On this day of photographing cherry blossoms in the local park, I was using a 100mm telephoto macro lens which gives you the ability to shoot two different styles of photos without changing lens - macro or telephoto. The advantage of using a telephoto lens is the ability to render the background in a soft blur if the background is far enough back, which it was in this image. The background, in this case, was actually a pine tree and, knowing that, you can kind of make out some of the needles.
On the other hand, the same lens allows you to shoot close-up. The closest focus point on telephotos is normally measured in feet, but this isn't true with a macro lens. That is why I could get only inches away on this image.
One of the things that drives me nuts about digital cameras is their aspect ratio - the ratio of the vertical side to the horizontal. With many cameras, like mine, the ratio is two to three. In other words, if one side is six inches, the other will be nine inches; if one side is twelve, the other will be eighteen. Only problem is, most standard picture frames are a ratio of four to five - an eight by ten frame for instance. That means you have to crop any picture you would like to print to a different aspect ratio than what you shot. If you don't keep this in mind as you are shooting, and purposely frame photos "loosely," you may not be able to reformat the photo to the new ratio because it will either look unbalanced or you will be cropping out vital information.
Here is the same photo as the last one cropped to a four to five ratio. In other words, this one could be printed as an 8x10 inch photo whereas the other would have to be printed as an 8x12, which is a non-standard size. By framing it a little bit loose, It could be cropped without losing and important information.
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