...and Blooms

Well, it was slow coming. but the cold and wet April has finally given way to a warm and dry start to May. Over a period of a few days the countryside has been transformed by the fresh greens of new foliage and carpets of wild flowers.

The fine weather has given many opportunities to get out with my camera, too many in fact to document in this blog. So I will have to be selective and choose only one expedition to talk about. This is a trip to Lea Gardens, famous for its collection of many varieties of rhododendrons planted on a mid Derbyshire hillside. Here, any time between April and June you can enjoy walking along paths with tightly packed bushes of hung with abundant large luxuriant flowers.

If you go in early May,as I did, you will find a mixture of flowers that are past their best, many more in full bloom and some still in bud which will be blooming in June.

I like to get in very close to the blooms with my macro lens. The blooms are so large and have such long pistils and stamens that it is impossible to get everything in focus at close quarters. So I make a virtue out of necessity and use a large aperture to reduce depth of field to a minimum. When it works this can give a dream like effect with stamens apparently emerging from a colouful mist:



Even from a further distance it is difficult to keep everything in focus. In the next shot the fronts of the petals and the stamens are in focus but the centre of the bloom, from which the stamens emerge is just a white cloud:



Finally, one with everything in focus, because it is still in bud, and which reminds me of a raspberry ice cream sundae: