Mike said he wanted to learn a little more about how I post-processed photos. So he drove down the freeway in the squishy weather and we spent a fun and happy hour or so transforming this photo of a hellebore, originally shot straight down on a light box with my 85mm perspective correcting macro lens.
[Nikon D300, 85mm PC macro (roughly, 127.5mm in 35mm terms), 2.5 seconds at f/57 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
This is a photo from about a year ago. I stood in my garden and saw these water drops clinging to a web. The rain had stopped and the sun was shining. The water drops were against a dark background, but reflected the colors of the garden.
I exposed at an intermediate aperture (f/18) so that a horizontal cross section of water drops were fully in focus.
[200mm f/4 Nikon macro lens, 300mm 35mm equivalent, 1/60 of a second at f/18 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
In the garden in the early morning I found rain drops suspended on a spider’s web. Nearby, pink Gerbera Daisies grew. These flowers were reflected and contained in the water drops. The technical challenge was to obtain high depth-of-field with subjects in constant motion from the wind, subjects so tiny that any motion was magnified.
I locked the camera’s mirror up to eliminate one possible source of vibration. As I waited for the moment of perfect calm to squeeze the remote release, I thought about the worlds inside each water drop, suspended animation waiting for a photographer to come along.
[200mm f/4 macro, 300mm 35mm equivalent focal length, 36mm extension tube, +4 diopters close-up filter, 1/8 of a second at f/40 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
We were sitting on top of Battery Townsley above Rodeo Beach in Marin Headlands. Somewhat aptly, I was reading to Julian from H.M.S. Surprise, the third volume in the Aubrey-Maturin series. The sun was coming in and out of the fog, shining brightly if obliquely when present.
All of a sudden, Julian pointed out this lizard to me, hiding under a low bush. I quickly got out my camera, and boosted the ISO to 400 so I’d have a crack at a handheld shot. Just as I was ready to make my exposure, the lizard turned his head towards me, and his eye glinted for a moment in the sun.
[105mm f/2.8 macro lens, 157.5mm 35mm equivalent focal length, 1/400 of a second at f/10 and ISO 400, handheld.]
Related story: No Time to Be Lost.
I photographed these stanchions on a pier at Fort Mason in San Francisco. Yesterday I set out to make an infinite progression of the stanchions. Somewhat like the endless doorways in World without End or the stair without end in Endless Stair.
But the lines of perspective didn’t really work. So I flipped the image this way and that, and noodled and doodled the afternoon away.
