way. I miss seeing your hiking photos and hope we'll all be able to see some more in the very near future!
Tripods can often be useful for things like this. I was vising one of the west side petroglyph sites and was not getting the shots I wanted. Mounting the camera to the tripod and holding the camera high over the artwork let me get photos straight down without walking on the rocks.
I setup to take 5 frames with 5 second delay between, resulting in a lot of bad shots and two or three good ones. The G9 can be set to take several frames in sequence with a programmable delay.
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