Our Garden 2014

Photo projects are all the rage these days. Some people, like my friend Paul, bravely set out to take a photo every day for a year but I'm still scarred by the memory of doing blog365 some years ago so I wasn't going to fall into that trap. So instead I thought I'd try for something a little less onerous and instead take at least one photo of everything that flowered in our back garden in 2014.

This was a bit of a voyage of discovery as we have a gardener and, to be honest, I never really pay that much attention to the what's going on out there. This forced me to do so. Oh, and I also threw in a few photos of things in the front garden, and a few things which weren't flowers but were interesting.

You can find them either on tallpaul.org or on our own site and there are 77 photos in all.

Today I took what I think will be the last photo of the year, our mahonia, which always flowers very late.

It also highlights another aspect of this exercise, which is that I've used almost every camera and lens I owned through the year. At the start I still had the Nikon D5100 with the 18-200mm lens which did everything more or less OK starting with early daffodils.

April saw the arrival of the Sony NEX-6 with the 16-50mm kit lens and you can see its potential right away. This is the second picture in the album taken with it.

I was still using both cameras for a while but before long I sold the D5100 and bought a 55-210mm zoom lens for the Sony. Here's the first photo in the album taken with that (I love cornflowers).

Then I discovered "legacy" lenses and things got even better. Beth started me off down this road but my first was a Minolta MC.W Rokkor 35mm f/2.8 and this is the first photo in the album taken used that. Yup, another cornflower, what a surprise.

That then began pretty much my "go to" lens for flower photography do the rest of the year as it's pretty damn good close up, with focus peaking it's relatively easy to get sharp focus where you want it and, being a prime and full frame, it's great glass.

However it is fitting that this final photo of the year, of the mahonia, was taken using my newest lens, my Minolta MD Tele Rokkor 135mm f/3.5.

So that means I've managed to use two cameras and five lenses through the year on this project. The only one I missed was my new 19mm Sony lens which isn't really very suitable for this sort of work (even though the photo in my article about it is a close up of berries).