More Long Island Camellias

More Long Island Camellias

Again here are a few Camellia shots from Planting Fields. After a grinding Monday I was so happy to have had a few hours to shoot pictures on Sunday. It sure was relaxing to look at the flowers and snap a few pictures. I can see that work is going to be hectic so this is the first Tuesday that I haven’t done Wordless Wednesday in quite awhile. WW is only fun when you can return the visits to the other people’s blogs. In general I will be probably be a little less wordy here than I was in the winter. I do really want to thank the people that visited and commented over the winter. You helped make my idle time a little more pleasurable.

Yesterday I said what lenses I took with me and I thought it would be fun to post one picture from each lens. This first one is the 60mm / 2.8 Micro-Nikkor. I can’t say enough good things about this lens. It is on my camera 75% of the time. I use it as a walking around lens, too. It was $349 (US) after the rebate when I bought with the D70s. It really has done a yeoman’s service under tough conditions. I would like to try out the Nikon 105mm Macro sometime but this will always be my main macro lens.

The first picture is ‘Latifolia Sport’. More correctly it is Camellia japonica ‘Latifolia Sport’. That is genus Camellia (capitalize), species japonica (lower case) and cultivar ‘Latifolia Sport’ (capitalize, single quotation marks). A cultivar (which is a combination of cultivate and variety) is a plant that is produced in cultivation by selective breeding and is of garden origin (not wild). Now I am not sure if this was a true sport, which is defined as a flower or branch that has an unusual deviation or mutation from the type of growth usually shown by the plant. I didn’t notice anything real different about this plant but I wasn’t looking all that hard. Latifolia means that it has wide leaves.


This next picture is from the Nikon 50mm/1.8 lens. I have enjoyed this lens but don’t use it as often I would like. These are some Clivia (C. miniata) buds that were inside the Camellia House. About 90% of the time I use this lens at F/1.8 but on Sunday decided to try it at some other apertures and found it pretty sharp throughout the range. You can really get some cool backgrounds with this one. The only thing I don’t like about it is the minimum focusing range; it is a little too far. For the money everybody should have a 50mm. One note on Clivias, don’t divide them if you want flowers anytime soon. They can take 10 years or more to flower after division. I learned that the hard way but have been back in business with the ones at work for a couple of years now.

Camellia japonica 'Purity'

Here is a shot with the Sigma 17-70mm/2.8-4.5 lens. I have said that this lens was okay and has taken some really nice pictures. Sigma recently came out with a better and slightly more expensive version of this lens. Overall it is a good trooper having survived a couple of falls and generally nasty conditions. I can’t figure if I like the 18-70mm Nikon lens, which came with the camera, (I gave to Karen for her camera) or this lens. It does seem to auto-focus well and is great in wide-angle low-light situations. This is ‘Purity’ Camellia again; you can see it is a real beautiful white.


Finally here is a picture from what I hope to be a photo series of ‘Flowers in the Dirt’. It is just something I have noticed over the last few years and I think I will start taking pictures of them and see what they look like as a group.