Posts in Category: macro
Eagar Bee! Anza Borrego Desert
It is, of course, the Eager Beaver and the Busy Bee…but this bee, or these bees since there were many of them, were so eager for nectar that they were attacking the barley opened blossoms of this flowering succulent shrub at the Anza Borrego Desert Visitor Center.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1800mm equivalent (1200 optical zoom plus 1.5x Digital Tel Converter) from about 5 feet. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 500. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Bird of Paradise
One of the highlights of my trip to San Diego every year is the Bird of Paradise plants around the Marina Village conference center. Either the festival was a bit early this year or the flowers (not only BofP) were a bit late…but there were still some good specimens. I love the color contrast when the flower is fully open. It is so outrageous!
Canon SX50HS at 24mm macro equivalent, plus 1.5x digital tel-converter. f4 @ 1/640th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Who knew? A macro.
Who knew a flower petal hid within the anther, folded as in a tiny furry coat of pollen? Who knew?
Probably lot of people actually. Botanists. Serious cultivators of flowers of all kinds. Maybe even observant gardeners. The point is, of course, that I did not. I had never looked closely enough, or perhaps, never caught the anther at just this stage of development.
This is my wife’s valentine lily, and I was using wide-angle macro (24mm equivalent, focus to 0 cm) plus the Digital Tel-converter function on my Canon SX50HS to get as close as I could. At 2x the DTC gives a 48mm equivalent field of view with better working distance and larger scale…and with an image like this that is “all detail” you loose very little quality. I might have gotten just a bit closer, but not without seriously getting in my own light. Already, on my HD 14 inch laptop display, the anther is 8 times life size.
Camera as above. f3.4 @ 1/30th @ ISO 200. Hand held (great IS on the SX50HS). Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. Processed in Lightroom for intnesity, clarity and sharpness.
Snow on Apple. The Yard.
Today we are getting up to 7 inches of wet snow mixed with freezing (and not freezing) rain, but on Christmas Day we got about an inch of dry crystalline snow. I went out the next morning to look for a few images that would catch the feel of the light coating of snow.
We have two little apple trees in the front yard, and this year they made fruit (they don’t always), but bugs got to it before we did, so we just left it in the tree. This is the largest of our apples. With snow. Mostly it is just a study in shape and texture. 🙂
Canon SX50HS with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. Program with –1/3 EV exposure compensation. 1800mm equivalent field of view (for the macro effect). f6.5 @ 1/400th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Christmas Macro Magic
Merry Christmas Eve!
I went looking for a macro this morning. It is MacroMonday over on Google+, and, as I mentioned yesterday, I need a break from posting images from the Rio Grande trip to Texas and New Mexico. Something new. The living room was dark, with only the little white seed lights of the Christmas tree glowing (along with the screen of my wife’s laptop :). I was attracted to the way the light caught in the hair of this little nutcracker ornament. I was attracted by the way the figure was suspended in the shadows and shapes of the pine needles with only the Christmas Tree lights on.
And here is where the magic comes in. This is a handheld, ambient light, macro taken in “handheld night scene mode” at 24mm equivalent field of view with the Canon SX50HS. And the “ambient light” came from the few white seed lights that were close enough. The exif data reads f3.2 @ 1/15th @ ISO 1600 but that is not the whole story. To make this happen, the camera took three shots in rapid sequence and then stacked them to produce an exposure with has much of the noise processed out, and which has been stabilized by using the position data in the three images to process out motion blur. I did use a monopod under the camera to help steady it a bit, but still, this is nothing short of magical! I have linked the image to the lightbox view at WideEyedInWonder on SmugMug so with a couple of clicks you can view this image as large as you like. (Size controls are at the top of the page.)
The third of Clarke’s Three Laws (Arthur C. Clarke, the famous SiFi writer) is “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It certainly seems as though our cameras today are getting to the point where the technology is that sufficiently advanced. This shot could have been made even in the days of film…but it would have taken a lot of work, and a very skilled artist. Today’s P&S cameras put this kind of shot within the reach of anyone with enough imagination to see it…enough sense to read the manual…and just enough courage to press the shutter button. That is magical!
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness using my hyper-real preset.
Acorns
It has been a wonderful year for acrons. If I were a squirrel I would be ecstatic. As I am not, I have mixed feelings. We have a whole new set of micro dents on the cars from parking under the oaks, and twice my wife raked the acorns off the drive and walks as a safety measure. You find drifts of solid acorn a foot tall along the roads. This is a random shot I took while out doing frost shots…and though there is not significant frost in the image, I like it. I like the firm round shapes, and all the brown tones, and the way the low light models the forms.
Canon SX50HS in macro mode at 24mm equivalent field of view…plus 1.5x digital tel-converter so I am shooting at 32mm for image scale and comfortable working distance. f4 @ 1/200th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Thornbush Dasher: Estero Llano Grande TX
I was going through odonata withdrawal in Maine during November, so it was a pleasure to go the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas where the dragons and damsels were still flying. This was literally my first dragon of the trip. I was hoping it was a new species for me…but I photographed it last year in the Valley as well. It is a Thornbush Dasher, somewhat loosely related the to the common Blue Dasher found in New England and country wide (except for the Rocky Mountains)…but the Thornbush is restricted to Texas. I really like the bokeh on this shot!
Here is a Blue Dasher for comparison, taken only a moment later and a few steps further on.
Though they are very similar in superficial look, and share a “name”, a good back view or top view of the Thornbush shows it is not same kind of bug at all. Note the flare in the tail. Note too how the angle of the light turns the eyes in last photo a very Blue Dasher green. 🙂
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 1) 2) and 3) 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 320 and 800. 4) 1200mm equivalent. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 500. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Giant Swallowtail: National Butterfly Center
The National Butterfly Center has one of the best Butterfly Gardens in the nation, but I am coming, the more often I visit, to appreciate the much less managed trails through native vegetation that extend out from the garden proper. On this last trip I managed to capture several bugs there, with one very rare, that had not seen in the gardens. This is a Giant Swallowtail, not an uncommon butterfly in Texas or else ware, but a real treat wherever it is seen. I found it in native vines along the dyke-top trail east of the gardens.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 320. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Bittersweet: Laudholm Farms
Bittersweet berries are part of the traditional New England fall/Thanksgiving table center piece. I don’t know enough about Bittersweet to know if this plant, found along the trails at Laudholm Farm (Wells National Estuarine Research Center) is American or Oriental Bittersweet. American is, as the name implies, the good Bittersweet…a native plant that is in danger of being pushed to extinction and hybridized out of existence by the invasive Chinese Bittersweet. As is so often the case, Chinese Bittersweet was intentionally introduced to the US and planted along thousands of miles of roadways and embankments to prevent soil erosion. That was before they knew how fast it would spread and how easily it hybridizes with American. Good idea? It turns out not.
By the way, the berries might look tempting, and are a fall treat for birds and rodents, but they are poisonous to man.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 24mm macro, with 1.5x digital tel-converter for image scale and working distance. The berries are just over live size on my monitor. f4 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Busy Bee: Seattle Washington
The small demonstration garden at the Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle, the first week in October, was definitely in Northwest Autumn mode. There were actually a surprising number of flowers still in bloom. I am sure the layout of the sunny courtyard with its stone flagging and walls help create a kind of micro climate that prolongs the blooming season. And the bees were certainly taking advantage…busy putting up the last of the season’s pollen to be made into honey for the winter hive.
This telephoto macro was taken at 1800mm equivalent from about 5 feet…that is the full optical zoom of the new Canon SX50HS plus the 1.5x digital tel-converter function. The optical image stabilization of the SX50HS allows for this kind of hand-held extreme telephoto macro.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f6.5 @ 1/160th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.