Mirror Lock Up

Just a quick pointer to my fellow photographers. If you want sharp shots and you have a stationary subject. Use the mirror lock-up. I am often disappointed with the sharpness of my images and therefore did a bit of research as to how to make my shots sharper. One thing that was mentioned was to use mirror lock-up, which simply allows the camera user to lock the mirror in the camera up before the exposure is made. The vibration caused by the mirror slapping back and forth in the camera causes unnecessary movement and therefore decreases how sharp the image can be.  

2014 Calendar

Hey All, these are the potential shots for the 2014 Calendar.

Waterton Lakes National Park

I recently was blessed to go hiking with my wife and a couple friends in Waterton Lakes National Park. It was a wonderful time. Please enjoy these shots that do not do the beautiful views justice. To God be the glory.

Macro Garden

Insects are Cool

Sometime when you are bored, take a second to actually look closely at things. Today for example are insects and the patterns that they have. The monarchs wings are easy to appreciate as they are wonderfully colorful and vivid with striking lines running through. A sweat flies, or hover flies, are not quite as impressive. Even so, check out the pattern on its abdomen. Isn't that sweet? In any case, enjoy. Hannah took the one of the fly!

Broccoli Leaf Drop

This shot was taken shortly after a light rain shower passed through the area. The water hung out on the broccoli leaves for a little while, beaded up like marbles. The mildly hydrophobic waxy layer on the outside of the leaves may seem counter intuitive, as plants need water, but that layer also prevents the leaves from loosing gross amounts of water as the summer suns beats down on the plants and speeds the possibility for evaporation.

Autumn Lacewing

Webs

ISO 800, 183mm, f/4.5, 1/80 sec, 

ISO 800, 200mm, f/4.5, 1/80 sec

ISO 800, 183mm, f/4.5, 1/80

ISO 800, 300mm, f/5.6, 1/125 sec

ISO 800, 24mm, f/7.1, 1/250th sec

Pest 2?

Hairier fella's than you might think.

Pest?

Feel free to click on any of the shots to expand them. It amazes me how light can come all the way from the sun, bounce off an ant or flowers, though a few lenses and hit a small sensor to create an incredibly detailed image of something we can't even see with out naked eyes. Crazy.

Stamens!

Drip

When doing photography, I like to keep an open mind to doing things a bit out of the ordinary. First of all because following rules to the T is really boring and because the stuff you take pictures of will be uninteresting to others and most likely yourself after a while...perhaps you are thinking that about my photography right now. I tried to be a bit original in this shot by having the grass only being in focus through the drop of water. It ended up producing a marble-like quality to the drop and allowed the shot to be very different than if it had just been shot with a smaller aperture with the rest of the grass in focus.

Young Elders

A while back, that being a week or two ago, I slapped a couple bits of information up on the ol' blog about aperture. Hopefully, you were able to find some useful applications for your new found brilliance and prowess in the camera world. After reviewing the blog though, I came to realize that a few dandy notes on aperture had been left out like the ugly duckling in a aqueous game of follow the leader. Do ducks ever play anything besides that? I guess I have never seen ducklings do anything besides follow the mother around. Second of all, why does the mother always get to be the leader? Sounds like a big bowl of lame sauce to me.
The ugly duckling that was left out was that reducing your aperture to the smallest setting often not a good idea. The reason for this being is that shots taken at a lens's largest aperture possible will often loose their sharpness. So, while your are indeed fuzzing out all distractions in the background and allowing a ton of light in with a huge aperture, you may also be making your primary object of interest a bit soft around the edges. Unless you have an uber expensive lens, your shots will loose their sharpness as the aperture gets to its final stop or two. The shot that was taken above was shot somewhere around an 8 I believe for the aperture, but in hindsight I would have liked a bit more depth to the field so as to include the two box elders nearest to the box elder bug in the center.
The other duckling that I forgot can be a bit cumbersome and confusing at first, but like any duckling, it has potential to be very useful. If you have looked into lenses much, you will have heard of an f-stop. An f-stop is a marker for the various sizes of the aperture by either halving or doubling the amount of light being let into the lens. If you have your camera handy, please scroll through the aperture sizes now. Most likely, the numbers that you are seeing are not exactly in any common sequencing that you learned in your school days. The reason for that being because they are f-stops and not bus stops. They are divided up by the halving of the light or the doubling of the light. It may be possible that your camera, like many cameras these post-modern days, has more options than just the basic f-stops, which is fine.
One disclaimer that I would like to throw out there is that I am not a professional and I have never taken a class. I may be very wrong in my explanations and am very open to correction. As always though, I hope that you find this enjoyable and helpful and please post any questions that you have.

Don't Eat Me

Photography is a highly refined and complex art, reserved only for the champions of the intelligence quotient and scholastic masters...ALL LIES! Perhaps you have often cradled your optical art maker in hand, longing to turn the mode dial from the "Auto" setting to that magnanimous M (manual), which has like a cliff of unexplored opportunity. Whilst you have walked along the auto trail, you may have wondered what was upon the manual precipice above, you still settled for the choices that your camera made for you as you took acceptable shots that took very little thought on your own part, except to point and shoot. Well, it is time for you to turn that dial to M. NO MORE shall you walk along the path of preset pictures. Think for yourself!
Enough soap boxing (what would a soap boxing match look like?). There are three things that a manual master need to know. They are ISO, Aperture, and Exposure. If you have read my other posts, which is fine if you haven't, you may have already heard about exposure a couple times in the long exposure shots. Since ISO is a tricky concept, I would like to focus on aperture. The aperture is much like the iris (or pupil) of your eye. It controls the amount of light that comes into your eye. If the aperture is opened up and made larger it will allow more light it. Therefore, like your eye, it is necessary to open up the aperture further when lighting decreases. Now, you may be trying this as you are reading and now be yelling "LIES!" back at me because as you make the aperture number bigger on your camera bigger, the photos get darker. The reason for this being that the aperture size is a ratio. Therefore, if the number is 5.6 it is a much bigger aperture than if the number is 20. If that is confusing think of it in more normal ratios. If the diameter of circle A was twice as big as circle B the ratio would be 1:2, in the case of aperture it would be 2. If circle A was four times smaller than circle B it would be a ratio of 1:4, or an aperture of 4. If that does not make sense play with it on your camera for a while and it that still leaves you befuddled please drop a question in the comments and I will do my best to answer it.
Now, there is more to aperture than what meets the eye. In addition to to regulating light coming into the lens , it also effects the depth of field in a shot. The physics behind this is sweet, but a bit tiring, so I will wait with trying to lay that out. However, know that the larger the aperture is, that being a smaller number displayed, the shorter the depth of field will be. The depth of field is the amount of the picture that is in focus. In "Don't Eat Me", shown above, a large aperture was used to get only the spider in focus and much of the rest of the shot blurred out. A short depth of field can be especially desirable in portrait photography as it decreases the number of distractions present. However, in landscape photography on would want a smaller aperture to increase the depth of field and get the entire vista in focus. Ansel Adams, a very famous photographer, was known for using tiny apertures for his landscapes, so feel free to type him in on google to find some good examples. Otherwise I have some landscapes on this blog as well.  That is enough for now, if you have any questions let me know.

Coneflower and Monarch

Psalm 150:6