Prickly Pear Cactus (Opuntia humifusa)

(1/40 sec @ f/14; ISO 200; -2 EV; natural light)

My wife and I made a morning trip to Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve (New Hope, PA) to see what was blooming and what I could photograph while she did some birding. Truth be told, she had a much better day birding than I had photographing wildflowers. First off, there really wasn’t a whole lot of interest blooming. And secondly, breezes made photographing anything I did find next to impossible. That is except for the these Prickly Pear cacti which, being stout of heart and low to ground, seemed impervious to the wind. 

As I looked over this small stand of flowering cacti, I quickly came to the conclusion that this might be another chance to try the wide-angle close-up technique that I discussed a couple of months ago. So I sat down on the ground, opened my bag and went to work. Off came the 150mm macro lens and on the Canon 30D went the Sigma 10-20mm wide-angle lens. Then on to the 10-20, I added a Canon 500D close-up filter/lens. As I mentioned previously, Canon recommends using this close-up filter with something like a 70-200mm lens. So a 10-20 is really pushing it. But I think it does work. You can be the judge.

I mounted this set-up on my tripod and spread the legs so the tripod was pretty much flat on the ground. And down on my belly I went. Looking at this photo it may be hard to believe but the lens was only a couple of inches from the flower in the foreground/right. That was the close-up part that the 500D allowed me to do. The flower to the lower left and all the flowers in the background are due to the wide-angle nature of the 10-20 lens. An interesting effect, I think. Do you?

According to Haywood and Monk’s “Wildflowers of Pennsylvania”, the yellow flowers (2 to 3.5 inches across) remain closed except in bright sunlight which we definitely had and wrecked havoc with the exposure as can be seen from the -2 EV.