I took this in April at the Woodburn Tulip Festival. I was using a macro lens – Nikon 105mm f/2.8 AF-S Micro VR. The aperture is set to f/3.2 and the shutter is 1/8000 second. I was playing with depth of field but didn’t realize that being close to an object intensifies the effect that aperture has on depth of field. It makes sense that it should. Just didn’t realize it at the time. I thought this was an interesting tulip, not like most that you see. I used Topaz Detail to highlight the coloring.
I took this photo in May at the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge. I posted the original photo without cropping it in my Great Blue Heron post. I also posted the photo to the Nature Photographers’ Network and the people there suggested that I crop the photo down to make it a portrait and highlight the back-lit beak and vibrant eyes. They thought that the background in the original photo was too distracting. So which photo do you like better?
It was amazing to be so close to this bird and takes its picture from the photo blind. I was using a Nikon 600mm f/4 AF-S II lens. The bird was so close that I wasn’t able to include the feet in the original picture. I should have rotated the camera to take a vertical picture but I didn’t think of that at the time.
Original Photo:
This is the last picture I took up on Glacier 13 on the Alaska Cruiser Trek. I set the tripod up about two feet up off the ice to accentuate the rolling hump of ice next to the snow-covered crevasse. I really pushed the HDR in this photo to highlight the blue glacier ice, the dirt, and the snow. It was other-worldly being up on this glacier and I wanted to capture the mood of being on this dirty glacier with the surrounding mountains looking down on us. It was menacing being so close to the crevasses and moulins without crampons or traction devices.
I forget the name of this flower. Does anyone know? I was playing with depth of field on a macro lens that I had rented from Pro Photo Supply in Portland. The lens I rented was the Nikon 105mm f/2.8 AF-S Micro VR. For this photo, I had the aperture set at f/3.2, which was the lowest setting I could set for some reason. I did HDR on a single photo with Photomatix Pro, then used a filter in Topaz Adjust, and used Noiseware to reduce noise in the background.
I took this picture while on a birding walk with the Portland Audubon Society. I was using a Nikon 600mm f/4 AF-S II lens. I did not bring my tripod with me because it was a walk and it was very difficult to shoot with this very heavy lens handheld. It was difficult to get this bird in focus and composed in frame correctly. I did crop this photo to show just the bird and the reflection. I cropped it so that the bird fell along the Golden Rule lines in Lightroom. Aperture was at f/4 and shutter was 1/800 seconds. I did use HDR Photomatix Pro, Topaz Adjust’s Spicify, masked in parts with Photoshop, and adjusted the Hue/Saturation on the yellows and blues in Photoshop.
I just read Trey Ratcliff’s new eBook – Composing the Photo: Creating Order from Chaos – Bonus Edition. It full of great information. I hope that it will help me understand why some of my photos are so much more popular than the others. I need to reread it to soak up all the information.
I took this photo at the Tualatin River NWR in May. I used my Nikon D700 camera and rented the Nikon 600mm f/4 AF-S II lens. I cropped according to the Golden Rule as outlined in the Composing the Photo eBook in Lightroom. I then tonemapped it using HDR Photomatix Pro. After that I ran it through Topaz Adjust’s filter Portrait Smooth. I then tweaked the colors in Photoshop by reducing the Hue/Saturation on both yellow and blue. I finally ran it through Noiseware to get the last of the noise out of the bokeh background. Last of all, I increased the size of the photo to its original size using Genuine Fractals. What do you think?
I took this photo at the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge in May. The water was drained but there was still a small pond next to the photo blind. So there were still a few birds around the water. This Great Blue Heron showed up and just looked magnificent. The Great Blue Heron is the official bird for the city of Portland, Oregon.
I tried doing HDR on this photo but it really messed up the beak and the feathers. I worked for a while in Photomatix Pro to get a realistic and stunning image but nothing really seemed to work. So this is not an HDR image. I did use Topaz Adjust. It gave a lot of options that did work well. I finally decided to use Portrait Smooth on this photo. It really worked well with the bokeh of the background that the lens produced (Nikon 600mm f/4 AF-S II).
What do you think? Do the feathers lack too much detail? Would you rather have more detail showing on the bird or does it all kind of flow together? I like the way this looks somewhat like a painting. The Great Blue Heron looks very regal is this stance to me and the background, which is not great, is not distracting.
This is another picture from the Alaska Cruiser Trek. We are lined up on the glacier. We couldn’t go any further because the crevasses stopped our progress. You can see some snow-filled crevasses in the foreground. No idea how deep they might be. Some were filled with water and are very dangerous. If you fell into a crevasse or moulin, you would freeze to death. So they are definitely to be avoided. You can see Charla’s BJ42 land cruiser. Luis has the light blue monster FJ40 land cruiser and you can see my darker blue FJ60 land cruiser. It was a lot of fun hanging out on the glacier. Click on the photo to get the camera information such as aperture or focal length through Smug Mug.
I took this at the Woodburn Tulip Festival in April. I was using a macro lens that I rented from Pro Photo Supply, the Nikon 105mm f/2.8 AF-S Micro VR. The aperture for this image was f/3.2 which was the lowest setting for the given lighting conditions and shutter speeds. I didn’t realize how small the depth of field is when using a macro lens at close distances. I thought the f/3.2 would give me more depth of field than it did. This was the first time I had used a macro lens. It was a lot of fun to play with and it was definitely a learning experience.
This photo is a little soft. I’m very happy that I was able to capture the bee flying inside the tulip but people had critique this photo as being too soft. I used some sharpening filters in Photoshop on the bee and top of the tulip and then masked that into the original photo. I tried doing HDR on this photo but it made the background very noisy and distracting without adding much to the tulip and bee.
I took this picture back in May at the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. They have a photo blind that you can reserve. I had been their previously in February and I took about 1,000 pictures then. The refuge was flooded in February and there were a lot of waterfowl and two bald eagles. I still need to process most of those photos. When I went to the refuge in May, they had drained the water, which surprised me. There was now just a little pond next to the blind. But it was fun watching these Belted Kingfisher’s plunge into the the water and return with small fish. I have a photo of a Kingfisher with a fish in its beak that I will post in a few days.
But there were two Kingfishers that started to battle with each other. I think one is a male and the other is a female. It was hard to pick which photo to post since I shot as quickly as I could while they were fighting. Unfortunately, there were some branches in the way that block the truly spectacular photos that I took. This one is the best compromise of capturing the battle and not being blocked by too many branches. I did crop this a little bit and then I enlarged it using Genuine Fractals, which works amazingly well.
I rented a Nikon 600mm f/4 AF-S II from Pro Photo Supply in Portland for use in the blind. I had it on a tripod. This lens is very heavy to try and hand shoot. I did that on a hike in Central Oregon but I didn’t get any really good shots from that hike. I’ll process and post those images in a few days as well. Mainly of Golden Eagles and assorted birds. The aperture for this shot is set at it lowest setting of f/4 and the shutter is at 1/1000 second. The shutter almost completely freezes the birds’ motions except for the edge of its wings. It was sunny out for this shot so I was lucky to get that fast of a shutter speed but it would always be nice to get a faster shutter speed and completely freeze the motion. But this way, the blurring gives the impression of the speed at which they were attacking each other.
I used the Topaz Adjust filter Portrait Drama for just the birds to bring out a little more detail. I used Photoshop to mask in a 50% transparency of the Portrait Drama photo into the photo that I had originally adjusted in Lightroom. Because of the strong sunlight, I had to correct some fill lighting in Lightroom to balance the colors and make both birds visible.
