Every season presents something different to photograph, the early spring flowers are one example. There are many varieties of Rhododendron and there is an extended stretch of time between the first ones that bloom to the late-bloomers. This image shows an earlier blooming variety.
You must be careful when photographing white objects, particularly with a digital camera. Usually we would use a spot meter in manual mode. We measure a white part of the subject where we still want to see some detail and set it to 2 stops above "normal". However this time we had the shadow of a tree moving erratically around our subject, so we had to let the camera choose the exposure at the last fraction of a second before tripping the shutter. Aperture priority (where we choose the lens opening and the camera's meter determines the shutter speed) was used to throw the background out of focus.
Note: the image is cropped slightly from the original, to remove brightly lit, out-of-focus flowers on the left.