Helen Stephenson's Garden Pictures

These leaves appear elsewhere on my website, so I thought I would display them here as well in nearly their original form.
This is an OpticPro 4830P flatbed scan.

My gardener tells me this is a peony. It is one of my favourite flowers in my garden. It sounds pretentious to have a gardener, but it's the only way to keep the place tidy as I never get around to doing outdoor work. My gardener is a real treasure: when the weather isn't right for gardening, she condescends to come inside to mop my kitchen floor and do the occasional bit of hoovering.
This is an OpticPro 4830P flatbed scan.

A visitor who spent a lot of afternoons in my garden during the summer of 1997.
This is an OpticPro 4830P flatbed scan.

One day, when I returned to my car in a local car park, I found a grasshopper sitting on my car roof. I berated myself for not having a camera handy, but as you can't help bad luck, I got in the car and drove home, thinking that this was one shot that had got away. Imagine my surprise when I parked on my driveway and got out of the car and found the insect still clinging to the roof of my car! I rushed inside and grabbed a camera which just happened to be loaded with 800ASA film, stuck my macro zoom lens on it and captured this shot. I did also try to photograph the front of the insect, but the shot didn't work, and before I could think up any other useful angles to shoot from, the insect decided that it had finally had enough and hopped off into my driveway, never to be seen again.

There are several forsythia bushes in my garden. They give a wonderful spring display, and must be up there with the peony as some of my favourite plants.

I like this close-up shot of a forsythia bloom.

Have you ever seen a conifer in flower? I hadn't noticed one before, but I have two conifer trees in my garden and both were in flower in mid March. The flowers pictured came off the more colourful of the two: the other had pale fawn flowers.

I recently invested in a set of extension tubes, as I wanted to be able to get even closer to my subjects than I had been managing up until now. Here are some of my early results. The fly is on 400ASA film; the bee and the two flowers are on 1600ASA. The 1600ASA film appeared to be under exposed. Next time I use it, I will take the light meter readings with a small pinch of salt!

Here are some more macro pictures from my garden. They were on 200ASA film. I think with faster film that I could have improved the depth of field of the butterfly shot, but I suspect that the insect clinging upside down to a green shoot is probably as good as possible.

I changed tack here, and instead of fast film, I loaded up with slow film and used a tripod. I am reasonably pleased with how this picture of a rosehip turned out.

This picture of a rosebud was taken in my front garden during August, 2001.