Macro Monday

Today's mission was to become better acquainted with my close up filter. It is so frustrating to have this great love of macro shots without the skillset to create the images in my mind. The keys to that is of course, practice, trial and error, experimentation, and all that good stuff.

For today's lesson I headed over to the business park near my apartment. I was aiming for Day Two of my I-5 avoidance. Success! (I might even be able to avoid it tomorrow, too, although 405 is on the agenda. slight grrr). I headed to the business park because I notice flowers there all the time! Usually I am in a hurry to get to work (or a hurry to get home!) so I figured I would take advantage of the warm glow of sunset to get a few shots. I waited a bit too long, and sunlight was slipping away quickly. I managed a few interesting (and challenging) shots, though.

Fall Color

Determined to only use my close-up filter, I left my 18-55mm at home. Oh Man, what was I thinking? The red leaves on the tree were such a gorgeous contrast to the cloudy blue skies. I also (quite unintentionally) left the case for my close-up filter at home, so I couldn't even try a shot with just the 50mm. (You see, I have bad luck, and didn't want to scratch up my lovely, glass, expensive close-up filter. I know my stinkin limitations.) So, I took a pic of the leaves. I don't really like the blurriness of the front leaf, but tried a couple different f-stops and moved the camera back and forth without much luck. I didn't want to spend all night in this spot, so I called it good and moved on. No matter how much you want something, or the potential you can see in the situation, you gotta just move on sometime, eh?

Sunset Flowers 1, 2, 3 & 4

For my first series on this post, I have a group of shots of the same sweet little white flower, taken at different f-stops. I used Del's 2-4-6-8 approach for shutter speed, but applied it to aperture settings. I like the third one the best, f7.1

Sunset Flower f.18

Sunset Flower 4.0

Sunset Flower 7.1

Sunset Flower F14.0

Just for Fun
Ok, so, just for fun, I wanted to take one as close as I could at f1.8. This is what I ended up with.... I kinda like the bluriness of it, relaxes my eyes a bit.

Twilight Flower 1, 2, 3 & 4
I continued on about a 1/2 mile to this patch of loveliness that has caught my eye just about every morning. It used to be a gigantic bunch of blossoms, but I noticed the landscapers cut them down early last week. Shoot. I missed my chance! I managed to get a couple shots here. It was quite dark by this point, so I had that challenge, too. Joy! I took the first three at ISO 100, but with the aperture setting I had for the last one, I needed to bump up the ISO... it was a thirty second exposure even at ISO 200!

This group didn't turn out at all like I had expected, and I wish I would have moved my camera a wee bit over to the left so that the brown part of the flower would be in focus instead of the silly tip of the petal. But, oh well, I learned something about composition, eh? What I do like is how obvious the setting changes are; the sunset flower settings seemed to create slight changes in f-stop settings. I suppose a big factor, too, is the dramatic difference in shutter speed, too. The sunset flower shots were pretty similar in shutter speeds, all at a fraction of a second. The Twilight group though, ranged from 1/2 a second to 30 seconds! Wowie!

Enjoy.

Twilight at f1.8, 1/2 second, ISO 100












Twilight at f4.5, 2.5 seconds, ISO 100

Twilight at f-8.0, 13 seconds, ISO 100

Twilight at f-18, 30 seconds, ISO 200

And there you go! These pics are going to be useful for me as I progress, and not really "frame worthy." Actually, I just realized this afternoon that I haven't printed out any pics from my new camera. Weird. I'm going to have to do that soon, eh? I need some new pics for my living room anyway. The DC & New York Black and Whites are soooo 2007 :)