Poking my nose (and macro lens) into a newly opening day lily reveals a world bisexuality (botanically speaking): pistils and stamens unfurling and reaching for maturity.
With the sun lighting the sides of the flower, everything seems much “hotter” than in this more neutral portrait of a day lily (also in my garden).
Just now in my garden this red “tongue” sticking out of the tiny purple flower caught my attention. I photographed it with my extreme field macro rig, described here.
This is a tiarella, a variety of saxifrage, a small plant known for growing between rocks and breaking up stones. Saxifrage is also notable as the first name of a sympathetic “green” scientist in Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic Mars Trilogy.
I photographed the small universe of this flower against the glow of the rising sun last month using the technique and in the circumstances I described earlier (along with another, related capture).
Here’s a piece I wrote about making AdSense money from a photography blog.
The very short version: traffic + content + community = $$$.
Don Pedro Lake, in the Western foothills of the Sierras in central California, is really a reservoir. In the summertime, it is hot and flecked with houseboats, but in February it is chill and mostly deserted.
Julian and I got an early start on our way to Yosemite. We passed Don Pedro Lake at sunrise, and I stopped to capture this vista. Clearly the weather was changing: either getting clear or brewing a blizzard for us in the mountains. The blizzard proved to be the case.
I twice-processed the RAW capture to preserve both sky and landscape tonal values.
What could be more mysterious than a wall of fog or clouds? You never know what is behind: mountains, or a greater storm, or a new life.
Then the veil lifts for a few precious seconds and the tree stands alone but resolute.
Covered again by clouds, the mystery resumes.
I captured this image a couple of weeks ago on my trip to Yosemite with Julian, my oldest son.
I have a new “gizmo,” purchased on eBay. Except that this small piece of photographic hardware isn’t really new. It’s used, discontinued by Nikon the manufacturer.
I won’t leave you guessing. The “gizmo” is a Nikon PN-11 extension tube. The great virtue of this extension tube, 55mm in length, is that it provides a tripod socket on a collar.
An important point in extreme field macros like the ones shown in this story, where the combination of a macro lens and extension tubes becomes very unbalanced. Mounting the assembly on the tripod at one of the extension tubes (rather than at the camera) helps provide a stable macro platform.
The downside of this extension tube is that I lose all automation. Well, the camera does still stop down the diaphragm. But I have to manually measure light and choose an exposure. Interestingly, my old spot light meter works just fine. Choosing the aperture with these kinds of photos is kind of a non-issue: I want to be as far stopped down as I can. So all losing the automation really means is that I have to set the shutter speed myself with the camera on manual. Thanks to instant LCD viewing, I can see whether my exposure was close enough, and correct things if there’s a problem.
Forthwith, one photo of a Lobelia bud, and two of Alyssum buds. If you know how small these flowers actually are, you’ll get some idea of how close I was thanks to my new (but old) tripod-mounting extension tube.
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I like the way this cherry blossom is backlit by the sun. Meanwhile, the background has gone dark so that all extraneous elements have been removed and do not distract.
Captured with my 18-200mm vibration reduction (VR) zoom lens at 135mm, handheld, with an extension tube and a +4 diopter close-up filter.
Meanwhile, it’s a great discovery in life that everything has a behind and backside. Little kids don’t know this. They think that if they can’t see something–like the rear view of something that is in front of them, or their parents when they’ve gone away–that the thing (or parent) doesn’t exist.
This is a photo of a cherry blossom from the rear. I photographed it in mid-February before leaving for Yosemite, Boulder, and Santa Fe.
Sometimes I think that unexpected views, such as this rear view, are more subtle and interesting than the lucious (and typical) frontal views of flowers in bloom.
This is a capture of a stained glass window in the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe brilliantly backlit by the late afternoon sun.
The Loretto Chapel is a pretty weird place. Privately owned (sold by the order of nuns who built the chapel) there’s a charge for admission. Inside, a soundtrack with quasi-religious theme music tells you about the various “miracles” related to the chapel. Like a carpenter showing up to build the special spiral staircase just when the nuns needed him, and only charging for his materials and not his time. It is a pretty neat staircase, and maybe I’ll post a photo of it later.
Compared with the blatant, mind-numbing tourist commercialism of Santa Fe, the Loretto Chapel is actually pretty understated. Just how many shops selling Indian trinkets, not to mention art galleries of various persuasions, can you have in a square half mile? Based on Santa Fe, an incredible density is indeed possible.
The beginning of March has got to be a kind of shoulder season in Santa Fe, so it wasn’t really too crowded, and it was fun for me to be an ambling tourist with a camera exploring the area around the Plaza.
The Rio Grande Gorge, near Taos, New Mexico, is spectacular. It’s spanned by a delicate steel arch of a bridge that you can walk across. There are even “balconies” that jut out over the drop. You can stand perched alone on one of these places, heart in mouth from vertigo, and know you are absolutely safe.
A few days ago I had the grace and good fortune to spend an hour or so photographing the gorge (and bridge) right around sunset. If you are ever in the Taos area, you should make a point of driving the couple of miles to visit this place.
I found this beautiful blue feather on a rather grubby street corner of Boulder, Colorado. Across from the ritzy hotel where our publisher put us up, this street corner seemed to be the kind of place that homeless people would congregate. But probably Boulder doesn’t have homeless people, it seems very white-bread and homogenous. (Boulderites reading this, please feel free to correct my impression. If anyone can identify the bird from the feather, I’d also appreciate that!)
The ambient light on the feather was great just where it was, so I got down on the sidewalk with my tripod and macro rig and started photographing. Passersby looked at my oddly, but the only technical hitch was that the feather kept wanting to blow away.
This feather was so beautiful that I decided to take it home, and put it in my luggage. Unfortunately, the FAA went thoroughly through my suitcase. In the process, my beautiful feather must have fluttered away, to grace some security station in Albuquerque or Denver airports forever.
Someone commented about my Horsetail Falls photos that in thumbnail they look like feathers. Well, here’s a real feather to match!
Not a rainbow, this photo is of low clouds that carried moisture. As they evaporated over the eastern ramparts of the Rocky Mountains, the late afternoon soon created this “cloud bow” effect.
Last weekend I was at a training session in Boulder, Colorado given by a publisher I work with. The training was very exciting, but I didn’t get much chance to capture photos. Monday afternoon after everyone left I went for a short hike on Flatiron Mountain above Boulder. And found this phenomenon.
