Backyard Summertime Nature in New Jersey.
Several frogs and many dragonflies (and damselflies) in my pond.
Individual images in the slideshow can be viewed here.
Sunday (24-June-2018) — New Jersey
Tag: poppies
Thursday (17-May-2018) — Japan
Gone to See Japan. Street Photography Workshop with Steve Simon and Soichi Hayashi. Day 1: Tokyo.
May 17th is the day that Norway celebrates its independence. There was an article in the newspaper delivered to my hotel room where Japan congratulates Norway, and comments on the shared goals of both nations — especially having to do with the sea and fishing.
The sun rises very early here in Tokyo — at 04:35. Combination of latitude, and not adjusting the time in the summer (daylight savings time in the US). I am not sure how the local residents use this daylight time in the morning. I did see a group doing stretches and exercising in Chuo park near Niagara falls at 06:30. I took some pictures of the group from my hotel room (on the 20th floor, distance about 400 meters). Then played with the scripts/statistics function within PhotoShop to try to indicate the motion. Later on after breakfast I went for another walk in the park.
The Street Photography workshop started at noon, with a lunch and initial classroom session. After an initial greeting and orientation we got to look at some samples of the workshop participants work, and expectations of what we would be doing for the next eight days. Each day we would have a review session of the images taken the previous day. We also needed to decide on a theme/subject/story line for what we would be photographing. The definition of “Street Photography” can be nebulous. After the classroom session we did a photography warm-up walkabout in Shinjuku. There area is visually overwhelming, and I was having trouble even deciding on what to shoot. During the classroom session, Steve suggested using prime lenses, aperture mode (relatively wide open with a narrow range of focus), a high shutter speed of > 1/400 second (to stop motion — both subject and photographer), and auto ISO (up to 3200 depending on camera sensor). The two cameras that I am using for the workshop (Leica CL, and Leica TL2) do not react and focus as fast as some of the Nikon Pro cameras I am used to. I selected the mirror-less cameras and lenses that I would be using based on their lighter weight (both for travel and being smaller and less conspicuous for street photography). I set the cameras to display the B&W image. I also chose to mainly work with B&W images for this workshop (although I saved the raw images so I can get to the color images). As you can see from the street walkabout images, I was struggling.
Individual images in the slide shows can be viewed here.
Three-Years Ago (22-December-2014) — Falkland Islands
Gone to See Antarctica 2014/5 Day 7: Hurtigruten MS Fram visiting the Falkland Islands
The first thing I did when in Stanley, was to look for a camera store (or somewhere that sold cameras). My Nikon Df camera failed a couple days earlier (shutter buckled), the battery charger for the Fuji X-T1 camera was acting up, and the Leica T camera was having issues with cold temperatures. No luck, since everything has to be shipped to the island. No option for Amazon next day delivery. I was going to have to do without a camera with a big telephoto lens. Fortunately, I found someone on the ship with a different Fuji camera that used the same batteries that allowed me to borrow the battery charger. I did have some time to walk around the town and take some pictures.
Tuesday (30-May-2017) — New Jersey
Springtime Nature in New Jersey.
Several more Poppy blooms appeared this morning. I took four inside to make high resolution focus stacked images. Two red, one pink, and one orange. The images were taken with a Nikon Df camera and 105 mm f/2.8 macro lens (ISO 100, 105 mm, f/4, 1/60 sec) with two SB-900 flashes (TTL, EV -1). The camera is mounted on a Kirk focusing track. Images were taken over 5-7 cm range in 0.5 or 0.25 cm increments. The composite focus stacked images were created using Helicon Focus using the method A (average), method B (depth map), and method C (pyramid)
Individual images from the slideshow can be viewed here.
Sunday (05-June-2016) — New Jersey
Backyard Springtime Nature in New Jersey.
My phone died last week, and won’t have internet access at home for a month. So I will upload images when I find WiFi hotspots that don’t block me for transferring too much data. This is a set of poppies from my wildflower patch before the deer and rabbits got hungry. I also have several time-lapsed videos of the poppies opening which I will post later. Individual images in the slide show can be viewed here.