Friday, June 12, 2020

Bee in flight with pollen on it's body; Wasp close up

1/400 sec. f/8 100mm ISO 250


It's nice to see the bees out back working the flowers again .. here are a couple of photos taken with my Cannon 50D and 100mm Macro lens.
1/500 sec. f/8 100mm ISO 400
This camera is helping me to get a better understanding of how to capture a well composed macro shot. I'm doing everything on "Manual" mode so I can control all aspects of the photo: shutter, aperture, ISO, focus and composition. It's actually kind of fun - like a balancing act.. wanting to speed up the shutter for the flying bee's, but not wanting to increase the ISO to much .. etc - I'm learning.

The PowerShot was a great starter macro camera (as can be seen in the quality of the fly photo taken with it), but this 50D is a good step to a better understanding and some better captured images.
1/400 sec. f/8 100mm ISO 400
Thanks for looking. Leave a comment if you like them or have any suggestions.

Thursday, January 30, 2020

Frozen water grows up defying gravity

 I was out back first think in the morning and it had froze the night before and was still below freezing. A barrel that collects rain water had what appeared to be a perfect water drop formed on it, but the "drop" was going up - opposing gravity. I've included two photos; the first showing the drop close up. (As with all my photos here, they have only been cropped - there is no other editing of the images.)

I think this is a striking photo with the air bubbles suspended in the middle running from top to bottom, or is that bottom to top..? It has become one of my favorite of all time photos that I've taken.




The second photo shows the drop in context - rising up out of the lid of the water barrel. I think it's important as it shows the environment of the above photo. It also shows the background colors that become blurred in the macro shot which create the pleasing refraction's and reflections in the frozen water.


The final photo is of a second water barrel that also has a frozen water formation growing up out of it. This one looked like sword or even an old glass Christmas light. It also has bubbles of air suspended inside the frozen water. It too was very cool!