Posts in Category: flowers
3/11/2010
Bird of Paradise against the Boats
An alternative view of the Bird of Paradise bloom, this time framed against boats in the marina, taken at a longer focal length from further back to isolate the bloom and turn the boats into interesting bokeh. Late afternoon light on the plant brought out the orange of the petals in particular.
Canon SX20IS at 250mm equivalent. F5 at 1/250th @ ISO 80. Programmed auto.
Added Clarity and just a bit of Vibrance in Lightroom. Blackpoint slightly right. Sharpen landscape preset.
From San Diego 2010.
And here is an image taken from the same spot, using a wider lens setting (95mm equivalent @ f4). As you can see, the boats become more sharply focused and battle a bit with the blooms in the foreground, but I still see it as an interesting shot, and as a contrast to the longer/closer shot above. Processing similar to above.
3/9/2010
Flower with Bokeh
Playing with the super macro on th Canon SX20IS. The bush itself and the clouds and bit of blue sky make for an interesting background.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm and Super Macro. F3.5 @ 1/250 @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.
A touch of Recovery in Lightroom for the petals. Added Clarity and Vibrance. Blackpoint slightly right. Sharpen landscape preset.
From San Diego 2010.
12/9/2009
Rose by Any Other Name
Rugosa Rose, beach rose, Japanese rose, Ramanas rose, introduced from Asia to North America many generations ago as an ornamental landscape rose, escaped, and now lives rampant on the dunes of New England. The hips are sometimes made into jelly. In this first snow of the season they certainly stand out, still only slightly shrunken from their fall glory, and still very red. The early light only emphasizes the color.
I took quite a few exposures of different clumps with snow cover. I shot in very close with wide-angle and macro, and I used the macro setting with full telephoto to isolate clusters of hips. Once more, the flip out LCD made shots like this one, where I had to hold the camera well below waist level to get the angle, possible…even easy. I look at the new entry level DSLRs and wonder…but until I see one with as flexible an LCD. I will have to stick with my little Sony P&S!
Sony DSC H50 at full tel (465mm equivalent) macro. F5.6 @ 1/640th @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.
Just your (my) basic added Clarity and Vibrance in Lightroom. Sharpen landscapes preset.
From First Snow 12/09.
10/2/2009
Splender in the Weeds
Still at Point Lobos from my visit last Sunday, but something a bit different. It would not do to get lost in the view and the drama of the fog blowing in, and miss the little details at your feet. Or so I say. As always the Sony H50s flip out LCD and super macro setting makes shots like this easy. Flip out, hold low and close, frame, shoot when it looks good.
I am not sure what this is, but the contrast between the spiky balls and the creamy pendants behind was arresting in reality, and makes, I think, a find study as an image.
Sony DSC H50 at about 40mm equivalent. F5.6 @ 1/320th @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
Just my most basic added Clarity, Vibrance, and Sharpen landscape preset in Lightroom.
From Monterey Bay 09.
9/21/2009
Coronodo National Monument, AZ
Travel day today and no time to upload pics from yesterday’s short visit to Otawa NWR in Ohio, so we will visit Arizona: Coronodo National Monument to be precise. This amazing piece of landscape sits right on the border with Mexico and contains some of the wildest accessible landscape I have encounted. A road runs up and over the mountain pass and good trails shadow it on the south side. Wonderful views. This is looking north across the valley to a storm capping the southern ramparts of the Hauchuas.
Sony DSC H9 at 31mm equivalent. Added Clarity and Vibrance in the Presence panel. Sharpened.
From Cochise Co. Arizona.
9/13/2009
Portland Head Light and Rose
Another view of Portland Head Light from our Labor Day visit. Generally I use the flip-out LCD on the H50 for low angle shots. Here, however, the rose is actually just below my eye-level, and including it in the composition from a normal height makes the greenery obscure most of the Lighthouse building. So I flipped out the LCD, tilted it down instead of up, and held the camera at arms length above my head to capture the relationship between foreground and background that I was after. Score one more for the articulated LCD.
Sony DSC H50 at about 55mm equivalent. F5.6 @ 1/1000 @ ISO 100. Programed auto with -.7EV exposure compensation for the whites of the Lighthouse.
Recovery in Lightroom for the sky and Lighthouse whites. Blackpoint just to the right. Added Clarity and Vibrance in the Presence panel. Sharpen landscape preset. This image, like most of my over-the-head shots, required some straightening of the horizon as well.
From Portland Head Light.
9/1/2009
Carol in Dent
Dent is known for the “Terrible Knitters of Dent” who, back in the early 1800s turned out terrible quantities of hand knit socks, underwear, and other knit wool garments. The vision is of the whole population of Dent sitting out in chairs, young and old, up and down streets, dawn to dusk, with baskets of wool at their feet, and knit, knit, knit.
Today it is a sleepy tourist town, well off the beaten path (see yesterday’s pic), deep in the Dales. It caters to fishermen and trekkers. The streets are so narrow I have no idea how two cars meet. We made it through town to the parking on the far side without meeting anyone…and back out in the evening as well. That kind of town. It sets up on a ledge overlooking one of the most beautiful valleys in England, so picturesque it makes your shutter finger itch. Public paths extend out from the village in all directions. We hiked a half a day loop up river and down and back to the town. We did not see a single person the whole time we hiked. Peaceful isn’t even in it, as they might say in Dent.
This is the main street between the Church yard and the Post Office. The Church now doubles as a kind of local museum where you can find out all about the Terrible Knitters.
Minolta A1 at 28mm equivalent. F8.0 @ 1/640 @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.
Just Punch and Sharpen landscape in Lightroom. Blackpoint to the right slightly.
And to round out the experience, here is a bit of the Church Yard.
Church Yard and Bell Tower Museum
8/30/2009
Heather on the Dales
Driving north over the top of the western Yorkshire Dales on a moody, dark, rainy day, we came to these fields of Heather…the first we had seen in England. Hours later, after a visit to the town where All Creatures Great and Small is set, we came back over the same road as the weather was breaking and stopped for a series of pictures. I found the stone wall compelling in contrast to the heather.
Minolta A1 at 28mm equivalent. F8.0 @ 1/640 @ ISO 100. Programed auto, tilted exposure to emphasize the sky.
Even with the tilted exposure, which left the foreground too dark, the Minolta’s sensor could not capture the detail in the sky. The original of this looks dark with a washed out sky. Very disappointing.
In Lightroom, after applying the Punch and Sharpen landscape presets, I was able to use Fill Light to restore detail in the foregound and a Graduated Filter effect to bring up the detail in the sky. Blackpoint just to the right. Slight added contrast. A touch of brightness overall. Cropped from the bottom to eliminate a distracting white stone in the wall.
This is clearly an example of software over sensor photography. Still I have to say that the Minolta’s 5mp sensor did capture the detail needed. The internal software simply could not render it into an effective image. Lightroom to the rescue…that is not my style…generally post-processing is previsualized and part of my creative process at the point of capture. The Minolta however, did not lend itself to that process.
Still, it is the final image that counts. And I find this one true to the memory of the day.
From England 2005.
8/26/2009
Sweet Sleep
We spent a late afternoon/early evening in the little town at the edge of the Dales called Skipton. This cat was decorating the bench outside the small Tourism Center where we went to gather information on the north west corner of the Dales, soaking up the last of the sun and the gathered warmth of the bench. With the flowers in the backgound, I could not resist.
Minolta A1 at 70mm equivalent. F5.0 @ 1/200 @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
Punch and Landscape sharpen preset in Lightroom. Blackpoint just slightly to the right.
From England 2005.
8/19/2009
Hills above Kendal, between the Lakes and the Dales
In honor of being in England (where I will not have access to this blog), I will post some images from a trip my wife and took to the Lake Country and Yorkshire Dales in 2005. They were taken with the Minolta A1, perhaps the worst digital camera I have ever used…it had a great lens: 28 to 140mm equivalent as I remember, but the sensor had very limited dynamic range compared to cameras I have owned since. I eventually bought a little 6mp Sony pocket camera and, when I saw the results it produce, stopped carrying the A1 altogether. Eventually there was a recall on the model when the sensors failed. By then my daughter was using the camera, and the sensor failed right after the Sony Minolta deal when service was in limbo. I never did get it fixed.
This is image, on the other hand, is one of my favorites from the camera and the trip. Our first night at a farm house B&B above Kendal at the edge of the Lake District, between the lakes and the dales, we took a walk in the B&B.
Minolta A1, at 70mm equivalent. F7.1 @ 1/400th @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
In Lightroom I preprocessed all the images in this set (>200) as a batch, applying the Punch preset (added Clarity and Vibrance), and the Landscape sharpen preset. I then opened individual images for additional processing. On this one I applied some Recovery for the sky, a bit of Fill Light, and slid the blackpoint to the right to intensify all the colors.
From England 2005.