Fir Tree

Thanks to all of you who wished Baxter well in his new home earlier today. He is settling in quite well though he is still a little wary of me if I go straight up to him. He prefers to back into you for initial petting. He thought it was great out on the dunes this morning and was very much in rabbit-hunting mode. In an endeavour to save you from an overdose of Baxter pics I wandered round the garden this afternoon in search of inspiration.

One of our fir trees has branches that bow over, a bit like a weeping willow tree and my original idea was the isolate one of the curvy branches against the sky using a wide angle lens.

However, this proved too difficult to do and I quickly reverted to macro mode using my 100mm macro lens and decided to add some interest by adding some water droplets. I was using a very fine spray and initially I did not think this would produce the sort of photogenic droplets I wanted. I plugged away spraying ever more strongly and all of a sudden these water droplets began to form at the end of the pine needles. Obviously the pine needles must channel the water through gravitional pull to their tips.

As the wind was quite strong and the light quite low I could not get an aperture which would give adequate depth of field and given the movement of the branches I did not think a focus stack would work. So what you have here is a heavily cropped fir branch where most of the needles are just about in focus. There is obviously some mileage in trying this either inside with cut off fir twig or outside on a windless day.