I had the chance to visit a hidden place in the middle of the jungle near the pacific coast of México, I am not allowed to say where this place is, but i’ll say that is probably the most beautiful house i’ve ever been. The owner has a passion for orchids and you can see them all over his property, wild orchids everywhere on the woods. I’d never see such variety of species in one place.

We’re getting closer to the driest season of the year and yet we had some rainy days last week, after the rain the colours and light were very soft so it was the time to get out and take some photographs, i didn’t have to go very far, i took this picture literally outside of my office window i reckon i could have taken it from my chair. Is an HDR and i was a bit surprised by the result, hope you like it!

I found the bulbs of a wild orchid laying on the ground in the forest of Tapalpa Mexico, last summer, it wasn’t going to survive so i decided to bring it home and take care of it, surprisingly even with this very cold winter it bloomed, 2 months after i placed it on the trunk of one of the trees at my garden, I though it deserved an HDR. Did i mention i love Orchids?

Thailand is a beautiful place, full of cultural and religious symbolism. Lotus flowers can be seen everywhere, according to legend, Gautama Buddha was born with the ability to walk and everywhere he stepped, lotus flowers bloomed. This photograph was taken at Sukhothai Historical Park in northern Thailand, a stunning place where i spent some days riding my bike around, and pretty much everywhere you look you’ll see some sort of religious symbolism like the lotus flower in this picture which was placed on the hands of a statue of Buddha long before i encountered it.

This is a particularly tricky shot, this white flower is surrounded by more white flowers and is getting direct natural light, the sensors of my camera were going crazy. This was the perfect situation for an HDR. It was quite windy which makes bracketing pretty difficult if i were going to try the usual multi-exposure HDR. I decided to use RAW, back to my Mac I processed the photograph to get 3 files with 3 different exposures in order to extract a bit of detail from the main subject. It takes a little longer than the Bracketing method but the results can be as good. I have written a tutorial on this blog about HDRs where i explain how to create them using bracketing. I also tried to avoid the excessive “HDR ish” look and have a more natural result.

I was telling the truth when I said I find Orchids fascinating.

This is another orchid from that famous exposition in Chiang Mai, Thailand, there were literally thousands, hard to pick a favorite, all of them were stunning.

Wild orchids are now a bit rare to find, if you find one the best thing you can do is to photograph it. I found this one in Tapalpa México, a beautiful traditional town in the mountains just outside Guadalajara.

I find orchids fascinating, some months ago i decided to start collecting them at my place, this is one of the first that bloomed from the species Phalaenopsis right after a mid day rain.

I had the chance to visit the biggest flower exposition in the world in Chiang Mai in the north of beautiful Thailand.

The exposition is held in honour of the king of Thailand every year. The Orchids pavilion was full of westerners like myself admiring the most amazing and exotic orchids, species that you could only see in books (i’m an orchids fool), the funny thing was that you couldn’t see  not one Thai at the Orchids pavilion, they were at the Dutch Pavilion totally hypnotized by the multicolour Tulips which are a rarity in Thailand.

I love this picture, orchids are one of those nature’s capricious creations and this red one is no exception.