Up Close

Morning’s First Light

I don’t know how productive it will be but I’m practicing one-handed shooting with a point-and-shoot camera while taking my dog for his morning walk.  So imagine me with a dog leash in one hand, the camera in the other and me being pulled in the middle.  This was today’s capture.

Princess Pine in the Snow

To give you a sense of scale these little gals are about 3-4 inches high and seem utterly resistant to winter.  This close-up does not show you how they tend to grow in patches.  This particular forest has a beautiful area where these are everywhere.  But if you walk a couple more minutes along the trail, there are no more to be seen.

In My Kitchen

This old scale has been in my family for years.  I think it came from my mother’s side…  Anyway, I have photographed it before.  My best guess is that those other photos were taken back in 1990 when I was at RIT.  Those photos were taken on a medium-format camera with Tri-X film.

Scale jpg versionThis latest photo was taken with a digital camera (Panasonic FZ1000) and I chose to work with the RAW image format this time. I’m finding myself slowly warming up to RAW – but not ready to jump in with both feet yet – so I’m shooting both JPG and RAW at the same time.  For reference here’s the JPG version of the same image.  Extracting as much data/detail out of the shadows of the RAW was pretty cool.  As you can see I also did some minor rotation and cropping to square-up the image.

Exposure on both JPG and RAW (technically .RW2 files) was:

f 3.4
1/1300 second
ISO 125
-0.7 exposure bias

Monarch Night

I shot this one back in the fall (Sept. 2015).  It was a fun experiment seeing how long the Monarch would tolerate being held and photographed.  The little guy was a great subject allowing me to play with all sorts of flash/drag-shutter images.  You can see more in the FB gallery here.