A cluster of small white flowers in the park

Spring in Atlanta!

I hope you had a wonderful Easter or a beautiful end of Passover. If you don't celebrate either holiday, I hope you enjoyed a beautiful Sunday! It was warm and sunny here in Atlanta. 

I love spring in Atlanta.

Everything comes alive. The air is quite literally alive with pollen - yellow stuff falling like rain as it coats cars, sidewalks, and front porches. 

Okay -  I don't love the yellow stuff everywhere and it makes me sneeze, but I can't get enough of the blooming flowers. 

I took a quick walk around the neighborhood yesterday with my camera and captured a few of them. 

I borrowed a 45mm lens from my friend Lauren for use with the Lumix. It's the equivalent of about an 85mm portrait lens on my full-frame Nikon. It's an amazing little lens that opens all the way to f1.8.  

With the aperture wide open it makes for some splendid bokeh. It can also make it a little hard to focus. But you can see what an amazing lens it is.

I took this photo of Bauer using that lens. He was sitting on the couch and I managed to catch him before he turned away. He almost always turns away when I try and get a photo of him. 

Jack Bauer

This was taken at ISO 200, 1/80th of a second, f1.8. 

Look at the detail in his fur! There are great catchlights in his eyes too. The background is completely blurred out with a nice bokeh effect. 

At f1.8, the only thing in focus is the eye I focused on and anything within the same plane. Everything else has that nice blurry bokeh. 

Finding Flowers

I took the camera outside and captured some flowers as well. 

I'm still learning how to focus with the Lumix and I'm not great at it yet. As the saying goes, "practice makes perfect," so I keep working on it. 

It seems like autofocus should make everything so easy, but it just doesn't always work that way. If you're struggling to get focus with an autofocus camera, don't get discouraged. It really does take time, patience, and practice. 

I need to watch a few more tutorials on YouTube too. 

Here are a few more spring shots I got yesterday:

Spring flowers

These are the flowers I managed to get in focus. I had quite a few that didn't come out.

The widest aperture I used was f4.0. That was on the white Dogwood petals (top right in the box of photos). 

The tulip was shot at f1.8 as was the purple/pink rose.

The purple flowers were shot at f3.5. I'm hoping to get the hang of the Lumix autofocus system soon! In the meantime, I'll keep on shooting. 

I hope you're enjoying the first stirrings of spring as the sun peeks out his head and the flowers bloom.

Have a wonderful rest of your week, and see you between the raindrops!

xoxo,
Susan.   

www.susanjphotography.com