Stoked!

Gorgeous colours at Auckland's Botanic Gardens

Or perhaps delighted is a better description.  I took a gentle stroll around Auckland's Botanic Gardens a little earlier and they really are quite lovely presently.  We're heading into summer here in New Zealand and there's some quite wonderful colours on display.  I'm still coming to terms with a new lens and wanted to see how it performed at different apertures.  I'm curious about it's background blur and also how sharp it is when wide open.  I really like to open up the lens to reduce depth of field to emphasise the subject in the image where ever possible, and thankfully this lens seems to behave rather well.  As is happens, the first shot in this post of some mesembryanthemums was taken at f5.6 in an attempt to get more than the odd bloom in focus!

Kniphofia at f2.8

The second shot was taken with the lens wide open at f2.8.  the colours were so rich and vibrant; makes me think of Kodachrome!  At the end of this post there's a couple more images taken from a less pleasing vantage point using f2.8 and f22, just to see how much I can get in focus at the extremes of the lens's aperture range.

Still on the theme of Kniphofia led to shot three.  Here the lens was wide open again and the rather curiously shaped tree used as a backdrop to the blooms.  You can see from this shot a little vignetting and also just how blue the sky was today for us here in Auckland!

Oh well, time to get out in the sunshine again methinks, don't forget to click on the images to look at a larger version of the shot ;-)

Kniphofia again ... still at f2.8

Lens closed down ... f22, just to see how much I could keep in focus.

Lens wide open ... f2.8, just to see how little I could keep in focus :-)