A Flower for My Friend
With bright purple flowers,
Knows not of this thing,
We tend to call hours.
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Plants and Flowers
A screenshot of my Aperture “fern” session. Full res. uploaded so you can see the details.
I have been using Aperture (currently version 3.x) for a while to organize and do post production for my photographs trying to minimize the time I spend in Photoshop. This post doesn’t go into some of the Aperture jargon, so please pardon me if you are not privy to Aperture slang.
I have 504 photographs that I took of the small ferns (less than a foot high) that started sprouting just outside my apartment in Seattle back in May. After many hours of sorting the images, this is what I’ve ended up with:
79 stacks of images with the best pulled to the front of each stack. Only the first two thumbnails are images I have actually done any post production on. (As noted in my previous post, one stack, for example, is a set of 127 photos.)
I have it sorted by rating, so my current picks are at the top decending down to pictures I might not even use.
My next steps are to actually give more accurate star ratings, choose which images are the créme (and which are shit), then edit those images to polish them for publishing.
All this for ferns. Then again, I can’t help myself; I just love the shapes, textures and colors that fresh ferns have.
If you are curious to learn more about how I am using Aperture, let me know and I might take the time to go into detail. Cheers!
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ISO 400, ƒ/14, 1/40s
After 127 shots of this fern “branch”, I finally captured what I was looking for.
I was working with a breaze which made it exceptionally difficult to get a clear macro shot of this small fern. The reason is that I was working within a very close range with a 60mm macro lens. (I took the picture 4 months ago, but based on my memory the lens was probably ~4inches away from the subject.)
This means that the depth of field is so exceptionally shallow that you have to hop the ƒ stops up just to get the bend of the tiny leaves in focus. As you can tell in this photo, I had to go up to ƒ/14. In turn, this means that I had to make up for it in either shutter speed and/or ISO. Since I don’t want to have anything higher than 400 as my ISO, I kept taking shots at exposure rates that would make even the tiniest of gusts of wind blur the furn. Thus, I took 127 shots hoping that at one of those instants the wind didn’t gust the fern.
I think that this one optimized the depth of field, kept the noise to a minimum, and still allowed me to get a nice crisp focus.
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I am working on a book of my Bioflash images. I am using a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3
More details to come, but in the meantime check out a few previews:
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A picture I took with my iPhone (unedited) of L’Enfant Station (Washington DC Metro)
With the right kind of eyes, you can almost always find artwork surrounding you.
The artwork of photography is knowing when the happenstance of beauty is upon you so you can put your eye in the right place at the right time, taking scissors to reality and grabbing a moment.
I posted the image of L’Enfant Plaza I took at the DC Metro stop for multiple reasons. For one, I took it with my iPhone’s camera. It wasn’t taken with an exceptional camera. I really wish I had a DSLR at the time, but I was still able to take a picture that I still find to encapsulate the beauty I saw at that moment. Is it a bit noisy? Sure thing! In the end what matters is that I have an image I’m still proud of, encapsulates a moment, and I find beauty in. The artwork of photography is knowing when the happenstance of beauty is upon you so you can put your eye in the right place at the right time, taking scissors to reality and grabbing a moment.
Do your best to look at the world around you through alien eyes; pretend that everything around you is new and you may see something that should become a photograph.
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In the middle of the night I brought my point’n’shoot out into the garden and took some pictures. I purposely left the flash on and used it to my advantage. For example, I put the lens into the nose of a flower and let the flash’s light come in through the petals.
There seemed to be a fair amount of garden spiders out mostly hanging around the porch light so they can snag some yummy moths. There is conveniently a bamboo “bush” right under it making droplets of dew for the morning to come.
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