Life in a Banana Republic - A Few Flowers

YumaMarc

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In Central America flowers are EVERYWHERE! The roadsides, wooded areas, jungles and everybody's back yard are teeming with floral splendor. Some very beautiful flowers are on weeds, very small and usually unnoticed. Others are huge and showy. These are just a few I found while hiking in the jungles. Some are in our yard and my wife's garden.

BeeEyeViewYuscaran.jpg Anthers of a lily found by a little stream.

DSC_0021.jpg Very tiny flowers on weeds I have to cut from our yard occasionally. They look like cookies and gumdrops.

DSC_0089a.jpg A domesticated flower known locally as "Camarones" because they resemble the bodies of shrimp.

DSC_0111.jpg Izote flowers. They're tall plants, not really trees, and are hard to get to, but the flowers are edible. They taste somewhat like cabbage. They grow wild everywhere.

DSC_0113.jpg Banana blossom with baby bananas. These grow wild like weeds. In fact, they ARE weeds, not trees at all.

DSC_0174_pe1.jpg La Rosa de Guadalupe. This rose celebrates the miracle of the roses that bloomed in winter.

DSC_0129_pe1.jpg An Alcatraz Lily, growing wild beside a stream.

DSC_0453.jpg Unidentified wild flower in the jungle.

DSC_0472.jpg Another wild jungle flower growing directly from the stem.

DSC_0536.jpg A rather primitive variety of yellow orchid growing wild in the jungle near Yuscarán, Honduras. If you look closely, and use a little imagination, you can see a jaguar face in the center.

DSC_0555a.jpg This is one of the strangest flowers I've ever encountered in the jungle. It's a large plant, somewhat resembling a pineapple, with holes in the sides where the pineapple sections would be. In each hole is a little "snake head" peeping out. These little "heads" even have FANGS!

DSC_0851.jpg In my wife's zinnia garden.

GuavaBlossomFruit.jpg A guava blossom with baby guavas. These grow wild everywhere. Burros get fat on guavas.

JungleFlowersYuscaran.jpg I'm not sure what these are, but blossoms on some tropical fruit tree.

TinyFlowersYuscaran.jpg One of thousands of varieties of roadside flowers.

And there are tens of thousands of other tropical flowers sparkling in the sunshine and rain of Central America.
 

Rookster

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Very nice pics.:icon_thumright:
 

tamrock

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Those are wonderful.
 

DizzyDigger

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Gorgeous pics Marc..:occasion14:

The technology may be old by today's standards, but a D90 in the
right hands can still stand with the best of 'em when it comes to
quality images.

I'm wondering which lens you were using? Also, the pics have a
nice bokeh, but was surprised to see that you shot them at f/11.
Did you adjust the background in post-processing?

Inquiring minds ..hoping to take better pictures...wanna know... moose.gif
 

old digger

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Cool pictures! :icon_thumleft:


There is nothing better than fresh ripened guava's and mango's, than the picked green and sold in the grocery store fruit.
 

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Such beauty...thank you for sharing! :hello2:
 

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YumaMarc

YumaMarc

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Gorgeous pics Marc..:occasion14:

The technology may be old by today's standards, but a D90 in the
right hands can still stand with the best of 'em when it comes to
quality images.

I'm wondering which lens you were using? Also, the pics have a
nice bokeh, but was surprised to see that you shot them at f/11.
Did you adjust the background in post-processing?

Inquiring minds ..hoping to take better pictures...wanna know... View attachment 1626608

Hello... I use a D90 primarily because it was the best I could get when I came here. I also had a D60 and a D40. I went to the D90 rather than another brand because I could use the same lenses on all of them. I like the D90 as it produces good quality, but frankly Nikon has never made better quality than the D40. It's old, batteries are not usable in the D90 and has half the resolution, but the picture quality is noticeably better. If my old D40 had 12MP I'd still be using it.

My main walking-around lens at present is an AF-S NIKKOR 1:4-5.6 ED. It focuses sharp, is light and I can always depend on it to deliver pretty much what the viewfinder shows. My "go to" lens for small objects, and to separate the subject from distracting backgrounds is a Tamron AF 1:2.8 90mm Prime MACRO. It does absolute miracles with small flowers and insects. I can use it as a regular 90mm prime lens or as a 1:1 macro. It is also a great lens for portraits. I sometimes use a Sigma 28-300mm 1:3.5-6.3 zoom, but the picture quality is inferior to the Tamron. It is also inferior to a Sigma 70-300mm 1:4.0-5.6 zoom which I use occasionally for long shots.

I brought all my camera equipment from the US because there are no dedicated camera stores in Honduras, at least not on the mainland. Here it's "what you've got is what you get", and if you should need a camera repair or replacement you'd better plan on a trip to the US.

The D90's main drawback for me is it's inability to handle low light without generating a ton of noise. I use a ring flash sometimes at night, or for closeups. I have anti-noise software, which helps, but it's practically unusable at night without a tripod and time exposure. I shoot almost exclusively in RAW format, so by default I use Photoshop a lot. I run nearly all photos through a basic adjustment of contrast and exposure. I admit I like to fiddle with post-processing, and I have just about every stand-alone program available for that. I try to use it sparingly, but sometimes I go for an "artistic" effect just to see how it turns out. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised, sometimes not so pleasant.

Most of the photos above were not post-processed other than exposure and contrast, maybe. Of course the Alcatraz lily is obviously processed, but the background is original. The Rose of Guadalupe has had the background darkened to enhance the white of the flower, but it is the original background, not replaced. Most of these are from the Tamron except the banana blossom, the Izote and the weird "Snake Heads". The difference is obvious. The "Camaron" flower might be filtered, I don't remember. And I believe the Izote is from the 70-300 zoom. I can't speak highly enough of the Tamron 90mm Prime. It does such a wonderful job of subject separation.

I do a lot of "artistic" photos and have them occasionally printed on canvas. An example:

Iglesia del Carmen, Ojojona, Honduras1.jpg Iglesia del Carmen, Ojojona, Honduras.
 

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