Decisions, decisions.

...Take what you can get.

This is the Powershot A550 I use for some casual shots. I carry it around all day and use it whenever I want. It's a versitile little point-and-shoot, but it has its drawbacks.

For instance, I wouldn't consider utilizing it for macro shots with a depth-of-field like this...

Oh well. If I'm trying to take pictures of Latin vocabulary words, with no flash, then it will do just fine...

Til then, I'll stick to a camera with a built-in 8x digital zoom lens. I just have never gotten good macro results with any point-and-shoot except the Nikon E8700. However, some of my most recent pictures have been taken using the Canon.

This is why a photographer needs to develop an arsenal of sorts...and I'm well on my way.

The first bloom!

For the longest time, it seemed as though the daffodil garden simply wouldn't bloom. It was just a sea of green shoots. They had a character all their own - resolute in the cold and frequently windy days of early spring, and completely indifferent to their surroundings of various lifeless shades of brown.

So a great deal of recreational macro shots sprouted up around these, um, sprouts. My favorite of these is this one. My iPhoto library is overrun with ones like that, though, so it got old very fast. Imagine having nothing green and not a tree on your entire 1.5+ acre property.

Well, at any rate, I do like macro shots. They take a great deal of talent to cobble together - since it's often a portrayal of some small entity of nature, a macro shot ought to have a definite emotional overtone or message to relay. Nature tells us things.

Macros work best with a DSLR. I do not have a DSLR. So, I use the Nikon Coolpix 8700 described in the astro-shot post I made earlier; I have done all my really satisfying macro shots with it. Nikon makes microscopes and binoculars, you know. They know how to magnify things. I have gotten good macro results with an obsolete and somewhat damaged Coolpix 5600. There's nothing against the camera here, but there are some problems with the raw file nonetheless.



This is the first daffodil to come up this spring. About time. :)

The contrast is way off, though, and the color in the background is just blah. It really doesn't add any kind of ambiance...it just detracts from the flower, if anything. Macro is one place where it's ok to center the subject, given the subject often is so detailed you'll focus on it no matter where it is. The other thing is the ambiance I said this photo doesn't have - it's all this bokeh that would look good if only it was of uniform color and texture.

Perhaps I'll try again soon...but in the meantime, take away from this that you ought to carefully set up any macro shot bearing in mind what's going to be in the background of the shot - and of course, the after-processing you may need to put more emphasis on the subject.

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all work contained here and on any external links posted here is the property of the artist responsible. do not reproduce or download any work without the specific written permission of the artist.

E8700 Astro-Shot

Now, as nice as it looks, the Nikon Coolpix 8700 is just that - a CoolPix. This well-known line of point-and-shoot, fixed-lens small-CCD cameras from Nikon is known for many things good and bad, but close-ups of celestial entities is not exactly one of them.

But check out this picture (click to view full size):



While it's not particularly large, as astro-macro shots preferably are, this picture surprised me nonetheless. The shutter speed was two seconds but everything else was auto-set by the program - I don't ever actually do anything entirely manually with this camera.

The main reason there's little to no luck of escaping digital noise here is due to the fact that any camera that's not an SLR is prone to it. It's just a fact - the sensor is comparatively small and also not quite as strong.

Oh well - thought I'd share. It's always cool to get an unexpectedly good result on a for-fun photoshoot. :)

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all work contained here and on any external links posted here is the property of the artist responsible. do not reproduce or download any work without the specific written permission of the artist.

Cloud Conceptualization I

Clouds are one aspect of nature which we have a tendency to admire from afar without ever really looking beyond.

Clouds are almost exclusively water vapor that has formed into various shapes and sizes dependent on a variety of conditions - atmospheric makeup, chemical content and composition, and relative density. When we see clouds from the ground, we frequently don't imagine them as three-dimensional, or even as structural entities, but they are.

Though hardly solid, clouds have a definite structure. A camera often sees this when we do not.

Since a JPEG image is just data, whereas what we see is merely reflected light, Photoshop can be used to manipulate an image to reveal cloud structure, which in turn can be color-balanced to bring out the true qualities of a photo. Clouds provide atmosphere and can add emotional overlays to a photo.

But before we get into too much after-processing, it's important to bear in mind that the camera is designed to take the picture you want it to take. Clouds, for example, look different based on something as simple as exposure time.

Here are two pictures of a simple sky and tree landscape taken on a cloudy, overcast afternoon. The first one was taken with normal exposure time, but the second was taken with -1_1/3 exposure time. The difference is quite noticable.




Although the shots are from slightly different angles, they were taken within 30 seconds of each other. Since a camera uses whatever light it gets, it often pays to manipulate how much it gets - as evidenced above, this simple adjustment can drastically alter the nature of a picture.

After-processing in Photoshop could theoretically make the first picture look like the second, but the closer your fresh picture is to what you want - right when you take it - the better.

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The images above were captured with a Canon PowerShot A550 digital camera.

all work contained here and on any external links posted here is the property of the artist responsible. do not reproduce or download any work without the specific written permission of the artist.