Posts in Category: macro
6/5/2010
Plantain
Laudholm Farm manages old farm lands, as you might guess from the name, and the open meadows are home to all kinds of plants…both native and foreign. This is English Plantain, which is a weed in a yard, but part of a natural and nutritious mix of plants in a meadow. Song-birds eat the seeds (it is actually grown commercially for cage bird feed). Rabbits love the leaves. One man’s weed is another man’s treasure.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent and Super-macro. Lens-hood touching the stem and the flowers inside. F4.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 160. Programmed auto.
And here is another view.
This one at F4 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 80. This one, to me, has a feel of the open prairies…though it is only a hill top meadow in New England.
Both processed in Lightroom using my standard touch of Recovery, Fill Light, Blackpoint right, added Clarity and Vibrance and Sharpen landscape preset.
From Laudholm Farms.
6/3/2010
Cinnamon Fern
The Cinnamon Fern gets its name from the fertile spike, or fond, which is loaded with cinnamon colored spores. According the wiki on the subject, it is genetically separate from the rest of the fern world, possibly even a separate, though related, family. Early light and Super-macro bring the cinnamon aspect. You see it more often like this.
Taken at the Wells National Estuarine Research Center at Laudholm Farms in Wells ME on Memorial Day. The tricky part was exposure, as I was about 50 feet from the forest edge and the full sun on the marsh beyond, working a mix of light shafts and shadow. Mostly I just kept the brighter background out of the images as much as possible. The camera’s Programmed Auto handled the mix of light values very well.
Canon SX20IS. 1) F2.8 @ 1/500th @ ISO 160, 2) F2.8 @ 1/400th @ ISO 160, 3) F2.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 80.
In Lightroom, a touch of Recovery for the highlights and the bright backgrounds in 1 and 2, some Fill Light for the shadows, Blackpoint right, added Clarity and just a bit of Vibrance. Sharpen landscape preset.
From the new Laudholm Farm gallery.
5/31/2010
Brief as the Dew on a Rose
Rugussa Rose, or Beach Rose, is an invasive plant all along the seaside in the northeast: so typical of the dunes in New England that most people assume it is native and natural. This is Parson’s Beach in Kennebunk, Maine, while I was out early one morning last week to digiscope Song Sparrows and Yellow Warblers, who feed and nest in fair numbers in the roses and Honeysuckle of the dunes. The dew had just touched this rose, and was not going to last long.
Somewhere in there is a reason why this might be an appropriate image for Memorial Day.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent and Super-macro. F5.6 @ 1/30th @ ISO 80. Programmed auto with Exposure Lock and Program Shift for greater depth of field.
In Lightroom, some Recovery for the highlights, Fill Light and Blackpoint to the right. Had to be careful with the blackpoint which tended to block up deeper pinks of the rose really quickly. Added Clarity and and a touch of Vibrance. Sharpen landscape preset. Cropped from both sides for composition.
From Around Home 2010.
5/28/2010
Rhododendron
We only have one Rhododendron bush in our yard…which is far below par for southern Maine. We have, over the years, planted several more, but none of them took. So maybe we enjoy our single bush all the more. This is an open shade shot, early in the am. I used the Super-macro setting which locks the lens at 28mm equivalent, and exposure lock and program shift to put the f-stop at 5.6 for greater depth of field. (The lens was just about touching the forward reaching stamen.) That put me at 1/20th of a second for exposure, but the Canon’s Optical Image Stabilization handled it well, even sans-tripod.
And if I tell you it was at ISO 80, and Programmed auto, that is all the technical data already.
A touch of Fill Light to compensate for Blackpoint right for extended contrast, added Clarity and just a tiny amount of Vibrance. Sharpen landscape preset. Auto White Balance to remove the blue tinge of deep shadow.
From The Yard, Kennebunk ME.
5/27/2010
Pastel Jungle
While this gives the impression of a veritable jungle of purple blossoms and green stalks, it is actually quite a small patch of chives in flower in our garden out back. The low angle facilitated by the flip out LCD on the Canon SX20IS, combined with the 28mm equivalent Super-macro, transform the mundane into the exotic. The chives were in deep shadow, early in the morning, with the sun already on the lawn beyond the sheltering trees. Composition and placement of the plane of sharp focus is critical to the success of this shot. I wish I could say I did it on purpose…but I just shot several exposures and selected the one that works best in post-processing triage. 🙂
Canon SX20IS, as mentioned, at 28mm equivalent and Super-macro. F2.8 @ 1/50th @ ISO 160. Programmed auto.
Recovery in Lightroom for the highlights in the background. A touch of Fill Light for the flowers, Blackpoint to the right. Added Clarity and just a bit of Vibrance. Sharpen landscape preset. Finally, the tricky light made the chives too purple. Auto White Balance in Lightroom brought them back to reality.
From The Yard, Kennebunk ME.
5/14 – 5/15/2010
I will be doing a chase car for Team Zeiss at the World Series of Birding, beginning at midnight tonight and going trough midnight on Saturday, so…this post will most likely have to cover two days. (You can follow my adventures, and the adventures of Team Zeiss, on Twitter, @singraham or @zeissbirding_us, or see both twitters and blog posts at zeisssports.wordpress.com.)
That said, these are Pink Lady Slipper Orchids from Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Wells, ME, taken last Sunday. The top shots are from a sunny patch facing the river, right at the edge of the forest, which bloomed early…most of the flowers at Rachel Carson looked like the bottom shot last Sunday. I was there early, and the low sun was in and out behind clouds, so the light on the full blooms is quite different than the light on the unopened buds.
All were taken with the Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent and Super-macro. Exposure varied with the light but was mostly at ISO 80 and ISO 125. The top three at F2.8, and the bottom one at f5.
For the sunny shots, a bit of Recovery in Lightroom. A touch of Fill Light, Blackpoint to the right, added Clarity and Vibrance, Sharpen landscape preset. For the bottom shot, similar but, clearly, different amounts, plus cropping for composition.
5/13/2010
Painted Trillium
These spring beauties bloom only briefly, around the same time as Lady Slipper Orchid, and in the same locations. I could find only two at Rachel Carson NWR last Sunday, but it might be a bit early.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm and Super-macro. F2.8 @ 1/60th @ ISO 125. Programmed auto.
In Lightroom, a touch of Recovery for the petals, not much Fill Light, Blackpoint right slightly, added Clarity and Vibrance. Sharpen landscape preset. Cropped slightly for composition.
5/12/2010
The Long and the Short of Fiddleheads
Same fern. Same fiddlehead. The top shot is taken at the wide end of the zoom, 28mm equivalent, and Super-Macro from centimeters away. The second shot is taken at the tel end of the zoom, 560mm equivalent, and Macro, from 3.5 feet away. Clearly they are very different images of exactly the same subject. The angle on the first one is slightly different as well. I used the flip out LCD to get down a bit lower to put the background elements exactly where I wanted them as part of the composition. In the second, I shot from higher up to increase the separation between the subject and the background, and to make sure there were no recognizable objects to distract. Both were carefully framed for effect.
I am not sure which I like better…and I am not sure that is even the question to ask. Both are strong images (in my opinion 🙂 ). They are just very different images. Same fern. The long and the short of it, so to speak.
Both are with the Canon SX20IS on Programmed auto.
1) F2.8 @ 1/500th @ ISO 160.
2) F5.7 @ 1/320th @ ISO 400.
Similar processing in Lighroom involving Recovery for high-lights, Fill Light for shadows. Blackpoint to the right, added Clarity and Vibrance and Sharpen landscape preset. Reduced exposure values #2 to match the tones better to #1.
5/11/2010
Unfolding Season
I have taken a shot (several actually) like this almost every spring. Compare to 4/15/2009 which are actually images taken on 5/19/2008. It does not matter. I find the emerging forms and the coiled potential irresistible.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent and Super-macro. The fiddlehead was actually inside my lens hood. F2.8 @ 1/160th @ ISO 160. Programmed auto.
In Lightroom, Recovery for the background. Fill Light for the fern. Blackpoint just slightly right. Added Clarity and Vibrance. Sharpen landscape preset. Cropped for composition.
5/9/2010
Bluets for Mother’s Day
Happy Sunday and Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms, especially to my lovely wife, Carol.
The Azure Bluet is a tiny flower of lawns and meadows, found all through the Eastern US, growing in acidic soils. This spring they are all over our shady lawn, and I am seeing pale blue patches in most of the yards on our street. We are talking tiny here. The flowers themselves are less than half an inch wide and, here in New England, they grow no more than 2 inches tall (there is a taller variety in the South). That makes them close to twice life size in this image, as displayed on my monitor.
This is another shot using the Canon SX20IS’s flip out LCD. Essentially I got down for an eye to eye view with the bluets. I am within 1/4 inch of the center flower. Open shade made it possible to angle to place the wood fragment for pleasing composition. To my eye it anchors the composition, giving a bit more coherence to an otherwise random pattern of flowers. Later, in Lightroom, I cropped from the bottom to improve the composition and to eliminate some more out of focus flowers.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm and Super-macro. F2.8 @ 1/1250 @ ISO 125. Programmed auto.
Besides the cropping, I used a touch of Recovery and a bit of Fill Light in Lightroom. Added Clarity and not much Vibrance at all. Sharpen landscape preset.
From The Yard, Kennebunk ME.
And, for contrast, a more conventional view.
