chasing the focus

I found a great photography blog via a friend. It’s called “Nikon Sniper” and authored by Stephen Baird. Having read his posts for a while today I’ve found that he not only has a fun sense of humour but a great attitude towards photographing. Already now he has inspired me a lot via his blog! At least go and read his text  “My General Guidelines To Photography“. It’s a valuable package to read, even if I don’t agree with all of it – but there are many ways to do this one thing, right? Like he prefers to shoot in shutter priority whereas I have my reasons to use aperture priority most of the time.

You want a photo too? Ok, here’s one. Taken in April, somewhere. And why did I post this pic? No reason. I just sort of like it :)

Looking at this picture on my computer screen my daughter said:
“Did you take that picture? It doesn’t look like one of yours. It looks like those example pictures in the cell phones – it’s so perfect.”

Not sure if that was a compliment or not…

Seems it’s been a while again since my last post. Sorry for that… I have been photographing some but never had enough energy or time or inspiration – or what ever – to prepare the photos for further use. However, here’s something.

In the summer mom always needs me to take care of her house plants when she vanishes into the country. This year she forgot to take her ultimate treasures – two miniature citrus trees – with her, so I moved them into my kitchen to make sure they won’t die while she’s away. And what do you know – one evening as I came home I was greeted by a strong sweet scent: One of the trees was blooming! And of course I had to photograph the flowers…

The first one is photographed with my Canon 7D using a Lensbaby 3G lens. That lens, unlike Lensbaby Composer, doesn’t need a special macro kit for getting closer to the subjects: By expanding the lens you can get the smallest focusing distance shrink. This is what I did in this first picture.

The second picture is also with the Lensbaby 3G but from a “normal” focusing distance.

The third photo is a sort of super macro: I used my excellent Canon 60 mm F2.8 macro lense attached to a Kenko 36 mm extension tube. The problem with a combination like this is that the depth of field becomes extremely limited. So here I used an aperture of f13 and it still wasn’t quite enough.

The fourth image is a traditional one – taken with a plain 60 mm macro lens. And truthfully – I find it rather boring.

I’ve been sort of hibernating and so has my camera. But today was a warm, beautiful sunny Saturday. For once the glorious weather came in the weekend! So I took my camera and went out. I didn’t go outside our own gate and still managed to find many delightful things! (Click an image to go into the original gallery)

Yes, the winter has been hard. Long, cold and hard. And it shows in the things that come out when the snow finally melts.

But the bikes have been deported from the greenhouse where they spend the winter. Hubby has started making room for potatoes and other growing stuff.

It’s finally warm enough for the pooches to be outside without their wooly sweaters. They love the sun and the warmth :)

And they shed……..

There’s still a lot of snow left so I had to do some shovelling to get where I wanted to…

…but it was worth the effort because I found these

and these

and these!

Gotta love it, don’t you think? :)

Pepe’s birthday was also my nameday. My sweet husband brought me these beautiful tulips. Is there another function to flowers except using them for photography? I took this photo handheld in the normal living room evening light using the full aperture of my 50 mm f1.8 lens. I really like how it turned out!