Dahlia Heaven

One of my favourite flowers is the Dahlia and I know Cragside house in Northumberland have a spectacular show of them in Sept/Oct every year. Having never seen them, I was determined to go along this year. So last weekend, I managed to find a spare afternoon on the Sunday and took my husband up to Cragside for a cream tea and walk around the formal gardens.

I decided to use my 50mm prime lens as I knew the results would be the best I could get with my camera. I shot my photos in raw, to give myself the best chance of recording all of the details I required and to set myself an editing challenge.

I was rather pleased with the results, so thought I would share.

I took this photo as a large jpeg, while I was getting to grips with using my prime lens in this new location. After playing around and seeing what results I could get, I swapped to raw and found the dahlias.

The dahlias did not disappoint. They had many different varieties and some of the largest dahlia flowers I had even seen. They put mine to shame, especially as I planted my tubers late this year and they did not flower at all.

I am always blown away by the intricacies of these flowers. What's not to like - loads of different colours to choose from and the flowers are always so 'perfect'.

I started off taking photos concentrating on one flower, but soon realised I preferred to include some more plant details to set the scene better. With this photo I concentrated my focus area on the flower on the left with the honey bee, while including the flower bud and half open flower on the right, to show different stages of the plant, but keeping the main focus of the photo on the left.

This was one of my favourites due to the fabulous dark colour.

Another go at showing a few more plant details. I am particularly pleased with this shot as it shows I am definitely using my prime lens to frame the photo better and thinking about what I see rather than simply shooting a load of photos and hoping I can crop a decent photo out of it later. This did have a slight crop to take out too much greenery in the background, but overall I was pleased with the results.

This photo was an attempt to show a different angle of the flowers, rather than looking straight down on the flower. It helps to show the fabulous individual petals of the overall flower, without the distraction of the centre drawing your eye away from some of the finer details.

A visit to Cragside is never complete without a view of the house. I took this from the Iron Bridge, before wandering back through the rock garden to the car park, followed by a drive around the estate roads.

I had a lovely afternoon in the sun with my husband and really enjoyed getting to grips with my prime lens. Not having a zoom may be good for my photography as it means I have to find new subjects to practice my techniques with, rather than always looking to photograph the dogs. However, I will need to sort out my zoom lens either way, as I will need one again for agility photos. The break from it will hopefully enable me to try out some new techniques and learn to use my camera to better effect. I would quite like a macro lens at some point as well, but that will have to wait until I can sort out the zoom dilemma.