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“Pilings” – Belmar Fishing Club Pier, Belmar, NJ
(Canon 5D Mark II, 24-70mm f.2.8L lens w/ Singh-Ray Vari-ND filter, tripod; 2.0 sec @ f/22, ISO 50, 0 EV)
“Roiled Surf” – Sea Girt, NJ
(Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens w/ Singh-Ray Vari-ND filter, tripod; 2.0 sec @ f/22, ISO 50, 0 EV; FL 140mm)
This was a very busy weekend. Yesterday (Saturday) I was up at 0400 and out of the house before 0500 on my way to Baltimore, MD for the Brenda Tharp seminar presented by the Baltimore Camera Club which was fabulous. The seminar ran from 0800 to 1700 and I got back home around 2000. This morning we were up at 0500 and off for the North Shore of New Jersey. You remember two weeks ago when we went to Longwood Gardens and it was Kid’s Day? Well today we drove into the jaws of what is billed as the largest St. Patrick’s Day Parade along the Jersey shore in Belmar. Arrgh!! The festivities didn’t interfere with shooting, it just made getting around the North Shore in general and Belmar in particular a real pain in the backside.
And it didn’t help that the wintering ducks seemed to have checked out. So no cute duckies to photograph. Well that was okay because I really wanted to shoot with the new camera (5DMk2) and my birding set-up remains the 50D (because of the 1.6x crop factor) and the 300mm f/2.8L IS lens w/ 2x teleconverter. Put it all together and it gives me 960mm of effective reach, great for birds. But like I said, there were no birds to photograph.
So I turned to landscapes and seascapes shot with the new camera and my 24-70 and 70-200 lenses. I really enjoy long water exposures since it generally turns the water so silky and that is what I wanted to do here. But even at f/22 and dropping the ISO all the way down to 50, I couldn’t slow the shutter speed enough so I turned to my Vari-ND filter. It is without question a very expensive filter (between $400 and $500) but golly it works great. Put it on and you can adjust the ND anywhere from 2 to 8 stops. If you want to slow shutter speeds way down, you could wait until dark or slap one of these babies on. It will stop a runaway locomotive!
Anyway, here are just two of the seascape images from this morning. Hope you enjoy them!
(1/40 sec @ f/7.1; ISO 800; +2/3 EV; AWB; FL 66mm)
… my new Canon 5D Mark II and me.
The new camera arrived yesterday (purchased from Adorama – see affiliate ad on left).
I won’t bore you with the details but it was a long and winding road that brought me to this point. But as they say, all’s well that end’s well and I am very happy with how this has ended.
As we are all wont to do, I wanted to check the new camera out. So I pulled down a flower and started to snap away just to check that everything works as it should.
I made this image under bare bones conditions using the new Canon 5D Mark II; 24-70mm f/2.8L w/ 500D close-up lens; handheld. Lighting was just overhead indoor lights.
Image was processed with Nik filters.
I think I will end this series of images made during our recent trip to Longwood Gardens (PA) with one that continues to bring a smile to my face every time I look at it. Yes, the kids did appear. And yes, they had mom and dad in tow. It was time to break out the macro lens and really work in close. So I put my Sigma 70mm macro lens w/ a 12mm extension tube on the Canon 50D and went to work getting up-close and personal with the orchids.
What can I say? Had I not brought along the macro lens, I very probably would have missed this “Close Encounter of the Orchid Kind”. There standing in the heart of this beautiful orchid was a tiny little alien screaming “Take Me to Your Leader!”
I was pleasantly surprised, make that shocked, to receive an e-mail earlier this week notifying me that my blog, this blog – “It’s My Nature”, has been selected as one of “50 Amazing Nature Photography Bloggers”. To see the complete list go to ( http://www.photography-colleges.org/50-amazing-nature-photography-bloggers/ . I’m in with some mighty fine company. Maybe some of their skills will rub off!
Not a whole lot to say here. Most of the morning, I carried two cameras ready to go. One was the 50D with the 24-70 and the other was the 30D with the Lensbaby. I added the soft focus optic for this image. Processing was done with Nik filters – Viveza 2 to adjust brightness, contrast, saturation and structure; Glamour Glow filter in Color Efex Pro; and then, at the last second, I decide to add a bit of sharpening with Sharpener Pro. The sharpening added more detail to the petals while leaving the halos characteristic of the soft focus optic intact. I kinda liked the result.
This is another image from our weekend trip to Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA. As I said in my previous post, what I had hoped would be a quiet winter morning in the Conservatory (like we had spent there last year) quickly turned into a zoo because it was “Or-KID Day” at the gardens and what seemed like a million kids showed up with parents in tow.
Despite these unforeseen challenges, I did get to do some shooting starting early on (before the kids arrived) with some wide angle HDR photography before progressing to some Macro and Lensbaby Soft-focus work. I will be presenting some examples of each over the next week.
I had just one opportunity to make the 5-image series I needed for this HDR composite image. Unseen stage left are the elevator and stairs up from the entrance. Obviously, I got there first, got set up and made this series of images just before the elevator doors opened the first group of visitors walked into the scene. I used my Canon 50D and 24-70 f/2.8L lens mounted on my tripod. I created the HDR image using Photomatix Pro and processed the image using Nik filters (Dfine for noise reduction), Viveza (to adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, structure) and a couple of Color Efex Pro filters to tweak things a bit. I finished up with a bit of sharpening using Nik Sharpener Pro.
And this is the result.
Barb and I spent a most interesting day at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA yesterday. It is always nice to spend a winter day within the warm confines of the conservatory. This is pretty much the middle of their orchid exhibit. So between the orchids and everything else, there is really a lot to see. It was also an interesting day in other ways as well, not the least of which was that it turned out to be a kid’s days (my bad for not checking the events schedule more closely). And when we arrived about 20 minutes prior to opening, there were about 20 people with tripods standing around – a camera club event.
Despite these unforeseen challenges, I did get to do some shooting starting early on (before the kids arrived) with some wide angle HDR photography before progressing to some Macro and Lensbaby Soft-focus work. I will be presenting some examples of each over the next week.
This first image is a “make good” from last year when I tried to make this image and blew the composition, blew the image, blew the processing. You name it; I blew it. So I was hoping it would be back this year and I knew I wanted another chance. I approaching this image several ways but finally decided on the approach used for this image. I used my Canon 50D and 24-70 f/2.8L lens mounted on my tripod. I attached a Singh-Ray Vari-ND filter so I could control the shutter speed in order to get the silky water. Then I took a series of 5 images to use in an HDR composite. The five images varied in their EV (-2 2/3, -1 2/3, -2/3, +1/3, +1 1/3) and consequently their shutter speed. I created the HDR image using Photomatix Pro and processed the image using Nik filters (Dfine for noise reduction), Viveza (to adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, structure) and a couple of Color Efex Pro filters ending with Glamour Glow. I finished up with a bit of Sharpening using Sharpener Pro.
And this is the result.
NOTE: You may have noticed the Adorama ad in the left column below my page listings. I am now an Adorama Affiliate. I will say more about this over the next week or so. In a nutshell, if you are interesting in making a purchase of any type (camera, lens, bag, card, binoculars, etc) and click through to Adorama via the link here on my website to make that purchase, it gets recorded and I credited with a referral. And you will have my deepest gratitude!
My wife and I stopped by one of our favorite local city parks this morning in search of some birds. We know this park well and know that it is not at all unusual for Chickadees, Titmice, and Nuthatches to come eat out of your hand and other birds (White Throat Sparrows, Cardinals and Jays) and bird wannabes (Squirrels) to come eat whatever seed is left on the ground or in case of conditions like we have now, on top of the snow.
The Chickadees, in particular, did not disappoint today. They were coming to my wife even before she was able to get the seeds out of the bag. I stood back and waiting for opportunities to get some decent images. They are fast little buggers, that much is for certain.
This first image is one that I have ended up naming “Gratitude”. There is just something about the look of the Chickadee that makes me think he is looking at my wife and saying “thank you” for bringing some seeds.
The second image immediately followed the first. Again I can’t help but think that after thanking my wife for bringing the seeds, he said “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll take this one.”
A little further on in our walk, we found the White Throat Sparrows waiting for some seed to be placed on the snow so they could could also eat. Here is an image of the “Patient White Throat“.
All images were made with my Canon 50D and 300mm f/2.8L IS lens, handheld.
I was lamenting about today’s snowfall (the second big storm in four days) over on Facebook and then decided I needed to think Spring. So I went back into my wildflower images from early last Spring and came up with one of my favorites, the simple Trout Lily, to reprise. I did rework it a bit using the Nik filters and think it is a stronger image for it.
Not a whole lot to say here except…
Think Spring!!!
It has been a very slow weekend from a photography perspective. I have been sick since Thursday and with the snowstorm on Saturday, I haven’t gotten out to shoot at all. So I may have to pull from the archives for something to post to the blog this week. But before I do that, let me indulge in a little bit of creative silliness. I did spend a few minutes out in the backyard yesterday and I happened to have my iPhone tucked away in my pocket. So in the few minutes that I was out there, I did end up making a few images.
When I got back into the house just a few minutes later, I dumped them on to the iMac and started to play around with processing using the Nik Complete suite of plug-ins for Photoshop. Here’s what I came up with.
This image is of three Maine Harbor Bell wind chimes that we have hanging from the corner of the garage. Processing was with Nik Dfine for noise reduction; Nik Viveza for brightness, contrast, structure; Nik Silver Efex Pro for the conversion to black and white and the antique sepia look; and finally just a touch of Sharpener Pro.
It’s not the Mona Lisa but it was fun to create.
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