Dreamy Spring Flower Macro 🌸 Helios Glow + Laowa 2X Details

So I'm currently in my backyard now trying to capture the magic essence of spring and by doing so I chose the Helios N44 lens because it gives us that dreamy and ethereal look and it looks so great especially with flowers and I just found a very nice composition right behind you guys and I will show it to you now. I just walk my way around this garden plants some beautiful flowers this looks very interesting. There's something about this framing that I like. I include more flowers in the background here. I found this one that's really spread out and I want to try out isolating it in some way. So it's this one but I think we will prioritize this area and make it pop. So I want to try the close-up ring just to see what it does with it. I actually think it makes wonders with this subject. It really isolates it. I don't get that beautiful swirls but you get a little bit different type of macro with it. Just trying to make it stand out a little bit more. Some of the grasses were in the way so I need to redo the shots and instead of 30 centimeters I can get really close with this. Yeah I like that. You can see the shadows looks really great. The halos has a tendency to make everything so bright especially where the light hits. So yeah you can see there's a lot of bright spots for my subjects. So I try to keep it a little bit on the dark side only it's brown instead of neutral. Since I am using auto ISO at the moment I'm also using the exposure compensation and I have one stop down so I keep it more on the dark side of the histogram. It's really hard to get your subject in focus with the halos. You need to be precisely at the right distance. So this is my way to go and I zoom in 100 percent in the live screen on the camera so I can really fine tune and just move millimeters forward or back if I need to. That way I make sure that I have my subject in focus. It was a lot of fun putting on that close-up filter. So we lose that dreamy swirls the lens is now born. But we get so close and I just like what the lens do with subjects. So I want to try out a few different more comps before we try out something else. We are not exactly spoiled with wildflowers this early in Norway. So instead of chasing blooms far and wide I'm starting right here in my own backyard. But later in this video we also visit up meadow flower fields near the coastline and also venture into the woodlands looking for anemones. Got some beautiful subjects in these flowers. I'm visiting my neighbor's backyard. There's nobody living at this property and the flowers get to grow tall. They are left in peace. Nobody come and disturb this place. Here we got some beautiful backlit flowers. One flower in the frame didn't feel right. Too empty. I tried isolating it with the Helios but it wasn't working. So I used the surrounding flowers as a natural frame and that made it come together. It might be better with the macro lens so you get more fine details. I was just trying out a few shots without the close-up filter. I need to have a greater distance to the subject so it's a little bit more difficult and we get that great distance. They kind of disappear in the frame but then we get that nice effect from the lens. I just concentrated the light source to the mid part. Maybe not a great shot but it illustrates how you can manipulate or use the light to your advantage. It's time for a switcheroo. Curiosity got the best of me. So I put on my Leoa 100mm macro lens. This is a 2x magnification lens so I can get really close to the subjects and because I spot all these dew drops I want to get a nice shot of that. I set my aperture to f4 to keep the background soft and dreamy. Then I switch to continuous burst mode and slowly turn the focus ring while the camera captures each frame. This creates a natural focus stack letting me keep that beautiful blur while bringing the flower into crisp gentle focus. I was really wanting to test out the Leoa again. It's so long until I've used both of these lenses. Just look how much closer I can get to my subject with this lens. A 2x magnification lens turns the ordinary into a hidden universe. Tiny textures becomes landscapes and every detail feels like it's under a microscope. And with that last shot I think it's time we leave this scene. The wind is picking up and focus stacking with wind is almost impossible. A quick little update I'm now on my way to a place where I captured a lot of nice meadow flowers last year. In that time it was with my Leoa macro lens and now I want to try out the Helios. I bought that later last year. I bought it after the summer. These flowers are so small it can be hard to tell if there's something yet or not. It's not much they are not in bloom they're just evolving so it's a little bit early phase. I see a few here between the moss so let's see how it looks. I didn't find this in particular interesting for a photograph but I found something similar later on. A little bit disappointed there was only sprouts so far but yeah that's the reason I went in with the macro lens. But before I head back home I at least want to try the Helios in these flowers. So I will do a switcheroo and see what I can frame. The main goal is to try to get rid of that distractions I see in the frame. Tiny weeds and grasses. I start to like to see now there's not much distractions. A few grasses down here in there. I don't want to pick that newly fresh grass. There's a few meadow flowers that's worth looking into like this one. But there's a lot of gardening. We found a few nice meadow flowers even though it's very early stage. I particularly like this one. I filled my memory card to the brink. I can't do anything more because I'm out of battery too so I guess we're done for the day. I can already spot a lot of white ones here. They tend to cover the entire woodland floor in Norwegian forests so it's a very nice sign of spring. They also look beautiful. Wow I can see the colors right in front of me here. Look at this area. They're thriving in the sunshine and there's a nice beautiful blue purple section up there. It's really in perfect conditions this place now. I was spent last year here on my knees and wow yeah this is what I came for. Beautiful colors all around. With the Helios lens it's preferably best when you get some light through the canopy but we don't have enough leaves in the canopy just yet so that's why I use the close-up ring and use my Helios light on macro lens today. There are many important aspects when you're composing a shot like this. One crucial factor is the background and the other thing is how the light interacts with your subjects. Not every experiment works. Some frames felt cold, others felt chaotic but after refining the approach with the Helios the result finally had that soft cinematic glow I was chasing. At the end I found this white anemone. A subject without light but what really makes the Helios shine is what kind of light you have in the background. This creates this dreamy ethereal soft glow. Yeah without the close-up filter it simply gets too small in this case. Now we have that nice source. It's not exactly the best background. So the disappointment from the day before got me back out in the woodland the next morning and I decided to make things so much easier for myself bringing that day over macro lens and focusing on the blue anemones. Just now I found myself a nice subject. When I first framed it up I think it looked great and then I look at the back of the camera and I think to myself what can I improve here. Some very distracting things happening in the foreground because the leaves catch the light. Every time I think I got the image I try to improve it even slightly more. So you can do it by simply going up and down to change the background the foreground how it appear in the scene. You can also know in this case I moved closer so I get rid of more of that foreground that I included in the first images and we get more of that nice dark background. So yeah it's a great way to not just capture what you think look great in the beginning but improve your image after you take a look at it. Pretty happy with a few of my shots. So you can play with light. I tried a backlit blue anemone it looks very great if you can capture that poles in the creating that shadow in the petals. So the blue anemones are very early so they're already now fading so a few are coming still but a lot of them are now fading because it's past their time. So here we have all the three stages.