Butterflies tell the story…

If any of you have checked the blog since last Thursday, you will know that I have been neglectful. I had been trying to post photos every couple of days, but this week got away from me, so I needed to find a series of photos that would work together.

 I like concentrating on one subject when I am taking photos, and I am always pleased, after sorting and editing, when I see a story emerge. These photos were taken last spring at EPCOT's annual Flower & Garden Festival. There is always a butterfly tent and using my telephoto zoom lens I was able to get close to the action. I was shooting with the camera set to shutter priority at 1/160 of a second (with shutter priority you set the shutter speed and the camera adjusts the f-stop). All of these photos were taken at ISO 200. I think that if I get to the festival again this year I will use a higher ISO setting and a faster shutter speed.

More about using ISO…

In the last post I showed a photo taken in low light using a very high ISO setting. The resulting image is well lit and has very little digital noise. In this post I am showing three versions of a photo where I used a higher ISO setting for a different purpose — capturing a moving object.

While waiting for Eddie outside the YMCA gym on Martin Luther King Day, two boys were skateboarding on the entrance ramp to the closed public library. I had a 70 to 300mm lens on the camera, and I wanted to shoot with a fast shutter speed to capture the motion. By uping the ISO, in this case just to 400, the image senor was able to capture the image with less light — and I was able to use a higher shutter speed to freeze the action. The camera was set at 1/2000th of a second at f/8.

The image was digitally processed in Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS4. I decided that the background colors took away from the image, so I muted the background in Lightroom. Using Photoshop I added a blur to the background to add to the feeling of movement — although I am not sure I am really happy with the results of this last version of the image.

A final note If you have been following my blog since the beginning of 2010, you may have noted that the copyright notice on all of the photos, up until today, have said 2009. My mistake! Most of the photos were taken since New Year's, but I forgot to change the year on my import metadata. It has now been corrected.

Using ISO settings to your advantage…

I was wandering around an antique shop when I came across this stop light. I thought it would make a good photo, but the shop was way too dark for natural light photography. Not having a speed light flash with me, I compensated by cranking up the ISO from 200, the camera's normal setting, all the way up to 3200.

The ISO setting measures the sensitivity of the camera's image sensor to light. The higher the ISO, the more sensitive to light, and the less light you need to take photographs. The traditional trade-off for high ISO is noisy photos — the higher the ISO, the more digital noise in the photo — until now. I shot the traffic light photo with my year old Nikon D90 using an 18-70mm zoom lens. The aperture setting was f/4.5 at 1/5 of a second. The photo was processed in my digital darkroom using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop

Enjoying the return to nicer weather…

The pair of Sandhill Cranes that live at Travelers Rest Resort came out on Friday to enjoy the return of warmer weather. Cranes sometimes stand  on one leg, with the other leg tucked under a wing. I was really lucky to be following the birds with my camera when one of them decided to unfold their right leg from under the wing.

"Baby it's cold outside…"

As I said in my last post, it has been cold in Florida. As of today, January 11all of Florida has been affected by an extended cold spell. Most years it gets cold for a day or two, and then warms up, so this cold spell has taken everyone by surprise. Today I took a few photos around our RV resort — winter in Florida!

Every Monday and Thursday a local farm sells vegetables at the park. Today the customers were lined up as usual, but instead of standing around in shorts and t-shirts they were bundled up and shivering.

It is not only the people who are feeling the cold. Every night, and some days, all of the fragile plants need to be covered to protect them from the cold.

But even covering the plants doesn't always save them from damage.

A Glimpse of Spring…

I took these series of tulip photos last spring. With everyone, including those of us in Florida, in the grips of a cold winter, I thought it would be a good time to post photos of flowers!

Silent Sentries…

For over five years I have been taking photos of statues, with the idea of making a handmade book of my statuary photos. Maybe this will be the year! At anyrate, these two statue photos were taken on Monday in the Lake Margaret garden at our RV resort. The gardens around the lake are very inviting, lush, and lovingly cared for by the garden club ladies.