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Anatomy of a Lemon Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

29 April 2021

Spring buds and blossoms have appeared in the garden with the blink of an eye. They are so delicate though that wind has made it difficult to photograph them even with a very fast shutter speed.

Lemon Skin. Nikon D300 with Vivitar 70-210mm Series I zoom at f5.6, 1/500 second and ISO 200. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.

Fortunately the Improved Meyer Lemon tree always has some hefty fruit on it and this nearly X-ray vision cast by the play of the shadow of a leaf and the sunlight on the textured skin caught our eye.

We shot the whole lemon but the small format here required us to crop it quite a bit so you could see the texture along the edge of the shadow, which we find as beautiful as a basketball arched from beyond the three point line and almost silently swishing through the net as the buzzer sounds.

Lemon Skin. The uncropped camera JPEG for comparison.

We hunted a bit longer in the garden, infatuated with the pistils of a poppy open to the sun and the fuzzy fruit of our first crop of loquats from a tree our little brother brought us from Santa Barbara years and years ago.

The neighborhood, too, is full of blossoms. If we bring a camera on our daily constitutional, we can hardly get down the street before it's time to come back. Which is not a bad strategy if you need new shoes.

But like this lemon, these recent images are, well, lemons.

While we love the color, we're usually disappointed with the focus. Our eye wants all the little buds in focus and the background blurred. But one or two central buds are as blurry as the background. And you can't crop an array of five apple blossoms as neatly as a Meyer lemon.

Sure, we should have stopped down. Maybe shoot with a telephoto at f8 or f11 instead of a 50mm at f5.6 or wider.

But that, as the lemon, apple and loquat trees know in their sap, is what tomorrow is for. Fruition.


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