Lighting and Focus
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It should be no surprise that light also helps focus attention on a subject. Anomalies in lighting, like the partially lit flower in this photo, can subconsciously engage the audience.
Imperfections
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Life goes on with all it flaws, perfection is relatively rare. I think that sometimes it can be the enemy of our best efforts in photography, as in all things.
Focus
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Depth of field permits us to choose what we want to be in focus. It’s a judgement call. The decision is also part of every photographer’s style.
Gull
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This bird captures that look that many of the gulls I see have – mean, narrow eyed, like some nasty manager in a big box store, but I digress.
Cormorant
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Cormorants tend be far out on the water when sunning themselves, or flying faster than I can capture them. At 500mm it is still a stretch to get a shot like this, but the Nikon 200-500 5.6 is a brilliant lens.
Colour Again
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It’s choice to work in colour or black and white. This Downy Woodpecker has bright white feathers and sometimes depending on the background, better in colour than black and white.
Not Everything is Black and White
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This photograph was complete happenstance. A relatively large bird, the green heron was moving fast and stopped for just an instant so I could get this portrait with its wonderful colour.
Attitude
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I find it amusing when some small and relatively harmless animal just tries to stare me down.
Standing Out
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This great blue heron was walking on the lawn beside the path towards me. I just waited until he was parallel to the path and hedge. The black and white shows how easy it would have been to just to walk by and miss this four foot bird if one was not observant.
Learning to be a Duck
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This is one of about fifteen shots of the same ducks, they swam past and I kept shooting until they lined up just perfectly and I got the shot I was after.
Flowers No. 7
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Depending on your point of view one of joys of flowers is that they attract insects. While this is a flower photo, had I had any of my close up gear, the insects would have had their day on film.
Flowers No. 6
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Pulling out the detail in the flower exaggerated the noise. Today we go a long way to remove noise without thinking that with film we used grain as one of the compositional tools. You can argue they are different but the look is often the same.
Flowers No. 5
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While working on this photo by accident I stumbled on this old movie look. It reminds me of some of the lighting used in Citizen Kane and Nosferatu.
Flowers No. 4
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This was taken in a “Tudor Garden.” I like composing for the imagination. To misquote Aristotle, the parts can be visually and imaginatively more important than the whole.
Flowers No. 3
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Depth of field is underrated. Most cameras and most zoom lenses sold, limit the use of depth of field because they do not permit the use of the same aperture throughout the range of the zoom. Buying your first F2.8 zoom is the day you really get on the road to your own style.
Flowers No. 2
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My processing addresses exposure for the most part, as well as sharpness and composition. Within those there is a fair amount of latitude for creativity; how sharp, how bright, what colour filter etc. Brash or subtle it makes the final product unique.
Gardens, Flowers, Nature
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I am not quite as fond of cut flowers as I am of those in gardens and forests. But both brighten our days. This week my blog is all about flowers.
Texture
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Here I have mixed a smooth surfaced object with a textured background. Depending on the shooting angle, backgrounds can be a little challenging and need special attention.
Backlit Glass
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Backlighting glass is one of the ways of avoiding problematic reflections. Glass is interesting to work with given the various shapes and sizes available.
Common Things
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Shooting things around the house may look easy but shiny surfaces, angles of light, types of lighting are all a little complicated to solve. The many tutorials on line help, but in the end, I think table top lighting has an interesting and fun learning curve.
This is as close
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This was as close as I will ever get to Czar Nicholas II and frankly he’s not in such great shape. Reflection was created with a black acrylic sheet under the coin. The coin was held steady by some wax.
Reflection No.1 (Two photographs)
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Normally when I talk about reflections it’s about a bird on the water, but it’s a bit too cold for that now. So a scotch tasting glass made for an interesting subject. Even alone the glass looked great, but stacked on top of another similar glass you would think that a mirror was causing the effect.
Cufflink
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In the studio as out in nature a good background is important. Old scarves, coloured paper, out of focus furniture etc. etc. can be made to work.
Putting Things Together (Two Photographs)
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The pandemic has lead my wife and I to do some table-top photography with flash. It’s been a long time since I have so I am relearning old skills, putting it all together so to speak. See the second photo.
