At Trader Joe’s this afternoon I couldn’t resist a plastic clamshell of raspberries. I don’t think it’s raspberry season yet but these were grown in Watsonville, CA and they are absolutely delicious. When I rinsed them off, a few water drops clinging to the berries tempted me to take some photos. I had previously set the D800 to DX mode and the 105mm macro lens was attached so I clamped the camera to the tripod and after a few seconds fiddling with manual focus I got this shot.
I may have mentioned that Bobo is eating my house. After twelve years without so much as a nibble on anything harder than a piece of paper (except for the occasional pine nut shell) she has decided to turn the window seat next to her cage into toothpicks. I added the bay window and its adjoining window seat when I remodeled my house 5 years ago and until a couple of years ago, Bobo had not ventured onto it. She has now made the window seat one of her favorite places to hang out and a couple of months ago, she started to shred it. I have determined that it is likely that granite is too hard for her to destroy (that remains to be seen, however) and I will replace the wooden seat with a granite one with the hope that the likelihood of Bobo grinding it into sand is remote. Yesterday, my friend Jeff, who will be fabricating the new window seat out of granite for me, gave me some sample pieces of black granite to see which I preferred (gloss or matte finish) and I set them on the window seat to get a feel for which I preferred. I should have known that I really didn’t have a say in the matter. Bobo came down onto the window seat immediately to investigate and was drawn like a magnet to the glossy piece. She is completely obsessed with her reflection in the shiny black granite. It’s a good thing I already selected the glossy finish.
I took this shot with my D800 with the macro lens. As I have discovered, the depth of field of this lens is so incredibly shallow that I am having trouble focusing on anything other than tiny things. It is not a technically good shot and very little is in focus. I obviously have much to learn about this lens and how to use it properly. I decided to use this shot for my blog because it is cute and one of my Flickr challenges is “reflections.”
My knowledge of lepidoptery does not extend much further than, “oh look, there’s a butterfly” but I think this might be a western black swallowtail, apparently minus the swallowtails! This afternoon as I wandered along Miner’s Ravine Trail in search of California poppies to photograph (I found none) I did find some oddly named purple wildflowers commonly called bluedicks and, flitting about them, a few black butterflies that a Google search revealed might be western black swallowtails.
I took these shots using my 24-70mm lens at 70mm, ISO 100, f/4, 1/1000. Even at that fast shutter speed, while the flower and the butterfly’s body are in focus, the wings moved ever so slightly, blurring them a bit.
Something is amiss with my fountain and the bubble of water that emerges from the center is very flat—not what my hummers are used to bathing in so this little guy that stopped by this morning seemed a bit puzzled over the change. I guess I need to figure out what’s going on so my hummers will stay happy and stay here. I was outside photographing something else using my tripod when I heard the hummer announcing his presence. I turned the camera and snapped a few photos but I didn’t adjust the camera from what I was doing so the shutter speed is 1/40. At least the tripod kept the camera still enough to capture reasonably in focus hummers but obviously not fast enough to stop those wings in the second shot. I was using the 70-200mm lens set to 200mm at f/4.
The landscape at Arches is so stark and severe that at times it seems otherworldly. I can almost imagine Bilbo Baggins might appear on that road in the distance hobbling along on his furry feet.
This is a shot similar to one I featured in my blog post Arches Day 2 but I took this shot with my 14-24mm lens, not the borrowed fisheye lens. I edited it in Silver Efex Pro.
The film noir preset in Silver Efex Pro created much more interest in my half moon shot than I could conjure in Lightroom tonight. I took this shot on my patio with the outdoor lights on (they turn on to movement) using my 70-200mm lens with the 2x converter attached. I did crop this shot a bit but I find it exciting that I can see so much detail with the camera equipment I use. I don’t know if the Chinese rover is still moving around the surface of the moon, but it seems almost as if I can see their tracks. The US needs to return to the moon if for no other reason than to make our presence known. I still feel such elation that my family’s company, Sunset Line and Twine Co., had such a significant role in our country’s early space missions. Whenever you see a photo (click here) of a Mercury or Apollo mission parachuting toward the sea, that is Sunset parachute cord that brought all of the astronauts back safely to Earth.
Rio Samba, one of my two Ron Smith memorial roses, won this year as the first rose to bloom in my garden. I thought I’d take some closeups because the bud itself is stunted and many of its petals are distorted and browned——not a true example of the beauty of Rio Samba. The breezes thwarted my attempts at attaining crisp focus on the petals so I clipped it and brought it inside. The one rain drop was not cooperating either so I got a spray bottle and spritzed the rosebud. Out from among the ruffled petals climbed a tiny arachnid, measuring no more than 3/8 inch from extended front legs to sprattled rear ones. The drop in the upper left of the first shot was no more than 3/16 of an inch so you can get an idea about the spider’s size. If it had been any bigger, I don’t think I would have had the nerve to stand still, moving the small bud with its 8-legged ‘dark passenger’ on top (I’m finally catching up on the last two seasons of Dexter), my fingers fractions of an inch from one of my most nightmarish phobias. As the spider climbed around the petals trying to dislodge a drop of water on its back, also visible in the first shot, I followed, adjusting the camera position and manually focusing. The spider cooperated on these two shots, holding completely still for the camera’s 1.6 second shutter speed. I love my macro lens!
I took these shots at a tourist spot near Moab, Utah called Hole in the Rock. It was a garden of sorts, featuring lots of rusty inanimate objects planted along the pathways among the cactus. We stopped there because of the opportunity to photograph in high contrast situations and, because it was there. I used my macro lens and leaned in to find interesting closeups but as I look at the shots, I realize that I didn’t really use the macro features of the lens to full advantage and I could have accomplished the same thing with my 24-70mm lens. I even used manual focus as I strolled through the place which is probably also apparent! I was drawn to the rusty things more than anything else there probably because they were almost the color of the red rocks surrounding them and we were in Moab for the red rocks.
One would think I’m copying Moose Peterson’s blog posts because almost every post I’ve made about my trip to Moab follows a similar post by Moose. Today’s is no exception. His post today is “Rock Art” but the difference here is that his are from the day we photographed the rock climbers and the petroglyphs he featured today were just down the road from the rock climbers. My shots are from a couple of days before when we visited Newspaper Rock, a National Historical Site featuring similar petroglyph panels that are fenced off from mischievous hands. As I leaned over the metal fence to capture the first shot in this grouping, Moose admonished me that I’d better not drop my camera (my strap was not attached at the time) because if I dropped it inside the fenced area, I couldn’t retrieve it.
These petroglyphs were the newspapers of their day. The meaning of the symbols is lost to the eons but it is obvious they’re telling a story. It is incredible that these petroglyphs remain in such good condition. You can see in the last shot, about dead center, that in 1954 some worthy decided to add his own “Kilroy was here” comment to the ancient carvings. Barely visible above that is another “graffiti” from 1902.
Bobo’s home after six weeks of staying with my brother and she has already exhibited three of her personalities for my lens: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Another distinct personality, The Evil, came out shortly after I took these shots as I bent down to retrieve something from under her cage, and she grabbed my hair —— not such an unusual occurrence —— but then she reached beyond my hair to the bare nape of my neck and latched on with those destructive jaws to pinch . . . should I say crush . . . the delicate skin. At least it was the back of my neck instead of the front where she could have easily latched onto a carotid artery. I guess I should be thankful that the bite didn’t break the skin and only huge welts appeared.
I was trying out the macro lens and the depth of field is so shallow that only a small portion of each shot is in focus.
The Good:
The Bad:
The Ugly:
Back to Utah for this post. It’s a shot of the cables that once suspended the Dewey Bridge, built in 1916, over the Colorado River. When it was built, the bridge connected a then still remote and isolated southeastern Utah with Grand Junction, Colorado and was the longest suspension bridge west of the Mississippi at the time of its construction. It was the longest suspension bridge in Utah until its destruction by fire in 2008, after being listed in the National Registry of Historic Places and being restored as a foot and bicycle bridge. The steel towers and sturdy cables survived the fire. I decided to lay my camera atop the cables and shoot up them with a shallow depth of field.
We’ve had several days of much-needed rain and the weather forecast shows the possibility of more rain this weekend and into next week. I glanced at my cyclamen and loved the look of the drops on the petals so I went out and took a few shots before the rain threatened my camera equipment.
This is a shot taken with the D7100 and the 105mm macro lens set at ISO 100, f/11, 1/25 second shutter and manual focus. The only processing I used on this shot was my landscape preset which intensified the pink.
