Showy Lady Slipper Orchids

[Stephen Stephen]

The Purdon Conservation Area about 1 hour west of Ottawa has the largest concentration of Showy Lady Slippers in Ontario. These beautiful wild flowers only bloom for about 3 weeks a year. The conservation area is named after Mr. Joe Purdon who in the 1930s began to carefully manage a few dozen of these orchids found on his property. Total over 10,000 bloom each year. Access to the flowers is limited to a boardwalk which winds through the fen.


Canon EOS 40D 1/125 seconds and Sigma 105mm F2.8 Macro, f18 ISO 640, Flash not fired, 105 mm

[Alfred Forns]

Hi Stephen

Imagine they are difficult to shoot and probably have to hand hold? I like stopping down for dof in the flowers but the bg comes into play.... Was thinking of Focal Point but flowers take most of the image, might just soften the bg with brush !!! I like it a lot !!

[Julie Kenward]

I really like this, too, Stephen. I actually think this is one of the few images where the background is in focus and not a major distraction. I'd consider toning down a few of the small hot areas by using the clone brush set to "darken" and 30% and see what you think.

The only thing about the comp is that I would have liked to see the entire leaf that is heading out of the frame on the right included. Still, very nice lady slipper image!

[Mike Moats]

Hey Stephen, I would usually not think much of an image with this cluttered of a BG, but it does seem to work okay here. I would clone out the white spots in the BG. Good details on the flowers.

[Stephen Stephen]

Thank you Alfred, Julie and Mike. I'll do a re-work of this over the next couple of days (we've got company from away) and re-post.

Julie and Mike I agree about the busy background. Every flower in the area was totally surrounded by sedge or cotton grass. I tried using a shallow DOF but then at least one of the flowers was OOF and I was hoping for a group capture.

Farther along the boardwalk I was able to get some close-ups of some of the flowers, as well as some images of pitcher plants, so hopefully I'll have some better images to share as I go through them all.

Thanks again for your kind words and suggestions.