Blooming crabapple

Spring took me by surprise this year. It was still cold and brown when we left for San Francisco. Spring was there when we came back. With general life busyness, I was worried that I will not get a chance to get out and photograph it on time, like I did not get a chance to take any photographs of this year’s few days of snow. So I found the time this weekend to record the blooming trees, before they are gone.

I am more and more embracing ISO 800 on my Nikon D300. I was hesitant for a while, but I see it gracefully handles it, and I do not see the digital noise. I went out on this photo walk close to sunset, and especially for the shots among the leaves, I needed this extra light to keep the shutter speed fast. And I had to work with the breeze, typical in the evening in Iowa, making photographing flowers impossible at times. Faster shutter speed, open aperture of f/4.5, it all helped create this image, my favorite of the day. If it wasn’t for the green leaves surrounding the hero bunch of flowers, they wouldn’t stand out from the background created with the rest of the blooming tree…