the benefits of young eyes

We've never had much luck with indoor house plants.  No matter how much care and attention we lavish on them, with textbook watering and feeding they just all seem to die.  Even when we've tried the opposite - leaving them to get on with it - the result is the same.

At the moment we've got about three or four of the little beauties struggling to survive, and the other day my daughter enthusiastically declared that one of them is flowering.

Imagine my excitement then; only it quickly diminished when I couldn't see any blooms at all.  It was only when my daughter pointed out a minuscule little flower, no longer then 2-3 millimetres in length that I could see it.

However, its diminutive size proved a perfect subject for my Laowa ultra-macro lens.  It allows for really close focusing, and at those short distances affords 2:1 magnification.  So, off I trotted to retrieve my camera and got this lovely little image:

Fujifilm X-H2, Laowa 65mm f2.8 Ultra-Macro
1/100th of a second at f4, ISO 125
tripod, self-timer release (10-second delay)

It was far from an easy image to make though.  The closeness and focal length meant that even the tiniest twiddle of the focus ring or movement of the macro rail I was using would see the camera shake, with each tiny movement magnified to earthquake-like shaking in the viewfinder! I had to resort to a little bit of guesswork, and a lengthy 10 second timer to make sure any shake had ended.

All worth it though I hope you agree?

And to cap it all off, when we went out for a short stroll the other day she spotted this lovely little fern sprouting, with its new growth forming a delightful heart shape as it unfurled.

Fujifilm X-H2, Laowa 65mm f2.8 Ultra-Macro
1/125th of a second at f2.8, ISO 125
handheld

If you'd like a little insight into my macro photography, then watch this week's video, part two of a four-part series on the subject: