I went to the Los Angeles Flower Mart yesterday with Shayne and Chloe. The colors were glorious. The tricky part in taking pictures there were the low light levels and the ugly fluorescent lights. I didn’t have a tripod with me, so I concentrated my shots on the areas near the big open doors. The quality of light by the doors was very soft and somewhat brighter than the interior of the mart.

When the light was so low that I couldn’t get focus, I tried to turn the shot into a strong out-of-focus background like these roses. The swirly circles of the petals gives the image visual focus without actually being in focus.

The flower mart itself is nothing to look at. It’s two large warehouse-like buildings with concrete floors and fluorescent lights. I concentrated my shots on masses of flowers close-up. I was less successful with wider mart-atmosphere shots like this one.

My point-and-shoot Canon PowerShot A70 has gone missing in the house, so I brought my Nikon DSLR instead. The point-and-shoot would have been better for this kind of shoot because I could have used the macro function to get very close-up shots on the flowers. I didn’t want to lug around my whole camera bag with multiple lenses and my diopters on this trip because it was a day more about being with my family than taking pictures. So I chose an 18-70mm lens for my DSLR and called it a day. But I like several of the shots I took and had a wonderful time buying flowers to decorate the house for fall.