Dragonfly

I kinda missed having the ability to take macro photos with my Nikon, much like the macro function on my old FZ45, so I purchased a cheap macro reversing ring as well as an aperture control ring to convert my 18-55mm kit lens into a macro lens (it made no sense to me to invest in a dedicated macro lens just to play around with macro photography). After photographing loads of everyday stuff just see what it they looked like close-up (string, feathers, needle eyes etc.) I decided to have a go at capturing a more animated subject. I brought my makeshift macro kit on holiday and one day spotted a little brown-yellow dragonfly sitting on a washing line.

I climbed up on a chair, adjusted my flash (with homemade diffuser box!) and began the task of focusing wide open, closing the aperture ring and shooting. Lather, rinse and repeat a few times, cull the out-of-focus images (of which there were a lot!) and clean up the dust spots on the few remaining good ones.

Surprisingly I was able to get my unwieldy camera, reversed lens and flash/box combo really close to the dragonfly without it barely flinching. I thought just my presence and the diffuser box looming over the insect would be enough to scare it but it stayed calm, even with the flash firing off just directly above it. Only when I decided to climb off the chair to try and recompose my shots did it decide to fly away.

I tried my best to get the eyes in focus as that's what you're usually drawn to in the first place, but if you've ever used a reverse Nikon lens set-up you'll know how difficult it is to get the incredibly shallow focus plane just right AND THEN close the aperture to near-darkness to increase sharpness and focus plane. Add to that hand-holding the camera with a top-heavy flash and it made for a pretty testing time. That said it was really fun, despite the arm-aching weight of the camera and googly eyes I got from peering into the dark viewfinder :)

Street dogs

Not actually on a street but close enough, appearance-wise.

Worm's-Eye View of a Bird's-Eye View

Looking up at a couple of crows looking down. I also like how these birds are framed by the passing clouds into a dark strip of sky.

Black, White & Blue

(Regents Park)

The bending reflections of those vertical bars in the water was the first thing that caught my attention. I wanted more than just an abstract image so I waited a few moments for some of the local wildfowl to appear in frame. Fortunately for me the birds that decided to do so were a black and a white one, paddling (floating? wading?) in opposite directions.

Photo Set: Animals (B&W)

In alphabetical order, I suppose:

 Gullwings. One up, one down.

 Power-pigeons. Grime and grime.

Sausages in the park.

 Trellick pigeon. I tried to focus on the bird but AF chose the building instead. Oh well.

Webdrops. 35mm goodness after the rain.

Chihuahua

Just playing with colour levels and shooting from-the-hip while on-the-move.

Should I have composed and centred the shot? Probably.
Do I care in this case? Nope.

Self shot

Not a huge fan of the "selfie".

This is my version, all lines and shadows; my silhouette, some crazy paving, and of course pigeons. But that's London for you, pigeons everywhere.

We used to called them "MySpace angles", particularly the ones where you'd place the camera up high and shoot downwards. Of course nowadays Facebook has all but slaughtered MySpace to be the self-indulgent stage of the moment, and front-facing cameras on phones have increased self-shot portraits to no end. The selfie lives.



My favourite "selfie" of the moment. Thanks, internet!

It's the ridiculous phone and duckface that does it for me.

(via)

Below the surface

A picture of a duck floating on water is just a picture of a duck floating on water. While I have many "normal" animal pics I thought I'd try and capture the scene from a different perspective. I spotted this female Mallard sticking her butt in the air and initially thought that that would be it.

I walked to her and saw that she was ducking (no pun) her head under the water to reach the algae at the bottom of the pond. Fortunately it was a bright day, the sun had lowered and the water was clear enough to see straight through with minimal reflection. She was too busy dabbling to pay any attention to me, so I set my shutter to 1/1000, composed my frame, then waited for her next head dive.

It looks like she has two eyes on the side of her head, but you can thank the wonders of refraction for that little quirk.

Distant relatives

If I see a Mandarin Duck and I have a camera, chances are I'll end up taking a photo. I know they aren't native to the UK but the males look so impressive in their full colour, and stand out so well against the drab grey of London. This one, however was paired up with an unusual friend.

The other bird is a Wood Duck. I spotted this pair of males in St James' Park. The Mandarin was bossy, but the Wood Duck seemed to tolerate his company despite getting pecked at every so often. I like that the Mandarin is puffing his chest out, I assume as a display of dominance over the Wood Duck. I didn't see any other Wood Ducks around, maybe it was lonely.

The two species are closely related to each other, but Mandarins are native to East Asia whereas Wood Ducks are native to North America. In the wild they would never meet, it just took a few thousand miles and a London park for them to get together.


Makes a nice change from all the black & white photos. (I do like my b&w's)

Ignore the horse

I remember passing by this window a few times. One day I decided to cross the road and wait for just a few minutes.

The two people lined themselves up nicely, and I like that they both ignored the big wooden horse as well as each other: the woman engrossed in her iPhone/MP3 player, the man in his own thoughts, probably.

I would have preferred a more centred, less-cropped shot, but I had to shoot off-centre as my own reflection in the window was really obvious even though I was on the other side of the road. I suppose a polariser would have been good to have (at least to lessen the reflections in general) but I only have a 52mm polariser and this lens has a 62mm filter, and fiddling with polarisers isn't very efficient when shooting on-the-move. I'm still in the picture (left door reflection, under the awning) but I'm standing in a shadow and my outline is barely visible in this 900px resize.


Last night I had a dream in black and white, which wasn't entirely surreal as it was street photography related. I remember standing around a lot of other photographers in an urban setting, and we were all moving around, trying to line each other up with the backgrounds to shoot some interesting compositions. Nobody really stood still for too long though, we were all looking for that perfect shot. I did manage to get a couple of guys framed up between two vertical structures, and I remember being quite pleased at framing and shooting these fast-moving subjects.

That was pretty odd.

Running Samoyed

An exercise in making my average performing Tamron lens feel a bit less average.

After learning about increasing exposure compensation to enable faster shutter speeds I had to give it a real-world test. An overcast day and a hyperactive dog seemed like the ideal combination. I fired off a couple of shots at this fast moving Samoyed and this one was the best.

Lens was at full zoom (270mm, which vignettes like mad!), ISO 800 and shutter speed 1/1000. Just a little editing in post to bring some contrast back to the image.

Great Crested Grebe

A little break from black and white.

This grebe was a little browner than I've normally seen them. Is that a seasonal thing? I dunno. They usually don't come too close to the pond edge but this one was only a few metres away from me (older juvenile maybe?) Unfortunately the light wasn't too great and it was wading under a bridge, so I had to bump up exposure to compensate for the 1/500 shutter and play around with the levels to bring some detail back. Final (full-sized) picture is a little grainy, but seeing as I don't have a pro FX shooter I can't really complain.

In amongst the birds

35mm prime time.

Shot from the hip, I think, back when I knew a lot less about my camera settings. Program auto mode explains the really shallow depth of field. 1/1000 @ f/2.2? Yikes! I definitely wouldn't use those settings now! The shallow DOF makes it look like I was on the ground when I took it.
I'm pretty sure I was also trying to get the person in frame (she was feeding the pigeons, after all), but this works just as well.

Must use 35mm prime more often...

Askal

My aunt's dog in the Philippines. I forget his name. He's a mutt, commonly known as an askal.

When I met him for the first time he was extremely wary of me. Being a new face/smell he wasn't used to me at all and every time I got even a little bit close to him he would panic and bark his little head off. When I went back to my aunt's house a few days later, it was as if the previous day never happened; he was wagging his tail, hopping up on his hind legs and licking my hand. Endless licking. He even did that puppy thing where he would gently bite on my finger like he was teething, but always being aware to not actually crunch my digit in his mouth.

Just like that.

I did the old point & shoot and managed to get him licking his nose. It's a bit blurry because I just stuck to Program Auto mode and it picked a pretty wide aperture/slow shutter speed on my 35mm prime. I only learned how to use a fast shutter with exposure compensation a few weeks ago (me = still a noob) which would have given a sharper shot, but I like the blurriness that came as a result.

I made sure to let him nibble my finger after.

Stone lion

I'm not usually a fan of photos with selective colour, but in this case I decided to give it a try.

I took this photo last year when I was still noobing it out with my new Nikon and kit lens. That's not to say that I'm "pro" now, but I think I know my camera a little bit better than before (and I might have used my 35mm prime in portrait orientation this time around). I liked the texture of the statue, as well as the lichen patches that had formed on it which gave it a nice splash of colour. When I looked at the picture later on my computer the features that I liked were lost in the background distraction of green leaves. Naturally I wanted to make the photo black & white but doing this would obviously remove the lichen patches, hence my decision to use selective colour.

It was just a case of overlaying the original colour image on top of a black & white version in Photoshop, then erasing everything from the colour image except the statue.

I then played with the blending mode of the colour layer and chose pin light. This had the effect of turning the lichen a bit more orangey-red instead of the original yellow tone, but it also added some definition to the lichen edges, as well as making it look less like a quick hack job using hue and colorization adjustments.

A few more adjustments with contrast and brightness to bring out more definition and a quick blur of the sides (to soften the spiky tree in the foreground which really distracted my eye) and it's done.


I suppose it's one way to rescue an image that's missing a certain something (or has too many distracting subjects), but I don't know if I'd use the effect often.

A dog and his balloon

So far December hasn't disappointed at all. It's cold and dreary, and everybody is bundled up in big dark coats, gloves and scarves. So it's always nice to see something more cheery, colourful and a little different around this time of year.

And to think I was going to put my camera away because my fingers were getting cold... pfft. Moment almost missed.

Pigeon or dove?

The internet says they are similar: "doves are white pigeons", "pigeons are a type of dove", "pigeons are crusty, grey and dirty but doves are clean, white and pretty", blah blah blah. All I know is that this white pigeon decided to sit on the bench I was sitting on and I had my camera with me.

I had a white carrier bag with me at the time, so maybe he (I shall refer to it as a "he" from now on) thought I had food. He was quite content with just perching near me.

I rustled the bag a little, and he got closer. Then I noticed the tip of his beak was overgrown and curling inward. He probably isn't that used to scrounging and fighting over crumbs. This along with his more friendly temperament lead me to believe that he might have been a hand-reared pigeon which was released during a ceremony (wedding?) and that instead of finding his way home, got lost and ended up in a park, joining a bunch of other "normal" pigeons. I offered him a piece of a nut and he pecked it out of my hand.

Naturally I wanted to see how close I could get the camera...

Almost into his face actually and he wasn't too scared of it, but my 35mm lens only focuses from about 30cm so this was about as close as I could get and still get a good picture.

Then he was joined by a friend (up top), but she (yes, the other one shall be referred to as a "she") had some black parts on her tail-feathers. Maybe she was also a hand-reared bird, and whoever released her coloured the dark bits white so she looked like an "all-white dove", and the white colouring washed out after living the street life for so long... Yeah, that's right, I created backstories for a couple of street birds.

A final "Hey, what's that ya got there?" pose.

In for the landing

130mm f/6 1/400 at ISO 400

The seagull just coming in to land had already ousted another gull from that post, and was ousted itself moments later by the seagull right behind him. I don't know why 3 birds were fighting over that one spot, it's not like there was a shortage of posts or anything.

Sometimes I like to take these freeze-frame type shots because most times I have my all-round walkabout lens on (Tamron 18-270mm f/3.5-6.3 Di2) and I want to push it because it's not exactly the fastest lens around. It is convenient though. This lens isn't very bright towards the tele end and it was a cloudy day so I adjusted exposure and a few other levels in post to brighten it up a bit.

Pile of ducklings

A female Mallard sheltering her ducklings from the rain, like an umbrella... a duckbrella?

That's a lot of fuzzy ducklings. Duckpile!

(I believe these are the same ducklings as the ones in an earlier post)

Talk to the animals

I don't think the pigeon understands what you're saying unless you say it with bread.