david allio

Unloved Flower? | ©2012 David Allio

“A weed is but an unloved flower.” – Ella Wheeler Wilcox [1850-1919]

My flowers are my neighbor’s weeds. They recently told me so, in writing.

This past Spring the uniformly requisite Crepe Myrtle and Knockout Roses were planted in the front yard. But the bees and butterflies seem to prefer the variety of blooms offered by the mixture of cultivated and wild flowers planted and potted around our property.

The yellow and white flowers along the wooded border are very popular at this time of the year. In fact, the normally skittish bumblebees remained relatively unperturbed by the looming camera lens while working this particular set of blossoms. On this day, the white flowers were nearly outnumbered by black and yellow bumblebees.

For this photograph, a Nikkor Micro AF VR 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED was fitted to a Nikon D3 camera body. The exposure calculations under heavy overcast skies were an aperture of f/11, a shutter speed of 1/125th-of-a-second and an ISO of 1000. Although sold as a lens with a largest fixed focal stop of f/2.8 lens, the fine print in the instruction book indicated that this lens may automatically adjust by 1.6 f/stops even in manual mode.