The other week I came across some orchids just barely in the bloom. Without hesitation I pulled out my big gun, attached a 31mm extension tube and set to work. In the viewfinder and on the LCD display everything seemed to be just fine, I was brimming with expectations when I downloaded the images to my computer. But alas, it was not to be so. It was the same old story, there was some little thing or two wrong in every frame but mostly I fretted about DOF. Well, I got lucky and the weather held for the next day, so I just drove back there determined to do it right this time. I made sure that I considered everything – check DOF preview, focus behind and in front to find additional distractions, bracket, change ISO speed, even try with and without image stabilisation. At home I was ever more expectful to see beautiful, perfect images of budding orchids, but what happened?

My favourite from those two sessions is one of the shallow DOF images from the first day (left). What otherwise would’ve been my favourite from the second day was spoiled by an intruding, slightly OOF leaf in lower left corner that I had to gaussian blur out of the way to save the image from the bin (the original un-edited version is above here). I swear for the life of me I didn’t notice the leaf on location, not even with DOF preview, not with focusing in and out, I just simply didn’t see it. Could I blame the 20D viewfinder with 95% coverage for it? Was my intruding leaf in the missing 5% area?

So even with the benefits of instant feedback, I still didn’t do any better the second time around. Is this as good as it will ever get?