Post-Christmas cactus

We had a leisurely breakfast with H this morning, before he headed off for lunch with a friend en route back to the Frozen North. I tried very hard to remember that he's a functional adult, with a career that entails a lot of travelling about, and therefore didn't probably need all the driving advice it was on the tip of my tongue to give him before he left. But with Storm Gerrit battering the country, holding in the maternal hysteria took some doing, and after he'd gone I didn't relax again properly until this evening, when he texted to say he'd arrived back home safely.

The very welcome dry day we had yesterday turns out to have been a meteorological error: today it was tipping down again, as well as blowing a hoolie. Despite this R and I had a touch of the post-Christmas empty house blues, so we concocted an urgent errand to take us off to Stratford, and away from all the clearing up and piles of washing we should have been dealing with at home. It's possible that cake may also have been consumed.

Because of the weather I hadn't taken a camera with me to Stratford, and by the time we got back and I began thinking about photographing this cactus flower, it was dusk outside and nigh-on dark in the conservatory. R offered to set up a softbox for me, but I decided to see what I could achieve in the little natural light there still was, and found that the double stabilisation of the R5 body and the RF 100mm macro allowed me to take sharp hand-held images down to 1/15 second. For this shot I put the shutter speed back up to 1/25 second, because I knew that the grain generated by ISO 3200 could easily be smoothed in Lightroom.