Monthly Archives: April 2010
4/10/2010
Red now…will be oak…
Back to the macro mode. I was struck by the color of the bursting acorn, beginning to sprout in the damp spring, especially in contrast to the fallen leaves and the lichened stick. I saw several after this one, but none arranged so nicely.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm and macro. F2.8 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.
Blackpoint right in Lightroom. Added Clarity and Vibrance. Sharpen Landscape preset. Cropped for composition and to eliminate some out of focus area in the lower left.
From Around Home 2010.
4/9/2010
Mousam Under Sky
We have spent a few days in the Macro world, so lets step back and take the wider view. The Mousam River runs a quarter mile behind our home and I often take a walk that includes a stretch of its bank. The double arch is a railroad bridge. Of course it is the sky that holds most of the interest in this image, and I have cropped it accordingly. And, though I know I say this a lot, this image really does look better at a larger size, available by clicking the image to open it on weiw.lightshedder.com.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent. F4.0 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 80. Landscape program.
Recovery for the sky. A touch of Fill Light. Blackpoint to the right. Added Clarity and a bit of Vibrance. Sharpen landscape preset. This is, by the way, a classic example of how I process landscapes, as detailed in the little video at Quick Dramatic Landscapes in Lightroom
From Around Home 2010.
4/8/2010
This Bud is for You!
So, I am getting really impatient for spring here in Maine. I think I may have said that before. To ease my pain I have been collecting buds of various kinds…photographically collecting that is. Once we get beyond yesterday’s maples, though, I am not good enough with local plant life to identify buds, but that does not keep me from enjoying their shapes and colors.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm and Super-macro, with manual focus. F2.8 @ 1/400th @ ISO 80. Programmed auto. I am finding, on occasion, that the SX20 fails to find focus on Super-macro. Other times it works fine??? It does have an excellent manual focus mode with an enlarged display that, for macros, is good compensation. This was taken, by the way, according to the exif data, at .09 of an inch. The bokeh on these macro shots is interesting as well.
Just basic Blackpoint, Clarity, Vibrance and Sharpen in Lightroom. Cropped just slightly for composition.
And of course, here are a few more from the bud collection, all taken the same day at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Wells, ME.
Okay…this next one is, apparently, a flower. It was tiny. As seen here it is at least 4x life size.
And this one is plainly a Catkin, but it fits the theme. I looked it up. A Catkin is a pendulant cluster of flowers, mostly without petals.
4/7/2010
Maple Flowers
You might not have noticed Maple Flowers. They are small. They come early. They are generally high off the ground in the unreachable tops of tall trees. And they don’t last long. But they are beautiful and, for me, one of the delights of spring.
I have been watching the Maple flowers more closely than usual this year for some reason. I noticed them on the trees in the back yard when they were still just tiny hard red balls on the branches. It took over three weeks, in our tidal zone with its still ocean-cold nights, for them to progress from that stage to full flower. I know. I was watching. I was waiting.
The trick with maple flowers is to find a tree mature enough to make them, but short enough so you can reach them for a picture. This tree literally pulled me up short as I was driving by on my way back from Rachel Carson NWR last weekend. It was right beside the road at the head of Fernald Pond, and the lower branches were in easy reach. I turned around and drove back, parked at the pond, and took quite a few shots. The wind was blowing, and this shot is cropped from the side because I had to hold the branch down and still, with the camera one-handed in the other, and on 28mm and Super-macro I could not keep my fingers out of the frame. Crop crop. I also used Exposure Lock and Program Shift to set a smaller aperture for increased depth of field. I wanted to keep the whole cluster in focus.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent and Super-macro. F7.1 @ 1/100th @ ISO 80. Programmed auto with Exposure Lock and Program Shift.
In Lightroom, some Recovery for the sky and background, Blackpoint to the right, added Clarity and Vibrance, and Sharpen landscape preset.
And, just for interest, a few more maple flower shots. After all, they only come once a year. The last shot is how you generally see them…just a kind of red haze on the branches of tall maple trees.
4/6/2010
Chipmunk
Not many birds singing yet in our Maine forests, in this case at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, but the Chipmunks, fully awake and hungry after the winter, are attempting to make up for it. Their high piercing calls are the sound of spring in the Maine woods, as sure as the peepers are in wet pastures. This little guy, uncharacteristically, posed on this pile of downed branches for long enough for me to get off a couple of shots at different focal lengths. Such a privilege. 🙂
So far I have employed the long end of the Canon SX20IS zoom mostly in macro mode, for long distance macros (long in this case being “over 3 feet”). It does have a 560mm equivalent field of view though, which puts birds and small critters just within reach. For this shot, I actually zoomed past the 20x mark and added a small amount of digital zoom: 30x for a 840mm equivalent field of view. Comparisons with a shot at 20x show that the detail held up very well, and I am able to achieve a larger image scale with this shot, especially with judicious cropping. The shot is also at ISO 200 and I am certainly pleased with the lack of noise. Not bad.
But of course, the image is all about cute!
Canon SX20IS at 840mm equivalent (20x optical plus a small digital boost). F5.7 @ 1/200th @ ISO 200. Programmed auto.
In Lightroom, some Recovery for the highlights on the wood, Blackpoint just slightly right, added Clarity and a smidge of Vibrance. Sharpen landscape preset.
4/5/2010
Wildflowers of Citie of Henricus Historical Park
Common Violet above.
Citie of Henricus Historical Park is a reconstructed colonial settlement on the banks of the James River in Chester VA. While it does not compare to the Williamsburg and Jamestown reconstructions in the area, it has its own charm, and is pretty impressive for a county effort. It preserves and celebrates the 2nd successful English settlement in North America, founded in 1611. A resident staff of reinactors play various roles, maintain colonial farming and gardening demonstrations, a carpenter shop, tobacco barns, etc. Henricus has an interesting history, both in Colonial and Revolutionary times, and one that somehow has not made it into any history book I read in school. More info is available here.
As fascinating as the history is, the real draw for me is accessible public land, with extensive marshes in a backwater of the James with lots of birdlife, and a stretch of riverside forest in the Dutch Gap Conservation Area with some rough trails. I visit it in spare moments when I am in Virginia at our corporate offices. I was especially eager this year to photograph the Redbud trees, and to see what spring wildflowers were out.
So what we have today is a random sampling of wildflower close-ups. All were taken with the Canon SX20IS and all but number three (Star Chickweed) and the Common Violet at the end were taken at the wide end of the zoom and macro. The Chickweed was off the trail and only accessible with the 560mm macro of the SX20, and I intentionally backed off, got down to ground level, and framed the Violet with the long macro to isolate it in an out-of-focus background.
Virginia Spring Beauty.
Star Chickweed
Henbit
Ground Ivy
Common Violet
4/4/2010
Easter Crocus: Maine
Happy Easter!! And for Easter, the first Crocus of spring from our yard in Kennebunk, ME.
Rebirth! If we need a reminder: He lives! And these flowers express the joy of it better than words.
Canon SX20IS at 560mm equivalent and macro. F5.7 @ 1/500 @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.
A touch of Recovery in Lightroom. Added Fill Light, Clarity, and Vibrance. Blackpoint right. Sharpen landscape preset.
From The Yard.
These last two at 28mm equivalent, macro and super macro.
4/3/2010
Redbud!
Another spring shot from my recent visits to Virginia. Last week there many flowering trees, mainly ornamentals, were in bloom in our industrial park. This week, as soon as I hit the highway south of Richmond, I saw these amazing purple shruby trees along the roadside, generally tucked back in behind, in the shade of the larger trees. Purple blossoms massing all along slender limbs, and no leaves in sight yet. Magical.
I went out on Thursday afternoon in a moment of free time specifically to see if I could find one where I could safely photography it. Beautiful or not, I was not about to pull off on the margin of I295 for a picture. 🙂
There were several on the grounds of Henricus Citie Park, near the visitor center, and out under the really big trees that shade the reconstructed colonial village itself. Close up they are more pink than purple. A little research on the web this morning pined the tree down as Eastern Redbud, Cercis canadensis. While authorities say it is common from Florida to Canada, the ones in Virginia were the first to catch my eye.
Canon SX20IS. 1) 560mm macro @ F5.7 @ 1/400 @ ISO 80, 2) 28mm super-macro @ F3.2 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 125, cropped from the left for composition, 3) 560mm macro @ F5.7 @ 1/320th @ ISO 200. Programmed auto.
All processed in Lightroom using Recovery, Fill Light, Blackpoint, Clarity and Vibrance, and the Sharpen landscape preset.
From First Canon VA.
4/2/2010
Irresistible Spring
While you have to look hard yet to find any signs of spring in Maine (or maybe that is just me being impatient), the season is in full cry in Virginia where I have spent the past two work weeks at meetings at the ZEISS offices.
We are in a 15 year old industrial park just off 295 in Chester, and the park landscapers planted the road dividers and margins with flowering trees of several varieties. They are all in full bloom, and it is quite a sight. This tree, not content to burst at every branch tip, was pushing out blossoms in clusters from the trunk itself. I could not resist the contrast of textures and colors here. This is another long tele macro, taken from 5 feet from the trunk. I used the flip out display to hold low, pointed up at the cluster, to get a shot into the blossoms and frame against the bark.
Canon SX20IS at 560mm equivalent and macro. F5.7 @ 1/60th @ ISO 200. Programmed auto.
In Lightroom, a bit of Fill Light and Blackpoint to the right. Added Clarity and just a little Vibrance. Sharpen Landscape preset.
From First Canon VA.
And, for the opposite effect…but still expressing the same vigor of spring in Virginia.
4/1/2010
Birch With a View
By this point in the day, the sun had sunk low enough to warm the light, which was especially effective in bringing out the gold in the winter grasses of the marsh. Add a white birch, catching light and filtering the amazing sky that day, zoom in a bit for framing, and…
Canon SX20IS at 67mm equivalent. F4 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 80. Landscape program.
Just a bit of Recovery for the sky in Lightroom. Blackpoint to the right. Added Clarity and a smidge of Vibrance. Sharpen landscape preset.
From Around Home 2010.