Nearly Wordless Wednesday

My group spent a week in Boston working at the Harvard College Observatory, and we happened to be there the week when all the flowers were blooming. Perfect!

















I like to think that these are Purple & Gold for LSU:


Many of the flowers were in here, a lovely treat I got to walk by daily:


If you know what kind of flowers these last two are, I'd love if you would share. Thanks!

One of these days...

...I'm going to learn how to properly slow down and relax. But not now! I finished the semester (all A's and I passed my Ph.D. qualifying exam!!!) and now I'm getting ready to head out on a trip with my research group. (Thanks in advance to Shannon, Mark, Mom, and Dad for babysitting my apartment while I'm gone!) I had grand plans to do a post on natural framing before I left, but that's just not going to happen. Too much to do before we leave, and long informational posts, unfortunately, do not help get my affairs in order or my clothes in my suitcase. ;) But I will leave you with one of the photos I was going to use as an example:



Gardenias are by far my favorite-smelling flower. They smell sweet and heady, especially in the still (aka hot and humid) night air of the Gulf Coast. They're not the prettiest, but oh goodness do they make up for it with their scent. And, if you catch 'em properly framed by their leaves, they're not too dreadful to look at, either.

And on that note, I'm audi. Don't know what the interwebs situation will be, but I'll definitely be taking pictures and hopefully be posting them sporadically! Ciao! =)

Flowers!

Hi friends - I'm back! For a little bit at least...I may have to disappear again soon, but for now, I have a few days of relative freedom! Woohoo! So here are some pics that I took a while ago, to celebrate! Even when I'm super-swamped, like I have been for the past few weeks, I try to take a few pictures every week. It clears my mind and puts me in a good mood.

A few weeks ago, I went back to Texas for the weekend, and my dear friend Shannon kept an eye on my apartment while I was gone. When I got home Sunday night, I found these:



You may or may not have noticed, but I kind of have a thing for flowers. Kind of. So I was pretty psyched to come home to such bright, pretty, happy ones! A few days later, I was up early and the light was nice, so I brought the flowers out to the back patio and took some pics. I liked this one a lot:



Bright, colorful, in your face flowers. Love it! Then, in my current state of relative freedom, I figured I could have some fun with them. (Ok, ok, if you follow my Flickr, you know that I played around a little bit before the relative freedom hit, but I was desperately in need of a study break, haha. Most of the editing was done post-test, don't worry parents.) Anyways, I popped over to Picnik and went to town:


The "1960s" Effect


The "Orton-ish" Effect (To actually do an Orton photo takes a lot of steps. In Picnik, it's one click. Love.)


The "Posterize" Effect


The "Cross-Process" Effect (Real cross-processing info)

Fun, eh? =)

Aperture Study

I've been trying to sneak in a post for awhile, and Donna's comment encouraged me to up and write it already! (Go check her out; not only does she have her own wonderful site, but she's contributing to the new PW Photography. Sweet!) A while ago, Jessica asked about the blurry background in some of the flower pics I took on campus. She was absolutely correct that it was caused by the aperture settings on my camera. (Does anyone else always want to spell it aperature? I guess I just pronounce it incorrectly with a bit of a Southern flair and put that extra syllable in there.)

The aperture is basically the hole in the lens that lets light in. Normally it's closed, but it opens to a predetermined size when you take a picture. When you're using a dSLR you can control the aperture size in the Manual and Aperture-priority settings. The wider the aperture (which corresponds to a smaller f/ number), the shallower the depth of field. A shallower/smaller depth of field corresponds to a smaller in-focus area in the image. Here is a series of images I took at Avery Island to illustrate the effect a change in aperture can have:


f/25.0, the smallest aperture setting here, the largest depth of field


f/13.0


f/7.1, see how the background is getting blurry?


f/6.3


f/5.6, the largest aperture here, and thus the most shallow depth of field

In PW form, here are the first and last next to each other for comparison:


See the difference in the background, and even the leaves in the foreground?

A couple random things about aperture. As you might expect (or already know), the wider the aperture, the more light is let in. You can then use a faster shutter speed, letting you take crisper, clearer photos (although, blur can be good). Also, if you are using a zoom lens, your maximum aperture will change in relation to the focal length you're using. On my kit lens, the range of maximums is from f/5.6 when it's at 55mm to f/3.5 when it's at 18mm. The f/3.5 setting lets in more light, so it's useful in low-light situations. If you can't get the exact composition you want, you can always creatively crop. (Photo editing is your friend!)

Someday, I hope to get a macro lens and then really rock out the fun with depth of field, in photos like this:


Image by Flickr user ecstaticist, used under terms of CC License.

And with that, fun time is up. Time to get back to work! Hope y'all have a great week! =)

It's a...

...beautiful day!



Look how blue the sky is:



Seriously. I didn't do any color correction. It really is that gorgeous today.



The flowers are even glowing:





I think the weather is celebrating the fact that finals are over. ;)

Monkshood...

...is another interesting flower. They line the stream beds in the French Henry area and bloom during the second half of the summer. I like the shape of the bloom, and how it's separated from the leaves; I think it lends a dramatic flair to the flower. Does the shape of the bloom remind you of something? Like a monk, wearing his hood? (Also, they're poisonous, so don't eat them, mkay?)

As for photography, do you notice how the flower is normally lit/colored, but the background is very dark? You can see the same thing in this shot, of Mountain Bluebells:



Obviously y'all are smart enough to know that the reason for the lighting differences is flash. It illuminated the flowers, but not the relatively empty background. Now, some people are very anti-flash. I don't love it, but I don't hate it either. I generally try to shoot without it, but will turn it on when necessary. I actually really like the effect in the first photo, because I think it draws attention to the flower. I don't like it as much in the second photo, but it was too dark to get a clear shot without a flash. (Obviously I just need a better lens with a wider aperture, so I don't have to use a flash if I don't want to...or a tripod...or both...)

So yeah...flowers are pretty, and flash isn't evil. =)

(Please forgive the lack of real content in this post, and the sporadic updates lately. Midterms stole all my time...)

Random Wednesday!

(Click for bigger. You can see some cool depth-of-field effects in the big one!)

This is a Sego Lily - isn't it interesting? It's one of the many flower pictures from this summer that I alluded to earlier. =) According to my Philmont Fieldguide:

Early Mormon settlers ate the bulbs of the Sego Lily when other food sources were scarce. Today the Sego Lily is the state flower of Utah. The bulbs have long been a source of food for the Navajo and Hopi Indians as well. The genus name, Calochortus, is Greek for beautiful herb.

Neat, eh?

I'd love to link you to the Fieldguide so you can purchase your very own, but it's currently not for sale, as it is being re-written (which it desperately needs!). The writers and photographer came through camp one day on a flower hunt. We'd just had a hailstorm that destroyed a lot of our flowers (including this rose!) and so I showed them the pics I had on my D40. They really liked them and asked me to submit them, for possible inclusion in the guide! Cool! Maybe they were just pretending to be interested, to humor me, but I still thought it was neat. The new guide probably won't be out for a few years, by which time I'll probably have forgotten all about it. Hopefully they'll let me know if they do decide to use anything!

Happy Wednesday! =)

Wild Roses, and Depth of Field

I took a ton of flower pictures this summer, because I love flowers, and because there were so many. Northeast New Mexico has been in a drought for a long time, at least as long as I can remember. This past year, however, was really wet, and some of the old-timers think this is going to keep up for at least the next few years. *crosses fingers* That would be excellent, if true. Enough water means so many good things for the region, including great flowers! We had more wildflowers this summer than I've seen in ten years of going to Philmont, and luckily I had my sweet new camera to capture them.

Over the course of this blog, you'll probably see most of the good ones (or you can go check them out on Flickr...see the sidebar badge), but for now, here are two pictures of the same flower, a wild rose, and a mini-photography lesson.

Disclaimer: I know very very little about photography. But I am capable of reading (thank goodness) and am teaching myself, little by little. To learn more, click here and here.

Ok. Back to the photos:

Do you see the difference? In the top photo, the petals are in focus. In the bottom one, the stamens are. I like the bottom one better, because...well, I don't really know why, I just do. This is one of the things I really like about my D40, is that I have control over where to focus. I also have control over depth of field.

Now, up until about three days ago, I didn't really understand depth of field or aperture settings or how they are connected. I always got shutter speed, because that makes sense to me. (The faster the speed, the less light comes in, the darker the pictures. And vice versa.) I shot on S a lot, and let the camera control aperture. I had a vague idea that aperture had to do with how wide the lens opened to let in light, but didn't really understand how that made a difference. I decided that I should probably learn. I found these two great articles (one and two) and they made a ton of sense. I also liked the Wikipedia article on aperture because it explains the math. (Yay math!)

Which got me thinking about the flower pics. I reckoned that the aperture must have been set very wide (which corresponds to a low number...) to get such a shallow depth of field that I could have either the petals or the stamens in focus, but not both. So I zipped over to Flickr and checked out the Exif data (for some reason I prefer to look at it on Flickr instead of on my computer...don't ask me why...), and sure enough, the aperture for both was f/5.3, which is close to the max for my lens at that zoom level. This means the lens opened really wide to let in a lot of light, and, as I suspected, made the depth of field very shallow. Cool!

I hope you enjoyed this mini-lesson, and that it made sense. Please feel free to comment and let me know other cool things about aperture, depth of field, wild roses, etc. (Also, please let me know (kindly!) if I have said anything incorrect.) Ooh, and if you know how to blog multiple Flickr photos into one post (I can only figure out how to get one photo in the post using 'blog this'), please please let me know!

Thanks y'all! Have a great week! =)

This blog is feeling neglected...

...so here are some pictures taken in my family's backyard back in May. Enjoy! =)

I think this one's especially striking in B&W.

So I want to be a photographer...

Here are some of my favorite pictures from my Spring Break trip to San Francisco. They were all taken with my Fujifilm FinePix A345 (4.1 mp). All but the turtle are completely unedited. (I darkened the shadows in the turtle pic a bit in Picasa, because there was a lot of glare on the water.) I don't know a whole lot about photography, basically just enough to get frustrated with a point-n-shoot. Stay tuned...









The composition of the jellyfish is dreadful, but I just thought they were so cool! :)