Photo Macros & Filters

I spent some time yesterday out in the back yard with my camera. I played around with manual settings and took some macro shots, I believe they came out pretty well. Do you know how hard it is to sit or lay on the ground with the dogs? I guarantee it took me over an hour just to get 5 or 6 shots! Patience is a virtue they say. Anyway back to the pictures, the first image is of a day lily. I used my macro lens for it, settings were: 60 mm, 1/60s, f4.0, ISO 400. I like how the stamen and some of the petal is in complete focus, and remainder of the image has a nice soft blur. There is a lot of texture in this image. The next two images are of wild cornflowers.

I used a little trick I found on the internet the other day, to bring out the beautiful colors. I hunted down a small spray bottle of water, sprayed it down, waited for it to quit swaying back and forth, and then took the shot about one inch from the flower. Very easy and quite effective I believe. The first one has a little more blur then I like, but I do like how there is a bokeh effect on the top left from the water droplets.

The second came out more in focus, showing us all the awesome things going on in this flower, which is only about the size of a quarter.

On this yellow day lily image, I used the same macro settings as the first one, but in the editing processing I added a retro soft filter. There is still the softness and texture, just more of a muted color.

This was the bud cluster on the top of one of my hostas. It looked alright in color, but I am partial to black & white images, and you know I couldn't go without showing at least one. The same settings were used, other then changing to the monochrome setting. During editing I did add a retro surreal filter which darkened up the edges and brought out some more shadows. Another image I used the retro surreal filter on in color, but I am not sure what type of plant this is:

I am bad at planting things and not keeping the tags, or just throwing out seeds. I never know what to expect in my flowerbeds..lol I hope you enjoyed all of the photos, leave me a comment if you have any tips and tricks!