When returning to well known places you are often greeted with something new. Goat Rock Beach, a California coast park, is a surefire photogenic place, but last weekend we encountered the additional floral splendor of fields of cow parsnip on top of all else. So what to do with so much cow parsnip? Closeups of cow parsnip in repose? Cows frolicking amidst their namesake parsnip? One must do one’s best.

Daffodil Hill is a private ranch in the California mountains near the town of Volcano, roughly two-and-half hours drive from the San Francisco area. (No, there is no volcano.) The McLaughlin family that’s owned the ranch since the 1880’s likes daffodils. They have about 300,000 bulbs, which is how I know they like daffodils, and they open the ranch to the public from late March through mid-April. If you want to photograph daffodils, this place is it.

Night queen flowers all bloom within a few days of each other. This tropical variety on Ali’i Drive in Kailua-Kona decided it would be October 20th. The flowers open at night and fade away after sunrise, collapsing by mid day. The plant is a cactus vine that grows as a hedge, and the spectacular flowers are four or five inches across and quite showy. There is a different variety in the Arizona desert that blooms in June. The Arizona variety has a bare stick-like stem, so the challenge is to show the characteristics of the plant and the flower all in one photo. I gave up.

Point Lobos is one of the world’s great scenic places. While the rocky shore and surf are reliable, sunshine there is not. We were lucky recently and had brilliant sun along with spring wild flowers. With all those things helping, it’s not too difficult to take good pictures. We drove to the Bird Rock area, at the end of the short park road. To make photography a more interesting problem, add some kids running near the edge of the ocean bluff.

Photoshop™ has a number of built-in filters that attempt to convert photo images into artistic renditions. Previously I discussed posterization, sometimes followed by the palette knife filter, to punch up weak scenes. Recently I obtained some Photoshop filters from Topaz Labs, including the Topaz Simplify 2 filter set that includes a Painting option. My test cases were some photos of flowers that seemed to me to have potential, but needed punching up. I have come away a fan of the Topaz paint options.

The specific problem with the edge of the bluff at Point Lobos was getting it in focus, but let’s step back from the edge for a moment. Point Lobos State Reserve is on the California coast about two hours drive south of San Francisco. Point Lobos deserves its proclamation as “the greatest meeting of land and water in the world.” It eases the burden on photographers in one sense, because almost no matter where one points the camera one is likely to get a remarkable picture. However, it raises the bar in terms of measuring up to the splendor presented.

I take quite a few pictures of wildflowers, but I haven’t had much success finding out the names of the flowers. It gets awkward referring to the “yellow flower at the beach,” and it definitely undercuts one’s air of expertise. Looking up the names poses challenges. … Everyone in California knows what ice plant it is, because it is a striking ground cover with yellow or purple flowers, and is common near the coast. Even though I’ve never heard it called anything but ice plant, it is not ice plant. It is really an import from South Africa called Hottentot Fig.

Spring flowers mean close-ups to photographers. Close-ups mean problems with getting the subject in focus. The best way to control focus is to use a single-lens reflex camera on a tripod and accurately preview the focus while making adjustments. That’s a good approach if you are not in a public garden with your wife saying “Are you done yet?” There is a strategy for getting the job done quickly with a pocket camera.

Few subjects are dominated by one color component, so autoexposure usually works well. For example, blue sky appears blue, but actually there is good deal of white mixed with the blue. Flowers are an exception. Flowers can have very pure colors. White flowers or pastel shades do not pose a problem. Usually it is red or red-orange flowers that create a problem. … The rule of thumb for subjects having pure colors is to force the exposure to one and a half stops below the automatic determination.

One rule of close ups is that they can be taken as well in a shopping center as a botanical garden, because the close up excludes the surroundings. Another rule for close ups is to try an extreme closeup. Here is such an experiment:

An image needs many shades of gray to appear blurred. Posterization removes the shades of gray, leaving splotches of pure colors. Posterizing is not restoring lost detail that was in the image. The clear color boundaries in the image do not correspond to the real world, they are examples of artistic license. So now we are making art. Well, sort of.