We should take pictures of Spring flowers to celebrate the season. In the winter we can look at the photos to restore hope of another spring. There are only two ways to take bad photos of flowers. One way is to get far enough away from just a few flowers so they look like errant punctuation marks on a dark page. The other way is to get close, but have the flowers out of focus. Here I present all six frames I took of front-yard blooms, all taken within a total of ten minutes. Does close and in focus really suffice?

The photos have some problems, but I think they do the job. These photos were taken with a pocket camera hand held in the close-up focus mode. I cropped several of the photos, but none were cropped as much as by half. There were a few minor tweaks, noted in the captions, but nothing laborious. It was the flowers that made the pictures. I’ve added some notes in the captions.

The scrunched up flower in the upper right is a distraction. I think it is tolerable.

These blossoms on a crab apple tree were dancing in the wind, making a studied composition impossible. I took my chances, and the image turned out with the flowers have swayed to near the top of the frame, so I cropped out the bottom. I lightened the dark areas about 10% in Photoshop™

Having some white and green in the image of renunculas helps accent the brilliant yellow.

The rules of composition demand that there be three five or seven objects. Here six seems to work well enough. Maybe the one turned somewhat on on edge doesn’t count.

The dark objects are shriveled crab apples from last season, still on the tree with the new blooms. A bit odd, but interesting.

The bottom line to all this is to unleash your camera and take a chance with close-ups of Spring flowers. With a digital camera, failed photos can be deleted at no cost — and no one will ever know. With automatic focus, you can get close and the odds are in your favor.