WildOats

I haven’t used my Nikon camera is a long time now. I think sometime before I went off to Vegas. I’ve kinda not had the opportunity to use it. So yesterday I grabbed my camera and off I went. However, for some reason winter decided to visit. It was 60 out….brrrrrr. On top of that, the wind was really blowing, which made it feel even colder. So after walking around a little while, I realized I wouldn’t get anything. That’s when I called it a day and went home.

Today it was much warmer, back into the 70’s at least. The wind also was much more manageable. A few little puffs of a breeze, but nothing like yesterday. I took off looking for something to shoot. I quickly started noticing all these spider webs. Here a spider web. There a spider web. They were all over the place. That’s when I started to think about Tim and his…….damn bugs saying. Hehe….I giggled and moved on.

A few steps later and I see …….you guessed it, another spider web. But this one was different from the others. This one had a huge spider in it. It kinda creeped me out. Which I guess is perfect, it being so close to Halloween and all.  That’s when I decided to shoot the spider.

This was a pain of a shoot. The spider had it’s web attached to a tree, and some bushes growing directly under the tree. So I couldn’t get too close because of the bushes. The wind also made it hard to work with. The damn web kept moving back and forth, moving the spider with it. It’s amazing these spiders don’t get motion sickness with all the waving back and forth.

I stationed myself as close as I could to the spider. I also had to keep watch of the wind moving the web. I couldn’t get a 360 degree view of it, because the tree was in the way on one side. And then on the opposite side, the bushes extended further out, and then I was too far away from that angle. But I was able to get a shot from the front and the back.

Here’s a shot of the spider from the part that I guess is the bottom.

I have no idea what type of spider this is. But I think those yellow things look like fangs. Ouch!!!. I told you he creeped me out.

Then I went around, and shot him from his top part.

He’s got a whole bunch of pretty colors on em.  The body alone was over an inch in length. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a spider like this before. Do you have any idea what it is?

Seems a lot of people like to really sharpen their pictures. Turns out sharpening is more involved than most people think. How much you should sharpen a picture depends on a lot of things. It depends on what type of camera you are using. It depends on the picture itself. It depends on how close up your subject is to the camera. A lot of variables come into play.

It you sharpen correctly, it really helps the picture a lot. A little sharpening can make a picture snap to life, and things look much clearer. But if you do it badly it hurts the picture. The picture looks aweful. Things just start to look odd. Plus you also start to see artifacts and halos. 

So with all this extra attention to sharpening, I decided to go in the opposite direction. I decided to add no sharpening. In fact I decided to actually de-focus…..imagine that…lol. Yup I had a picture that I did not sharpen at all, but then on top of it, I started to play with the clarity slider in Elements. I slide it in the opposite direction…..I guess it’s more de-clarifying.

The picture is of a pinkish flower. I also thought that the soft focus would help make the petals look more delicate. So anyway, here’s the picture.

I liked how it took on a dreamy kind of effect. The details have been smoothed over. I like the overall feeling I get from the shot.

I think fall might be coming to Florida. The past few days it’s been beautiful when I go out for my walk. I don’t think the temperature has dropped too much, but the humidity really seems to have gone down a lot. It’s also been cloudy. It appears like it’s going to rain, but so far, no rain. Just plenty of clouds.So with all the cloudiness we’ve had, I decided to work on a picture to bring back some of that sunshine. I think it’s a daisy of some sort. But it’s all yellow, and has that sunshine-esque feeling.When I took this picture I was fascinated by all the detail in the center part of the flower. I liked how the little green things opened up and inside those you have still smaller little yellow parts. I like how you get to see parts of the flower that you don’t typically notice when you just look causally at it.Anyway, hope you enjoy today’s bit of sunshine.

Seems like with digital photography there’s one thing that stands out. Color. Color can be a great thing, but it can also look bad.

Back in the old days of film, you had color, but it was more natural looking. They had some films that gave you more saturated color, but overall, you got back normal looking colors. Today when people take pics with their little point and shoots, the cameras are usually set to amp up the colors a bit. But then people also crank up the colors when they see the pics on their screens.

If you do it correctly the picture turns out great. But if you don’t do it properly, the effect ruins the picture. Either the colors look wrong, or the shade is off, or it’s sooo saturated that it almost looks neon or nuclear. Also some colors kinda bleed, reds tend to do that.

This got me thinking to back when I was in college. In college I took a photography class. Back in those days we only had film, no digital stuff. In the class we used black and white film. YES…..they had already invented color film by then. I’m not that old. But we used b&w for the class. In fact most people that developed their own film and then worked with prints in a dark room, pretty much only used b&w. The reason was that the darkroom equipment needed for color was pretty expensive, and also it was much harder to do. 

My favorite part of the class at that time was the darkroom. It was cool to work with the negative, and then enlarge the picture and crop it the way you wanted. Then you watched as the picture ‘developed’ onto the paper. The only bad part was the aweful chemical smell. 

Now today we have software like photoshop, and we can do what was done in the dark room and much more. It’s all much easier now too, you don’t have to be in a dark room, and you don’t have to smell those crazy chemicals. 

So with all that in mind, I decided to be old school today. I decided to abandon color, and play around a little with black and white. Photoshop makes it easy for you. You just take your color picture, and you can convert it to b&w. Which is pretty cool if you think about it. Back in the old days, when you shot in b&w, that’s all you had. Now you can shoot in color, and then use software to make a b&w conversion. Now you can have both.

Anyway, when I think of pretty b&w pictures I can’t help but have Ansel Adams in my head. Well, I’m no where near in his league. And I don’t have anything near as pretty to photograph as he had. So I had to make do. I used a picture from a few blogs ago, and played around with it. Here’s what I came up with.

In photoshop, you have a few pre-sets to pick from. But then you also have sliders to tweak things if you like. I clicked throught the pre-sets, and settled on one I thought looked the best to me. Then I tweaked the sliders a bit. Taa daa!!!! Here’s the finished product. How do you like it?

Ok today I have a picture of a daisy. It’s an orange-ish color, with a light green center. I took this photo because I liked the details in the flower. It has the regular big petals that you’re used to seeing when you look at the flower. But as you look closer, it has these smaller petals too. Then in the center it has this light green area, that when you really look at it, it looks like even smaller little petals.

So that’s what got my attention. All the little details. The whole small-ness to these little petals. I wanted to show that in the photograph. So I set my camera onto my tripod and put the flower into a vase.

I wanted to get close to the flower, to make the little petals as big as I could. But when you get in close, you are now limiting how much you can get into focus. To extend the focus as much as possible you need to change your aperture setting to the higher numbers. When you do that, the whole where the light gets into your camera gets smaller. So now, less light is getting in. To counter this, you have to keep the shutter open longer.

For this picture I set my aperture to f/22. To counter this small opening, the camera decided my exposure needed to be 22 seconds. Caramba!! So I set it all up and let the camera take the picture. Here’s what I came up with.

Overall I think I like the finished product. I tried to keep as much of petals in focus as I could. But I also wanted to direct your attention to the center of the flower. Into the little orange bits and then into the green area. I think when you look at it, your eye goes that way due to the sharpness of the picture.

How do you feel about it?