Black Eyed Susan

Sometimes your backyard can be a marvelous place to achieve satisfying images.  I have several stands of Black Eyed Susan's around and come the end of June they are in full bloom and will stay that way until September.  

This image I shot on the morning of my birthday.  It was a little after 6:30am, the kids were sleeping and there was no wind.  I tooled around looking for various shots when this one came into being about twenty minutes into this half hour shoot.  Using my 100mm macro lens and an aperture of 4, I set out to create a shoot through.

A shoot through is where you deliberately look to obscure parts of the subject you are trying to capture to create a diffused or dreamy feel.  The open aperture helps this by cutting down on the depth of field. I also only sharpened the in focus portion of the flower.