This is the shot I presented as the first of my unfinished project 365.  I am actually very happy with this one.  Macro is a relatively new subject to me…although I’ve dabbled a bit in the past…this is the first time I’ve actually owned a specific macro lens, the Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8, and I really like it. It’s well constructed but not too heavy, it’s reasonably compact, and has a 52mm filter thread.  I have tried it for a few portrait type shots, and I think it has potential there too, being an ideal portraiture focal length; more experimentation to come on that.

The flower in this shot is an Egyptian Starflower, plucked from my garden and placed amongst a couple of grass seed stalks. Lighting is natural daylight, and the setting on top of a piece of black cloth on a small coffee table on our patio. I used a white reflector at the back to reflect some light back into the shot, and I liked what I achieved here. The other group of red flowers in the background balance the composition nicely, and I find the eye sits nicely in the shot, without seeking a route out of the frame. It printed nicely too. The little flower is, at most, about 10mm across, so it’s not very big.  Every now and again, a little flurry of wind, a zephyr perhaps, would cause the starflower to move, much to my annoyance, but I did get several good shots from that session.

I fitted the word “zephyr” into that sentence back there so that I could tell a story. Picture a young lad, about eight years of age, standing with his Dad admiring a car, a Ford Zephyr.  “What is a zephyr Dad”, asked the young lad.  “Oh, its a kind of Lion Son, like a Puma”, said the Dad after a brief pause.  The Lad accepted that, and the conversation moved on. Now picture a scene forty odd years later, when that same young Lad, no longer so young, is sitting with his kids, both doing their school homework, when one pipes up and says “Dad, what’s a zephyr”?  “Ah, replied this next generation Dad…its a kind of Lion”, like a Puma. And it’s also, in fact, a model of Car from Ford, in the late sixties and seventies”. A few moments passed, when the Daughter piped up “That doesn’t seem to fit with this homework Dad, are you sure?” The Dad picked up his phone and Googled…finding that a zephyr is actually a light breeze; a small gust of wind.  He googled further, desperately searching for a feline zephyr, a cat zephyr perhaps, but no such thing exists. So thanks Dad, for that inaccurate piece of information I carried around for years.  I know you didn’t have Google.  And perhaps it was my Grandfathers fault? Thinking about it now, it was a great name for a car.  The Zephyr was the biggest car that Ford (UK) produced at the time, and I imagine they wanted to portray that it wafted along with the effortless ease of a gust of wind!  There was super duper top of the range Zephyr model called a Zodiac, but you can google that yourself.