Local Texture

This post contains a few recent Ashland Reservoir photos. Local scenes taken with the attempt to make the ordinary seem a bit extra-ordinary. I titled it local texture, as opposed to local color. That's weak photography humor.

After returning from Zion, and capturing a few silky water shots of the Virgin River, I thought I'd try to duplicate the concept using an extremely tiny stream which feeds the Ashland Res. It is only a minor trickle, perhaps a foot across.

Instead of silky water, I got this:

Water Dance

Even though it was a 1/10 second exposure, the nature of a tiny waterfall is different from a large river. I've no doubt a much longer exposure and perhaps less camera movement would have yielded a different result. The "dance" you see is from the reflections of some of the surface water. The sun was illuminating the falls quite strongly but only on the uppermost surface spray.


Here's a shot of the bottom of the stream:

Watercolor

Green Folds

All shots were taken with my 60mm macro. I focus stacked 8 shots of the green folds plant as I continue experimenting with focus stacking on occasion. Here's the result:

Green at a Distance

While this is technically accurate, and has a lot of the plant in focus regardless of distance from the lens - sort of a "photography feat," I can't help but feel the focus stacking feature, at least in this instance, feels clinical in nature. I much prefer the previous photo. It would appear that having asymmetry and parts of an image out-of-focus aren't bad things in photography :)



All photos © 2016, all rights reserved.  Contact me for licensing or to order prints.

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Indoor Flowers and Focus Bracketing

While the beautiful colors of outdoor flowers are hard to find mid-winter in New England, there are still indoor flowers to delight. Here are a few quick samples.

You are probably familiar with HDR, high dynamic range photos, where photos of different exposure get merged. Most cameras and many cell phones have this capability. In contrast to that, my camera also has a new focus bracketing capability, as explained below.

The orchid below is shown three ways: in a single "best" photo, as a focus bracketed stacked photo, and as one of the photos in the stack. My Olympus camera's new focus bracketing/stacking feature in the latest firmware allows me to take several identical photos (in this case, ten, though one could stack a few hundred if one wanted to!) at slightly different focus distances from one another and merge them together into a single photo with a much higher depth of field (area in focus) than any of the original photos individually. While the camera takes the bracketed set of photos, I actually merge them later in Photoshop. Focus bracketing is a pretty neat feature and I've had some fun experimenting with it. I still enjoy the soft "bokeh" of the out of focus areas in the single photos, so I'm hard pressed to decide which version I prefer. Which do you prefer?

Here's the orchid at its best in a single normal photo using my 60mm macro lens:

Orchid

Next is a focus stacked version of the same orchid. Notice how more of the orchid is in focus. Note that the above non-stacked photo is actually not one of the ten used to create this focus stacked picture, but was actually taken a few moments later, as I preferred its lighting and composition to any of the ten.

Focus Stacked Orchid

For reference, here's one of the ten photos used in the above focus stacked composition. You'll note that it is uncropped, and I hadn't yet magically removed the dark lines of the orchid's support.

Orchid - Uncropped

We have other indoor plants as well. Here's an African Violet (not focus stacked). See how its textured surface sparkles.

African Violet

All photos © 2016, all rights reserved.  Contact me for licensing or to order prints.

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