Foster Botanical Garden - 11/1/2009

I haven't been able to go on any shoots for a while and started to get "photog withdrawals". I've also been looking for a tripod and finally decided on a Manfrotto Tripod and wanted to take it out for a "test drive" taking some HDR shots so Erick, Celia and I decided to go to Foster's Botanical Garden. I am a bit rusty since I didn't get that many good shots so I must go back and try again soon.
A must-visit for me is the new green house. It was soooo hot inside especially on this humid day so I decided to get an HDR of the exterior instead.
It was unfortunate that there were not as many blossoms as there were the last time I visited.My HDR of flowers didn't really work out and the only one that looked natural was this pitcher plant.. there was only one blossom that didn't turn brown. This hanging plant is usually swinging in the wind from the fans blowing so it is especially hard to get a good HDR shot.There were mostly green plants in the green house...(duh?!!)
Just outside the green house is this statue of a girl with butterflies. Around this area I saw a lot of butterflies dancing around the flowers.
I waited patiently until I was able to capture these two shots of butterflies. These were cropped since I was using my wide angle lens and wasn't able to get too close without scaring away the butterfly. There's even a caterpillar in the flowers.
I wanted to get a panorama of the cannon ball tree, but that photo also didn't turn out and I got this instead. I think this is the largest tree in the garden...It took 3 shots to build this panorama.