Victoria's Butchart Gardens, Part 2: Macro Photography and More! (+10 insets)

(+10 insets) (bigger is better for lovely details!)

Trip Talk: Macro photography at Butchart Gardens: you can't see it all through your macro lens!

Anyone who loves macro photography knows how long it takes to photograph a small area. If you're photographing really small stuff like tiny mushrooms, lichen or itty-bitty bugs, a few feet can take an hour. Flowers in a compact, colorful garden will keep a person busy for many hours.

Now, just imagine the idea of trying to get pictures of all the various flowers, plants, art, architecture and people in an immaculately kept garden that sprawls across 55 acres. In other words, there is no way, no how, that a macro photographer is going to get images of even a small fraction of that real estate. It ain't gonna happen.

What's a person to do? Well, you just do your best. It was a good thing that Steve kept pulling me along by my ear or I would have never left the parking lot to enter the actual Garden! Seriously, everywhere I turned there were 100 more things yelling for my attention!

No, I didn't get a close look at everything in the park. But we did visit all of the different areas and I did get to spend many hours taking pictures of hundreds of flowers and countless other cool sights!

Today's Pictures

My main picture today shows a pair of Fuchsia "dancing ballerinas" and a row of buds, set against a sea of bokeh. Throughout the park were endless enormous pots exploding with color, and wherever there was a place to hang a planter, outrageous displays cascaded to delight the eye..the combinations of flowers and colorful foliage plants was incredible! Like I was saying above, I could have spent an hour just taking pictures of exactly ONE of these huge arrangements. When I saw this hanging planter, I couldn't help making these pretty ladies the star of the show! (By the way, there are over 120 kinds of Fuchsias and there were dozens represented at the park!)

Inset 1: This is a group of Calibrachoa flowers, often confused as small petunias. They are related but not the same, yet nearly everything else about them matches. Easy to grow and care for, they churn out blossoms like crazy for an entire summer and come in a billion colors and combinations (There are about 25 species). At the park, these were often parts of lovely, multi-species planter displays, but I found this group celebrating their singular, outrageous beauty!

Inset 2: I'm going to guess this is a Camelia, though I don't really know for sure. This was another kind of flower that has about a billion species! Ok, well over 200 anyway, and never in my life had I see so many kinds! This one was glowing at me and I was only too happy to give it some love!

Inset 3: The lovely Japanese Garden was such a delight to stroll through, and I really loved this fabulous Sturgeon Fountain, sculpted by Sirio Tofanari, an Italian artist known for his animal sculpture.

Inset 4: When Steve and I entered Butchart Gardens, one of the first things we saw were planters filled with Hibiscus plants, all of which were covered with huge blossoms in several colors. Because the red was really vibrating against the green behind, I chose to desaturate the background and add a strong vignette!

Inset 5: As the evening began to make itself known with the sun getting lower in the sky, I looked up and saw this tree glowing at me and stopped to gawk. I got Steve's attention and together we did our best to immortalize this lovely tree.

Inset 6: Camas leaves just kill me…they are so incredibly beautiful when the leaves are open, and yet, just look at how amazing the unfurling leaf looks! Be still my beating heart!

Inset 7: I used to think Hydrangeas were boring, ugly plants. That's because the two that grew in my family's front yard weren't given proper nutrients…one had flowers which were a sort of grey-green and the other was dirty off-white blechy pink. But here at Butchart, the flowers were electrifyingly bright and beautiful! In fact, this picture was bright to the point of being a bit blown-out. So I decided to play with my Topaz Labs' Black and White Effects filter suite. The effect I ended up with really makes me happy!

Inset 8: Oh, don't you just LOVE Lantanas? I had a lot of fun playing with focal depth and bokeh with this image! :)

Inset 9: This is another Camelia but this time in white with lemon! So pretty…there were countless bushes in many colors and I stumbled around like a zombie doing my best to get nice pictures of what I saw.

Inset 10: After we got pictures of the glowing tree, I made my way out to a main path way and saw this jaw-dropping sight. It's too bad there isn't any way to totally do justice to the warm translucence of the flowers but at least you get an idea!

Pam, I don't know what your favorite flowers are but I am confident we'd find them here for you, as long as they were in bloom! :D The insects…holy cow they were EVERYWHERE! It was quite the happy convention for a zillion happy critters and you'll see some of my attempts to get pictures when I get to posting them! I hope that you are getting some good results with your photography experiments! Sending *BIG HUGS* your way!

Explored on 10/01/19; highest placement #2.