Nature in the city

Flowers in the city of Hanoi

This picture was shot on the first day I was in Vietnam, in the city of Hanoi. This city was so busy with mopeds, it overwhelmed me a bit. Certainly being the first encounter with Asia for me and specifically with Vietnam, the city was alien for me.
We walked through the city, crossing the street without looking and ended up near a nice bed of flowers.

I tried to show the difference in life in this picture. On the one hand you have the slow growing flowers in a bed of green, while on the other hand you have the mopeds zoofing around like crazy. Both worlds were seperated by a tiny green wire. What a contrast between those two worlds.
At that moment I had my 75-300 mm standard Canon lens attached to my camera. To make this shot I had to stand back some distance from the flowerbed (behind me, there was a lake) because I wanted to focus on the flowers. Those are almost unrecognisable when blurred due to the focus distance. The background is easy to distinguish, mopeds swooshing by, all the time. These mopeds are recognisable in the phote, so those were not necessarily given the focus.

So, I had my camera with me, set it on aperture priority because I wanted to show the flowers sharp and the mopeds unsharp and set it on the lowest number possible for this lens (F/4 @75 mm). With having an ISO of 100, the exposure was going to be 1/200 seconds. At that time I did not have my ND filters that I have now, so I just had to make the shot without further tools to get any motion blur.
However, with motion blur, you probably would not have seen the mopeds at all, being just stakss of light.
In post I did a bit of putting a touch of vibrance, nothing more. The picture was made on the spot, without any fancy settings, with a tripod and almost no post production. That made this shot a great impulsive photo!

Camera settings:

Location