This is a flower that seems to bloom backward. The flower head is pointed down (notice the downward direction of the buds to each side) but the petals turn up. This plant is part of the Cyclamen genus.

I’d like to tell you that I took this photo of an exotic plant in some exotic foreign land but, alas, it was taken in the kitchen of our home. I was working on my camera, making micro-adjustments to the focus of my various lenses. It’s a process of fine tuning the auto focus function to account for the minor differences in lenses.  Even lenses of the same brand and model can have minor differences. The camera will focus each of them the same so focus could be off…usually just a bit and mostly unnoticeable, but still off.  Of course, we’re typically wanting a very precise focus on most of our images so tweaking settings to get it as close to perfect is a worthwhile endeavor.

So, after making my micro-adjustments, I just snapped a few photos to test the focus accuracy. This is one of those test shots. The plant is one my wife keeps on a cabinet in front of a window in our kitchen. I focused on it, taking advantage of the pleasing green of our lawn outside the window as the background. Of course, the lawn is out of the range of focus so you’re not seeing blades of grass; you just see a solid green background. You’ll also notice a kind of cross-hatch texture in the background. That effect was created by the window’s screen.

Sometimes, if your looking, you’ll find “interesting” and “exotic” in the most common places.

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