I got a present yesterday. A macro lens for my camera. Took it out to my balcony for a test drive. It's been hot here in Finland lately and some of the flowers in my balcony are suffering from the heat but I managed to find few that are still looking good.

I guess these are the survivors. The ones that won the water war and earned the rights to the few drops of water in the dry desert called balcony pots. It's a cruel world and their god has had other things to do and forgot that plants need water if it's scorching hot. Scorchio.

But back to my new toy.

Laowa 25mm f2.8.
2.5-5X Ultra macro.

This, about 1 cm sized bud was my first target.

"I do not need a stand! Who needs a stand? Not me because although the lens weighs much more than my camera, I have steady hands, can be without breathing in or out for that matter for 15 minutes and can also stop the wind from blowing so that the bud remains still. Or can sync my movement with the wind because I am the balcony god."

"I am the one who decides where everything is, who gets water and nutritients and how much, how much lebensraum is given to anything and everything and have not yet fallen over the balcony railing although I have removed the balcony glasses and wobbled up on a bench and on a shaky table to water the plants high above."

"Shit. I'll get me stand."

This is what you get when you play with different settings. A bud and a bud.

I wonder if my magnifying glass and my new macro lens fought, which one would win? My magnifying glass already has some battle scars and a loose handle, but it also has sharp edges and doesn't break if it falls to the floor. So anything is possible.

Cat hair.

I shouldn't make any promises but I have been taking photos also with the magnifying glass and I should also show those to you, as a comparison, but one never knows when I will be posting again so perhaps I just promise that I'll do that before I die. I solemnly swear, with a tiny reservation that I will make a post about my magnifying glass and show you few flower photos. I'm nowhere near the end of my life expectancy so should have plenty of time.

Although anything can happen, I have not almost tripped to my cats lately so statistically that is something that is just waiting to happen sooner or later. And this thing is like earthquakes. The longer it takes for nothing to happen, not even a minor shake, the stronger the quake will be. So the longer I do not almost trip to my cats when walking at home, the bigger the accident will be when it happens.

I wonder, do cats like human brain and eat it if given the chance? In case my skull breaks in half when I fall and die. Let's hope I wont die during this heat wave so that my cats have more time to feed from me.

Then again there is a slight possibility that when I trip, I, on my way down on the floor, will somehow turn in to something extremely heavy, like Lord Nibblers excrement and weigh so much that when I do reach the floor, I will fall through the floor and the next one and the next one and so on and make a huge holes to as many floors on my way down to the ground as needed and fall all the way down to the public parking garage under this building and some BMW or Audi driver will try to make a quick maneuver to avoid me from harming his car and accidentally drives through a group of elderly people and although they all have 2 meter spaces because of corona, the randomness of things is so ridiculous that enough senior citizens start rolling to different directions to start a chain reaction that ultimately results in the collapse of this building that I live(d) in and also half of the city centre.

Just keep checking the news in case that happens. This city is Tampere. It's in Finland.

Look at the pretty flower.

So hard to decide where to focus. So hard to keep focus. So hard to focus.

This bloom is also about 1 cm size. So it's tiny but big enough for me to take the photo although the wind was blowing ever so gently but then again disturbingly too much when watching its effects to the tiny bloom through a camera lens.

My brain started to melt when I wrote that sentence.

I my, it rhymes!

If I wrote a poem it would go like this:

It was like watching my life through a camera lens
When the doctor repeated my death sentence
"But", I said, "You have mustard on your shirt"
He didn't even notice this detail of dirt

^{(I've been watching Breaking Bad. Finally got around to do that. Better call Saul is better but Braking bad isn't that bad. It's watchable and sometimes even good.)}

But I'm not much of a poet.

Now more than ever I need to establish a small macro photography studio indoors. It's virtually impossible to take photos if there are any variables that I can't control. Like the heat outside that drives me insane and inside near to the air conditioner.

Next plant. Bougainvillea.

The problem with quickly taking few shots inside just to see what this new toy can do is impossible. There's not enough light. I prefer natural light when photographing flowers but that means that the ISO causes grain to the photo or I need to set up that studio and take the photos after adjusting the stand and the flower for an hour of two. And that's not quick by my standards.

Nevertheless I did manage to take few photos with plenty of grain in it.

Did a little post processing to reduce the graininess.

So that's it for today, I just wanted to inform you that I'm here, older than last time I had something to say. My balcony flowers are relatively alive because I've been working out by carrying bucket loads of water to them and inserting a watering system in case I get a terrible need to be away from home longer than a day or two and the temperature outside is near or over 30°C like it's now.

P.S.
Pretty pink.
I don't like the color pink.
But pink flowers sure are pretty.