Rare Chrysanthemum

Chrysanthemum ‘Chiru momiji’

This was my favorite flower in the Fall Flowers of Japan exhibit. The buds were amazing looking and I remember thinking that I had never seen anything quite like them before. The flowers had not quite come out on the stems in the display but didn’t look as good as the buds. Google has been stumped on both yesterday’s mum and today’s. That usually doesn’t happen as just about any plant has some reference on the Internet.

These were both shot with the D700 and 60mm Nikon lens. The pop up flash was used in the second shot because the lighting is almost never good in a greenhouse. I have the flash set to -.7 to take some of the harshness out of it. A pop up flash isn’t really a great way to go but it works in a pinch. For Christmas I am going to ask Santa to bring me a Speedlight add on flash. It is not something I would use all the time but can be helpful in certain situations.

Almost all of the macro pictures on this site are manually focused. While the auto focus system on the D700 is great (51 points) I have found it doesn’t always focus on the part of the flower that I want. This also eliminates back focusing where the camera focuses on something behind the subject. It takes a second or two longer to get the photo manually but there are less junk photos when I get home and look at them.