Macro Fun

I love to get up early on a summer morning and explore the garden looking for new images. In my previous blog I captured images involving the garden sprinklers. This time I put on the macro lens (Nikon 105mm) and started exploring. Given the sprinklers had run earlier there were a lot of water droplets hanging on the flowers and foliage so I decided to focus on those.

In the 1st image I saw a row of water droplets hanging along the edge of a gladiola. To get in close, I added a Canon 5T close-up lens and a 36mm extender.  I traded depth of field for some background detail. On a shot like this all the droplets have to be very sharp or else they distract from the rest. Set your camera up as parallel to the droplets as you can.

  

If you want to get a sunburst like the above you need to go with a small aperture (f51 in this case). The tradeoff is, of course, depth of field so you need to make sure the background material is far away and not too cluttered or else it distracts from the image. Also, note that changing your angle of view relative to the sun and water droplet can greatly impact the level of sunburst. Move you head up and down watching the water drop. Find the point where the sun seems brightest (you will see the difference once you hit that magic angle).

Finding nice background color when you can is always a great way to add pop. In the image above the background was all green which was nice, but I wanted a little more pop. I grabbed another red flower from the garden (I don’t recommend this unless it is your own garden) and held it at arms’ length (while I looked through the viewfinder) and moved it behind the area I wanted to emphasize. It took a few tries to get it, but I am happy with this one.

In this final image, I couldn’t get the sunburst without an aperture that resulted in a messy  background.  So I actually shot one with the background bokeh I wanted  (large aperture) and combined it with the small aperture shot using Photoshop. The result is the sunburst plus the nice background. It always pays to think outside the box you think you are in.

Fun with the Sprinkles

Remember the hot days of summer when you used to run around in the sprinklers? Well you can still have fun with the sprinklers, but in a different way. As I was testing out the sprinklers early one morning last week, I noticed an array of beautiful images just waiting to be captured – this blog contains a few of them.

I used a Nikon 70-200mm lens with a 1.4x extender to reach in and get the images without getting wet. I was generally shooting with backlight so I had to set the EV to –1.3 to –2.0 (typical for backlit situations). I kept the depth of field shallow for the first image to remove background clutter. Notice the difference in the look of the water droplets between it and the next two which had a bit smaller aperture (more depth of field).  Try different shutter speeds to change the appearance of the droplets in the air. The first two images were shot at 1/320sec and the last at 1/100sec.

Happy Fourth of July

I thought I would share one of my latest “Floral Fusions” for the holiday. These blue star thistle blooms seemed appropriate for the 4th. This floral fusion is created using moving textured glass. One image was shot without the glass and the second was shot through the moving glass (0.4sec at f22). The images were captured in the garden, early in the morning, before the breezes started. To add a little punch behind the blue flowers I took an orange plastic bag that was handy and wrapped it around the base of the plant.  The two images were blended together in Photoshop using a layer mask and a brush. Contrast and local adjustments were done using Lightroom.

Have a happy fourth everyone!