Rusty Bracket, #2

Meant to post this about a week ago but seem to have missed that deadline...

Second, and final shot of the rusty metal bracket. I do prefer the first one, but this one's okay too.  Taken after the feather added by my nephew had been removed.

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White on Rust

An actual new shot - not raided from my archives...

Had the opportunity to go out to shoot with my nephew yesterday. He's the new owner of his first SLR and we were going to do a bit of photography and then work on the shots later so that he could get a sense of some of the things I do to process my shots.

We got on location, started to get cameras out and he said "I think I forgot to put my battery back in the camera, it's still in the charger".  Rookies! So instead of both of us collecting some shots, I took some then we headed back to try out the processing end of things. This isn't one of the ones we worked on together, but I rather like the colour and texture in this one so I thought I'd post it first.

What you see is a very rusted metal bracket bolted onto a rock that would be underwater at high tide. The feather, which I'll admit gives a bit of scale, was added by my nephew.

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Gone to Seed

Resorting once again to archive raiding...

This one was taken back in August. I must admit that I no longer recall what it was that I wanted out of this shot, just that I wasn't fully satisfied with this result. Now that I can't remember what I wanted I find that I like it a little more.

Quite a bit of work was done on this one. I think it's worth noting that what looks like a shadow behind this dead flower (wild marigold or something like that I think) is actually another dead flower in the distance. The picture was actually shot in very bright (and hot) sunlight, which I suppose gives a little bit of a hint of what was done in processing.

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Home for Sale

First of the archive-mining shots (I haven't anything recent to post).

There's an area at Deas Island Park that was cleared in the not too distant past. It's starting to grow over a bit now, mostly scrubby weeds, moss and wild marigold-like flowers so far. The odd thing about it is that is seems to be a dumping ground for snails as the ground is fairly littered with empty snail shells. Not sure if the shells are naturally abandonded or if they've been left there after being picked clean by some kind of predator.

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Different Day, Different Insect

I've kind of gotten side-tracked for the past couple of days and almost forgot to post another picture... My attempt to get a roll going is off to a shaky start!

This was taken the day after the previous post at a totally different park (Deas Island as opposed to Fraser River) but the insects are were both caught/shot on the same kind of flower (I was told that it's chamomile?). The 'poses' are almost identical - I have a great report with my bug subjects to get them to strike such similar poses. Actually, it's just that I wanted to get a nice sharp shot of the eyes and that's only possible from this angle or very similar angle.

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Bumbling Along

I knew when I started my holidays that it would probably not be my busiest posting period as I've been having a bit of an inspirational drought of late. However, 5 weeks into my holidays and this my first post is a little bit less than even I expected. Chalk it up to computer failure (computer died on the first day of holidays, replacement took over two weeks to arrive), computer reconfiguration (took several days to get it set back up to my liking), briefly out of town, then helping a friend re-roof his garage. Along with the new computer comes new software, and the newest version of Photoshop is taking a bit of getting used to compared with the relatively old version I had been using.

I finally took the camera out yesterday, not really because I was feeling inspired but thinking that I ought to at least make the effort. Most of what I captured was, predictably crap, but I did get one or two shots that aren't bad. They're not exactly what I'd like to be posting at the moment, but it's what I've got so it'll have to do.

Here's the first one.

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Sunflower

I don't know how it so quickly got to be so long since my last post...

In the previous post I'd said that maybe I'd spring for some flowers to do some lightbox (or "lighttent" if you prefer, though what I built is actually much more a box) work. Well, I did pick up what I thought was a nice collection of interesting flowers and proceeded to snap a 'few' shots then started working on a couple of pictures but I just wasn't at all happy with the results, either out-of-camera or after processing.

I'd actually decided to give up on that set completely, and in fact hadn't touched anything for some time. This evening, I decided that I really ought to take another look and see if there wasn't something I could do with at least one of the shots - this is the result.

Like many/most of the pictures I post, I'm still not 100% happy with this one. It is, however, fair to say that it's a darn sight more satisfying than any of my previous attempts.

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Light Box Chess Set

After my last post I felt motivated to build a "cheap" light box for more control over lighting shots such as that one. Finding myself with some time to fill last Friday afternoon I did a little shopping to see what I could come up with.

It didn't stay a cheap project for very long, although it certainly didn't cost anything like what a more purpose-built system would cost.

Unfortunately, while I saved a bit of money I had to sacrifice other things. In this case, although I'd coughed up the bucks for some decent full-spectrum bulbs, I still found the results horribly colour-cast. Thank goodness I shoot digital, as this white balance error can be corrected realively easily... well, mostly. There's still something a little wrong with the corrected colour of this shot although I'm not sure just what it is. But aside from that, the over-all lighting effect isn't bad, specially considering that I was stupid enough to select such a highly reflective item for my first test subject.

If I can scrape a couple of bucks together next weekend I think I'll buy some nice flowers to see what I can do with them in a controlled lighting environment. They, at least, should not be reflective.

[Oh, almost forgot... In case you missed my late-addition comment to my last post, I've had to add in comment moderation due to some asshole trying to use the comment section of my blog to plug his own - for all I know virus infected - stuff.  He loaded up an identical comment (Chinese characters) full of links to other sites to almost 200 of my posts before I cut him off.  I've since deleted all his comments; it was faster for me to do this than the time it took him to load them, so nuts to him.  Comments related to my posts and this blog are still welcome and encouraged, but you'll have to have patience for them to appear on the site as now I have to approve them first - I'll probably only check for new comments once a day.]

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Pollen Collection

This is another shot from Roberts Bank from quite a while back. The yellow flowers in this shot are just a few of a very large colony. As it turns out they drop pollen like crazy which I discovered after getting this shot - I'd pushed my way into the midst of them and once back on the path I found myself covered in pollen stains which could not be brushed off. Worth it though, I think.

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Sunrise - Three Bridges

I've been sea-sawing back and forth over these two shots, trying to decide if either one was worth posting as I'm not completely happy with either. Then I figured, what the heck, I haven't done a two-fer Sunday for a while and surely if neither is up to standard individually, together they're post-worthy...

These were actually taken almost a month ago, early in the morning from the parking structure above Front street in New Westminster.

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The Approach

I spent some time one afternoon with my macro lens working on just one large colony of wild pea. Over the course of things I was able to distinguish at last 6 different types of bee/wasp working the blossoms, and another two varieties on immediately adjacent plants. I didn't manage to get satisfactory pictures of all of them, though I did try. After a while I gave up trying to get them all - some you just couldn't get close to - and instead spent some time trying to capture the ones I could get close to in flight.

It's not as easy as you might think... Having said that, this shot isn't bad, though a little faster shutter would have been nice so as to capture more of the wings.

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Butterfly World #4

I think this'll be the last of the pictures from Butterfly world that I'll post. It's that one that I like the best...

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Imported Insects

Visited Butterfly World in Coombs this past weekend, where the variety of butterflies flittering about was rather limited. Even so, I did manage to get a few decent shots, a few of which I'll post over the next couple of days.

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Wait a sec, that's not a bird!

Well, I said that all I had to draw from was bird shots, which was true when I wrote it. Then yesterday I stumbled - almost literally - across this guy having a nap, hanging off the grass about 8 inches off the ground. I quickly swapped lenses so that I had the macro on and lay down on the ground to get a nice straight-on shot with the camera partially supported on the ground.

I was lying right on top of a red ant nest, of course.

After just a couple of shots (to be sure that I'd have one that would be good) it was time to get up and away from the ants. Just as well, as he started twitching/vibrating just after that; about 30 seconds later he took off. The twitchy/vibrating thing was interesting to watch - it looked very much like an old propeller plane starting up with cold engines, a little rough at first, not firing on all cylinders, but getting smoother as the engine warmed up and the oil started to flow.

As usual I've had a challenge getting the colour/brightness/tone to come out accurately. Might have been less of a challenge if I didn't use Photoshop to process, but I wanted to mute the background and you just can't do that with any other program. The dragonfly as you see it here is pretty close to what I had in Photoshop (which was very accurate to what I shot), except that the colours here aren't quite as vibrant (at no time did I fiddle with the saturation - it really was this colourfull).

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Opening Soon

I spent quite a bit of time out at Iona yesterday, photographing birds. Haven't got any of those shots ready yet (they may never be ready) so I thought I'd throw this one up instead, taken at the end of many pleasant hours in the hot sun

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