Snowdrops (Galanthus) at Garston Wood

You know that spring is just round the corner when you start to see Snowdrops (Galanthus) appearing. This set of shots of the snowdrops were taken at Garston Wood using my Zuiko Olympus OM 90mm F2 lens on Fuji Sensia 200 slide film. I used this higher ISO rated film so that I could take the pictures with natural light (instead of flash) avoiding blur caused by a light wind. I also mounted my camera on a tripod and used a cable release to stop mirror shake.

My first shot is of a single snow drop, and here I went with a small aperture of F2.8 to have a shallow depth of field (DOF) that focused on the flower, and so blurring the background. (Exposure compensation of +2/3).

(Please note you can click on any image to easily flick through them all)

Next up is a shot of two snowdrops together (you might be notice a theme starting up!) again using shallow DOF, F2.8 aperture.

A row of snowdrops taken at F4.

Then a bunch of snowdrops both in the foreground and background at F11.

You will notice with all of the previous pictures that the focus was on the nearest flower. In the next shot I went for a different approach, and focused on a single snowdrop towards the back of a group of snowdrops. Here I intentionally used a shallow DOF (F2.8) to make all of the snowdrops in the foreground out of focus.

and finally the same shot as above with an incident light meter reading taken from my Gossen Digisix light meter. This reading told me use a shutter speed of 1/500 at F2.8. The result is a cooler image to that above. I haven’t decided which of them I prefer.

If you don’t know an incident light meter reading is where you meter from the subject towards the camera, rather than reflective which is made from camera towards the subject (All camera’s metering systems use the reflective meter reading).