Magnolias ~ Floral Friday

Magnolias in Rain, a photo by C.Duncan's Photography on Flickr.

Magnolias. They ooze old world romance and purity. I love trying to capture those things in the lens. I can spend hours photographing magnolias. And feel renewed afterwards. I was thrilled working on this image for today. Thrilled and ..... giddy. I just love magnolias.

The weather cooperated for once. I love photographing flowers after lazy rain showers, the sky still overcast. The colors are cleaner, no high contrast to work around, and a few rain drops still clinging. Add a little, and I mean little, fill flash to erase deep shadow on the subject and you have the makings of a fine photograph. Had my trusty tripod, plus bumped the ISO up to 320 since there was a slight breeze and I needed my shutter speed to freeze the blossom without loosing the exposure I wanted. It's extremely rewarding to see the image in your mind become the final product on the screen without excessive processing.

Now on to other news. You may have noticed that today's image has been posted through another source other than blogger itself. I want to thank Flickr for providing photographers with the option to post images through their site for a very important reason. I've noticed recently in my blog feed that someone is "lurking" about the blog, waiting for me to post images here, then googling the titles and copying my images on the google search site. NOT cool friends. I don't know what this person is using them for, but it's the sneaky way to ignore the copyright of any of my images. For the most part it's not a huge issue as I have been posting small resolution images, and I'm not naive about what happens in Internet land, but still. So posting through Flickr has eliminated a good portion of this problem as far as I know. And we need to spread the word... photographers work just as hard as anyone, the minute you take their images without permission, you devalue every photographer out there. We already struggle with being asked for free photographs every time we turn around. So let's enjoy the images, and if you're super attached to one, contact me, we'll work something out.

Thanks for the ramble today gang! I appreciate each and every one of you who show up to read the blog and let it inspire you somehow. Thanks!