Month: October 2012

As I pulled the dying tomato plants from their pots and harvested the last few small fruits from the Patio tomato, I noticed that my Winsome rose is budded again and there were a couple of flowers starting to open. I took the opportunity to take a few shots and decided to play around with split tones in Lightroom. Today’s Flickr theme is “dualism” something made of two parts. As I looked at this small rose, I thought it might meet the challenge because it’s made up of a flower and a stem (and a few other things, too) and that it’s made up of two colors, pink and green (are colors parts?) and when I applied one of the preset split tones in Lightroom, the dark and the light manifested themselves. So, here’s my little pink rose turned into a split tone photo.

My Flickr group’s theme yesterday was “Contre-jour,” a photographic technique that produces backlighting of the subject. I’d never heard the term before but given the definition from Wikipedia that was used to describe the challenge, roughly translated from what I can remember of my high school French, it means “against the day” or perhaps, “against the daylight.” The definition in the challenge included these sentences: “This effect usually hides details, causes a stronger contrast between light and dark, creates silhouettes and emphasizes lines and shapes. The sun, or other light source, is often seen as either a bright spot or as a strong glare behind the subject.” I didn’t try it yesterday, but, this morning, when I went outside in search of Arnold (see yesterday’s post Experiments With Flash to see who Arnold is) I looked at the sun spinner garden ornament and knew that it met yesterday’s challenge. I think the spider webs reflected in the shot add interest.

This morning before I went to the gym, I decided to try capturing my little hummer, who I’ve decided to name Arnold because he is a hummer and our recently termed out governor, also named Arnold, drove a Hummer. I waited by the fountain and Arnold arrived and flitted around the fountain elusively, then perched on one of the bare branches above it and watched me. I turned on my on camera flash and reduced its light by 3 stops, enough to highlight the hummer without making the flash obvious. I cropped both. These aren’t great shots. I think Arnold blinked in the second shot, but they’re all I got today. I’ll try again tomorrow.

These were shot using my 28-300mm lens set at 300mm, ISO 100, f/5.6, shutter speed at 1/160, and flash compensation -3.

Today’s theme is “natural texture.” This is a piece of coral that a friend brought me from Florida more than 30 years ago. I don’t know what type of coral it is, but it obviously has lots of texture. I used my 24-70mm lens at 70mm, with the aperture at f/16 and ISO 100 with a shutter speed of 2 seconds to get this shot. It was still mediocre at best until I made a few adjustments in Lightroom and cropped it. After processing, it reminds me of a chrysanthemum, only one that will never wilt.

Bandit, the cutest Welsh Corgi on the planet, came to visit us at Famous Mo’s today. His main interest was exploring the Douglas fir floor that we’re in the process of installing … and we’re thrilled that Bandit approves!

Here’s Bandit surveying the expanse in front of him:

Here’s Bandit, curious about the sound of the chop saw that suddenly screeched nearby:

And, while this shot has absolutely nothing to do with Bandit’s approval of our new floor, who could resist those eyes?

This afternoon, I went in search of a mailbox near Famous Mo’s. I walked because the weather is beautiful right now and I just wanted to take a walk. I came across this bottlebrush plant and then saw a bank of rosemary swarming with bees. I couldn’t decide which shot I preferred so I’m posting both.

As I backed out of my driveway this morning on the way to the gym, the early morning sun was making the few remaining roses glow. I pulled over, jumped out, and took shots of a miniature red rose, whose name I cannot remember, bicolored Betty Boop, and pure white John F. Kennedy, the most fragrant of this trio. These blossoms are all a little raggedy and long past their prime but the morning light brought them back to life, if only temporarily.

I woke up at 3:30 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep so I did what I always do when I wake up in the middle of the night. I groped around for my iPad, found an instructional photography video on Kelbytraining.com, and I watched it. I was glad to find that Moose Peterson has a new wildlife video. Since I’ll be joining Moose at the Grand Canyon in late February at a photography workshop, I thought I’d see what he had to say about wildlife photography, although our main focus in February will be landscapes. I was happy to see that his two cameras of choice are the Nikon D4 and the Nikon D800. I don’t have a D4 but I certainly plan to pick his brain about the D800.

Moose’s approach is to practice, practice, practice right in your own backyard so when the opportunity to photograph wildlife in the actual wild does occur, you’ll be more or less prepared. This makes perfect sense, although I don’t have nearly the variety of wildlife Moose, who lives on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada range in a forest, has. He does live in a neighborhood, though, just one that is much more rural than mine. As I watched the video, the occasional car drove by on the street behind and he had to make compositional and exposure adjustments to avoid photographing his neighbor’s deck. It’s nice to know these kinds of things happen to the pros, too. He devoted several segments to bird photography, including hummingbird photography. Since I do have lots of birds that visit my yard, including hummingbirds, and birds are my favorite photography subjects, I paid lots of attention. I learned some valuable tips about it and discovered that Moose makes the occasional “improvement” on the wildlife scene in his backyard. As he pointed out, Alvin, the resident rufous hummingbird cooperated for the Kelby training video crew and arrived on time; in fact, Alvin appeared to be in almost every shot because many of the shots were near the hummingbird feeders. One of the suggestions that Moose has is to modify a natural perch and affix it near the feeder, in the hopes of drawing the hummer to perch there and watch over his territory. This gives the photographer the opportunity to photograph the bird in a more wild setting than at the feeders. Of course Alvin came immediately to the bare twig attached to a light stand and posed as if on cue. Moose also suggested setting up on a tripod using a remote shutter release and with the camera focused on the modified perch waiting for the moment when the hummer arrives.

I found a twig, the kind the hummer always sets on while he guards his feeder. I modified it by breaking, not cutting the extraneous twigs off (afterall, it has to look natural), leaving the prime part of the twig exposed. I attached it with zip ties to the shepherd’s hook above where the feeder hangs hoping that my resident hummer might be like Alvin and come right over.

I set up the tripod and moved a potted rose tree which was right where I needed my tripod to be. I had to use manual focus in order to focus on the specific spot I thought the hummer might land on. I tried both aperture priority (that’s what Moose uses) and shutter priority in case I had an opportunity to shoot the hummer in the air. I closed the eyepiece shutter opening to prevent extraneous light from entering. Then I got out my remote trigger which wouldn’t work no matter how many ways I tried; I didn’t think the batteries were dead because the light was on. After 30 minutes of fiddling, I read that weak batteries can prevent it from firing. New batteries were all it needed to work. Then, I experimented with whether my remote trigger would operate though windows (it apparently does not). Because the twig appeared a little dark, I used flash (my on camera flash, not my Speed Light but that might come out in the future) because Moose highly recommended it and suggested ways to make it seem as if the flash wasn’t used while still getting the desired lighting on the feathers. Hmm. There is obviously more preparation to this wildlife photography than just stumbling upon a wild creature.

With this scenario, one is committed to a specific shot. If the hummer were to arrive and land or hover around the feeder, I wouldn’t get the shot because the camera is focused on the twig attached above the feeder and not on the feeder. I heard the hummer out there all the while I was in the yard setting up. He never came to the feeder, though, either while I was outside or after I left the yard. Finally, when two hours had passed and I was still hearing the hummer but not seeing him, I decided to call it quits. I did take a few shots of the twig, though, and that’s what my photo is, along with one taken with my iPhone of the set up. I tried to channel my inner Moose but didn’t manage to do it. I got some nice bokeh, though.

The waiting game:

This morning when I went outside to save my fountain pump which was laboring to push the paltry amount of water that was left in the basin, I noticed the sun was at the perfect angle to highlight the water drops on the jade plant setting on a table nearby. My 24-70mm lens was already on the camera so I set the aperture to f/4 and bumped the shutter speed up to 1/800 in the hopes of freezing a drop falling from one of the leaves. My efforts were in vain but I did get a few shots I liked and I cropped them all so that they appear to be macro shots.

I was excited to see a few clouds and to feel the breeze today. It looks as if fall is finally on its way. The first few days of October were over 100° so it was nice to have slightly cooler temperatures. This oak tree is across the street from Famous Mo’s and before I left there this afternoon, I took a couple of shots of it.

I found some metal stars in a box at Mo’s this afternoon and, of course, I stuck them on the granite wall. No one has noticed them yet. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for anyone to notice that I decorated one wall.

I listened to Arlo Guthrie’s 1967 twenty minute monologue and anti-draft protest, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” so many times that I had most of it memorized. For some reason, this morning when I photographed this bench seat for the Flickr “minimalist” challenge, Arlo’s words came to mind, “…and they all moved away…” when he revealed to the “mean nasty ugly people” on the bench who were “mother rapers” and “father stabbers,” among other things, that he had been sent to sit on the Group W bench with them at his draft physical because he had been arrested for . . . littering!

I resisted adding to the photo some “circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back telling what each one was” and now I can’t get that song out of my head. So, today’s shot is my attempt at minimalism.

This is just the beginning of an oak tree. Yes, this acorn might someday become an oak, once the scrub jays plant it somewhere in my yard. Today’s challenge theme is “beginning” and when I noticed this acorn on my lawn a while ago, I knew it was my subject today.

I just returned from an eye appointment and my eyes are dilated so I everything is overly bright. I decided to see what I could see through my camera lens with my eyes in this condition. As expected, everything is just as bright through the lens and I’m not sure I’m able to see well enough to focus. But, what the heck. I’ll try anything. As I wandered in the backyard, the soothing, gurgling sounds of the fountain caught my attention. When I framed this shot of the fountain with the gone-to-seed lavender stalks in the foreground, it occurred to me that since today’s Flickr challenge theme is “relax” this shot meets that challenge. And, since I can’t trust my eyesight right now, I didn’t tweak the shot at all in Lightroom so it is straight out of the camera.

190mm
ISO 200
f/5.6
1/80
WB: Fine Weather
SOOC