After I had already posted my Monday photo of the day, my son-in-law, Justin, discovered a mama hummingbird sitting on her nest in our magnolia tree which hangs over our deck. Using my zoom lens, I stood underneath and snapped a zillion photos. I was happy with this image and had a lot of fun processing it with Kim Klassen’s warm sun texture.
We are just chillin’ today. Our three year old is exhausted from yesterday’s busyness and does not want to pose for photos.
So- here we have Blueberries for Breakfast (actually they were in pancakes):
f/3.8, 1/60, ISO 1000
I added some textures for fun.
:: thinking about Spring . . . and playing with textures ::
It was very overcast at 9 AM when I went out on the deck to find something- anything!- to photograph on this dreary day. Right by the back door I spied some berries- Aha! MACRO! It was soooo dark that I had to bump up my ISO to 2500 and also turn on the porch light. When I uploaded the photos, I noticed a lot of noise. I don’t know if this was because I inadvertently uploaded jpegs instead of RAW (I shoot jpeg and raw pairs- don’t ask me why…) or because (more likely) the images were slightly underexposed.
So…I added a texture to disguise (sort of…) the noise in the background. I know I could have reuploaded my RAW files and seen if that made a difference- but this was more fun.
f/4.5, 1/500, ISO 2500
My great-grandmother’s hatpins (she was born in 1859) made an interesting subject for my macro lens today. I am trying to do a quick post before I go out this morning, so I don’t have much time to play with the editing today. I actually liked the out of focus results better than the in focus ones, but I chose an image where there is focus on one of the hatpins. The cylindrical objects in the back are actually bokeh/reflections from surrounding pins.
f/4.5, 1/80, ISO 500, 85mm
UPDATE!
It is now almost midnight, and, while my husband watches some basketball recorded earlier, I am taking the time to look again at the hatpin photos from today. I fiddled with one and applied a texture- and I really like it (even though it breaks a design rule and has FOUR objects, not 3 or 5)!
So…I am updating my blog and adding another photo- which is now my REAL photo of the day!
I got a BIG SURPRISE yesterday from my husband- a MACRO LENS!!!
It’s a Nikon 85mm 3.5- and I can shoot less than a foot from my subject! I no longer have to be 4 feet away zoomed in! The autofocus works great- or I can manually focus OR use manual override, which I haven’t tried yet. And of course, this lens works great for portraits as well. I’m SO EXCITED!
Guess I have no excuses now!
I went out bright and early this morning and took this shot of a very, very tiny flower on our deck.
f/4.8, 1/160, ISO 500, 85mm
It is my Photoshop Friday, so I used CS5 to do a slight crop, and a simple levels and curves adjustment on this image. THEN…I added texture (thanks to Trish for introducing me to Kim Klassen Cafe where I learned how to do this!).
Be warned- over the next few weeks you will probably be seeing a zillion close-up photos of everything in my house!
melinda anderson photography 