Robin's Daisies

Last year at this time I photographed a bunch of Daisies and posted them up here as a kind of memorial to my Grandmother, Grammie.  I titled the post Grammie's Daisies.  At the time, I wasn't planning on making a second such post one year later, but sometimes the hand of fate just works in some funny ways.  Back in July, I attended a big family gathering to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of my Uncle Fred and Aunt Norma.  The party was held at the home of my cousin Robin, her husband Paul and their three kids.  You've already seen one of the photographs I took while at the party.  The strange looking crystal ball that caught my attention.  They had a great flower garden out back, but the first things I saw when I went wandering around the yard was the daisies.  I guess it was Grammie's way of letting me know that she was there with all of us.  One fun thing was that I had a nicer background for my shots this year.  Replacing the grey concrete of last years photos was a nice garden green, and other daisies as well.  I even decided to try out a little bit of creative framing with the final two photographs in this update.  First I placed the center of the daisy dead center in the frame, which is kind of a photographic no-no, but I liked the way that the photograph looked.  I then took the same photograph but re-framed it, putting the center disc of the flower down on the lower left-hand side of the photograph.  I really like the visual change that re-framing the photograph caused.  The center of the flower becomes even more of an eye catcher.  The first photograph was taken at f/2.8, 1/6400sec, ISO 1600 at 38mm.  The second photograph was taken at f/2.8, 1/250sec, ISO 100 at 32 mm.  Here is the final photograph, framed two different ways.

The above photograph was taken at f/2.8, 1/400sec, ISO 100 at 70mm and framed two different ways.  Also of note, those of you who were paying attention may have noticed that the first photograph was taken at ISO 1600, while the rest were taken at ISO 100.  That's right, I made my classic error of forgetting to reset the settings on my camera.  But, and this is a huge but, I actually caught the mistake and corrected it.  Yay me!  I'll go with the feelgood ending and say that it was Grammie who whispered a little something into my ear to get me to check what I was doing.