A little bit of autumn color to brighten up a wintery day:
This was on opportunistic shot I took on a lunchtime photowalk some months back.
Bloomin’
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Category Archives: Flora
Blue kaboom
An oldie but goodie from Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Washington:
Hope everybody had a fun and festive holiday break! It’s almost hard for me to believe now that I took this with my first DSLR nearly four years ago…
Treekeh
A little seasonal bokeh from our front yard:
Sorry about the thin posting schedule lately, writing photo guidebooks has been absorbing my every waking moment — but the end’s in sight!
Seed head
A spur-of-the-moment shot from a solo photowalk a few weeks back:
I have no idea what kind of plant grew these seeds, but I liked how the swirl of the seed head mirrored the feel of the bokeh background. It’s just one of those things I don’t really have words for, you know?
Looking back at Autumn…
…from the start of Winter:
A shot from a lunchtime walk about a month back, before the season’s first big snowfall wiped out the colors.
House of the Cenote
At the ancient Maya ruins of Tulúm, México:
This was a tricky shot to get — bright sky above, and (dark, cave-like) cenote below. It didn’t turn out well as a multi-image HDR, for some odd reason — but tweaking a single image and running HDR on that did the trick. Amazingly, the structure at the top still has some of its original (500+ year old) plaster, in spite of being close to the cliff’s edge and the Caribbean.
Want to know more about photography in Tulúm? You might want to check this out…
Temple Row
One of the odd things about visiting ruins is that the tour guide books seem to always give them short shrift when it comes to photography. The books will tell you that this set of ruins is more scenic than that one, and one or two things to see at a site — but they always seem to miss a lot of really nice stuff (possibly in the interest of fitting in more plugs for affiliated hotels and such). This is one of those missed things at the Maya ruins of Tulum, México:
If you walk down to the far southeast corner of the ruins (on an unofficial trail), you can sight up along the coast to get this nice composition. Much better than some of the other coastal shots you can make here (and the colors came out far nicer than I’d expected they would)…
Bluekeh
Another South Dakota picture — this one from a little damp fen tucked away in a much drier Custer State Park:
I have no idea what these little blue flowers are, but each bloom is at best an inch across.
Lindsey’s shadow
When we were in Houston a few months back, one of the places we wandered through was the Mercer Arboretum and Botanic Gardens.
Funny thing — I took this shot of a waterlilly (Nymphaea x “Lindsey Woods”), but didn’t notice the shadow that looks like a face in profile until I was doing a little post-processing work on the shot this morning. Kinda’ spooky…
Echinacea, 7/09/11
My first decent shot using an old Polaroid SX-70 camera I bought off eBay, and some Impossible Project film:
Long-story-short, now that the Impossible Project folks are producing both color and black and white film for SX-70 cameras, I thought I’d take the plunge and start experimenting with low-fi analog photography.
Here’s a shot of echinacea in our front yard, taken with my used / new (to me) SX-70 Alpha 1 SE and Impossible Project PX 70 Color Shade film.
I think it’s going to take a while to get a hang of this — the camera works just fine, but the film is a bit… tricky. In particular, it’s REALLY light sensitive for a minute or so after it comes out of the camera — and it’s prone to over-exposure too.
Oh, and did I mention film costs about $3 per exposure? Definitely gives one cause for reflection before pushing the shutter release. Once I get this down to a more-nearly-repeatable thing, I’ll do a writeup on this film and the whole process of using it.