The photo I show you today, Astrantia Major, is (still) not included in any of the Galleries of this website because it does not correspond to any “big travel” but to a Photographic Workshop about Flora from the Pyrenees, by Oriol Alamany, that took place between July 1^st and 3^rd, 2011, in La Cerdanya (Catalan Pyrenees). Maybe you recognize it from my galleries at Fotonatura and Whytake.

We were approaching a field full of orchids and at the beginning of the path I discovered this curious and nice flower. It was the first time I have seen it and I did not know anything about it, but it attracted my attention so I stopped to take some photos of it.

It was close to a bush, among lights and shades, so I took my “chinesse” (a tiny reflector “made in Hong Kong” that was given to me at a Sonimagfoto Fair stand because I spontaneously became a translator “Spanish-English”) to illuminate it more properly (so to speak, because it is a quite poor quality reflector and it reflects the sunlight in a very special manner), so I started playing with the f-stops in order to obtain enough focus on the flower while keeping a soft background.

I spend more than an hour with this flower, trying to capture all its beauty and all its details, without realizing about the time. It was a short break. I really relaxed and abstracted from the reality.

I like this photo so much, and I hope you like it too.

100 mm, f 5.0, 1/400 sec., ISO 100, Manual, Punctual Measure, Tripod, Reflector and Cable Shouter.

There was a botanic in the group who told me which was that flower and later on, at home, thanks to Saint Google and Saint Wikipedia I found out the rest… It is a Astrantia major, Apiaceae family (same family as the celery, the dill, the carrot and the fennel, among others).

Few weeks after, I went back to the area and I tried to found the flower again… but it was too late. The plant had dried and I found nothing.

I would like to see (and photograph) it again. I’ll have to wait till early summer.