In Focus

For a long time I was desperate have a picture of a Foxglove. There is something about them that I just love. Whether it is the colour or the way they look, tall and majestic, I really don't know, but there we are, I wanted a photo of a Foxglove.

The problem with Foxgloves is that, being tall and majestic, it is not as easy as you would think to get the whole plant in a photo AND for it to be in focus. It fills so little of the frame that the camera would not automatically focus on that, so you get lots of photos of the tree or fence behind the Foxglove with a blurry mauve stripe through the middle. You would think it would be easy to sort the problem out, and I am sure if I knew where there were some Foxgloves
I would have had no problem doing so. But we don't have any Foxgloves near where we live, so that was not possible. The only chances I had presented to me were while we were out, often with friends, cycling round the country.

Now, our friends are very aware that I photograph pretty much anything that does not move fast enough, and many things that do, but they are not necessarily wanting me is to spend ten minutes framing a shot of a flower when the aim of the day to find somewhere for lunch. The result of this pressure, self induced I accept, is that it took me many, many goes to finally get a picture of a Foxglove that was pretty much in focus; I mean months, if not over a year.

But finally I did it, and here it is. To many people it is nothing spectacular, and had I managed to take it at my first attempt, it probably would not have ended up in my scrapbook, but that is not what happened. So the irony of this is that the fact of it being a challenge to get is what made the story.