Category: Nature

Pinckney NWR, South Carolina

There’s a blue heron rookery in the Ibis pond.  There’s also an egret one, but well, these are from the blue herons.

It was feeding time on one nest, and dad was doing the honors.

Every last bit.

All done:

More, Now!

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Focus Stacking for Fun and Profit

I’ve been playing with focus stacking because it can result in spectacular results.

The sharpness and three dimensionality of this image are a combination of using a telephoto lens for a flat perspective and focus stacking to generate the depth of focus. 

It can also fail spectacularly.

and

There are a couple of simple ways to fail:

  • Move the camera. Ideally, you would use a tripod, but I can usually hold the camera still enough. Especially if I lie on the ground and brace like I was doing target shooting. 
  • Use too few focus layers. Nothing like having blurry stuff in the middle.
  • Let the subject move. Windy days are heck with flowers. 
  • Align Jpegs rather that raw images. Jpeg images will vary in their color normalization and will generate odd color patches in the output. You can spend some time blending those by hand, or you can use the raw data which should have constant normalization. 

It works surprisingly well when you get it right. I’m looking forward to trying this with landscape photography. The allure of a sharp, sharp foreground and background is hard to pass up.

For more of my work please see www.robertharrisonfineart.com

Spider Web Rainbow

The droplets on this web are neat – both because they make the web visible and because they are colored. The colors are from the reflected light and formed in much the same way as those of a rainbow. Neat?

Two Does

I love this picture of two does facing off. 

They’re sisters and establishing their relative pecking order. 

I took this image at dusk with the sun filtering in from behind them and illuminating the tall grass behind and around the two deer.

One of the pleasures of watching a population of wild animals evolve over time is that you sort of get to know them. We’ve seen these gals with their mother, and brother as they grow from fawns to mature animals. Mom has just decided that it’s time for her girls to strike off on their own. Their brother left last year after being a “spike” buck and we’ve seen him since with a moderate rack. If the hunters don’t get him this year, he’ll be even more handsome next year.

This is him, from earlier in the year. 

Early Bloomer

I caught this one flower, the first from its bunch to blossom. The 600mm lens I used let me control the depth of field and I adjusted the saturation and colors to emphasize the bloom and the bunds that were ready to open. 

It’s just one of those pretty pictures that one can be philosophical about … or not.

On the cutting room floor.

I thought it would be worthwhile to show how a little cropping can make an image. I have rather mixed feelings about cropping as my ideal is to make the image in the viewfinder. It’s not for nothing that I say I admire Henri Cartier-Bresson and his principles.

Principles are nice, but a good image is everything.

The original image, after correcting the color and intensity, is nice enough, but there’s an awful lot of blurry green background. Once you’ve seen one bit of green blur, you’ve seen it all.

A first crop gives:

Which is pretty good, but maybe we can do better. Let’s try a square crop:

That’s better but let’s see what happens when we get close up:

That’s got the main flower right, but something is missing. So we go back to the original aspect ration and stay close in:

And that’s right. It has the detail but the other blooms balance the image. This image is the one on the website.

Not quite a Kaon – Just a Saying.

If you light a lamp for somebody, it will also brighten your own path.

~ Buddhist saying

(Cabrillo Point Lighthouse, California in the fog).

A Kaon

Spirit of the Woodland

Let it be still and it will gradually become clear.

~ Lao Tzu

Zen Kaon (Illustrated)

A flower falls even though we love it and a weed grows even though we do not love it.

~ Dogen Zenji

Photograph of the Week

I’m rather proud of this image. It’s of the sun through the misty early morning woods in Alabama. Getting it “just right” took more than a little trickery.

The original isn’t bad,

but no matter how I adjusted it as a single layer, it just wasn’t the way I liked. Not that there is a great difference between almost right and just right. I think it’s a little too busy and a getting a good balance between foreground and background is hard.

So I cut the lit areas of the background out.

Then I used  Gaussian blur on the original image to produce a smooth bright background:

These were then layered together resulting in a composite that I think hits the spot

I’ve used the same sort of techniques in portraiture – both to brighten hair and remove distracting background without causing the picture to cross the “uncanny valley” into caricature, but that’s for another post.