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I noticed these pristine yellow flowers all along the expressway while driving home from Little Rock. There was a pretty good breeze so I knew I could not get a great shot of the flowers. I decided to pick one and prop it up in the back of my truck protected from the breeze. The dark backdrop is my luggage. I held the camera against the door of the truck. |
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I decide to take the highway rather than the expressway home, and found this field of wild daisies. I should have used my tilt lens to get the entire field in focus. But I just handheld the camera and grabbed this shot. |
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Right next to the field of daisies were these dandelions. Another handheld shot that still captured the soft and fragile tendrils. |
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The weather and plant life have claimed this building. |
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I noticed this burned out tree shell still standing. I kept trying to imagine the circumstances that would have caused this. I walked out in the field to silhouette this tree against the setting sun. I had to use the curves tool in Photoshop to bring out the detail in the otherwise drab sky. |
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I need to start using this lens more often. This midday shot is not great but I want to experiment more with this 17-35 wide angle zoom lens. This lens allows both a foreground object and the background to fit into the same frame. |
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I had to rushed to the river to get to this spot before sundown. I like the reflection of the sun stretching all the way across the Mississippi river. A few minutes later, the sky was even more saturated but the reflection was gone. I combined two frames exposed one stop apart to get this image. The part below the horizon is the correctly exposed picture, and the part above the horizon is from a separate frame shot at one f-stop under. If all objects are stationary, the two areas can be blended across 100 pixels or so. In this shot, the bushes in the foreground were being moved a lot by a stiff wind, so the transition had to occur over about 20 pixels. This works well when there is a dark area spanning the entire horizon. The intent is the same as using a single frame and a neutral density graduated filter. The digital darkroom makes this possible, and even makes it feasible to do with a non-linear horizon. |
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Driving early one morning to my Tuesday morning small group meeting, I grabbed this dramatic sunrise as a backdrop for Bellevue's crosses. This was just a grab shot out of the window of my car with my Coolpix 950. |
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I am beginning to experiment with getting foreground objects in with whatever scene I am shooting. |
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