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 :)

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.

Leafy Tunnel

Well, it's not black & white but it does have people (a person).

Look at all that green! Shot with my 35mm f1.8 @ f5.6, with just a little bit of post to boost the contrast (particularly the greens) and darken a few of the shadows in the foreground to lead your eye into the background. I think I'll revisit this place when the leafy tunnel has regrown again.

Windows says the max f-stop of my 1.8 lens is 1.6. What?! Not that I'm excited for the added 0.2 or anything (it's a DX lens after all), I just think it's odd that the numbers don't exactly match.

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.

Alien Terrain

This picture reminds me of satellite photography, showing blocks of buildings, areas of Autumnal woodland and large bodies of water. There's even scattered clouds in the top right corner. It's actually the top of an old wooden post I'd seen on the bank of the Thames.

This was a way more interesting photo opp than The Shard (I love The Shard, but I've seen it so many times that it can get ordinary-looking) and it's always a nice change of pace to find something less obvious when you're surrounded by tourist attractions.

Spider Hunters

I saw these kids climbing trees in the woods behind my house in the Philippines. What they were doing was looking for spiders, which they would later pair up to fight against each other. Mr. Orange decided to climb the trees, while Mr. Red was on the lookout, directing Mr. Orange to where the big arachnids were.

I kept this shot in colour rather than convert to black & white as the orange and red t-shirts contrasted really well against the green leaves. The colour also helped to define the imaginary rule-of-thirds lines; the picture is divided vertically by the two trees flanking the diagonal trunk, as well as horizontally by the dark green tree canopy up top and light green scrubland down below. The kids sit nicely on the horizontal lines, with the diagonal trunk and Mr. Red's face leading your eye upwards to Mr. Orange.

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.

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.

Just point the lens to the sky and...

It's usually difficult to get photos of a plant or flower isolated in a normal setting as there's always background distractions and colours lingering around, no matter how much you bokeh it out. Blurring the background heavily narrows the depth of field on a subject. and you can't really avoid all the background colour unless you're in a studio setup, or you do some selective colouring (not exactly my favourite technique). I decided to experiment with a few shots by using an overcast day as my flat, colourless background, which meant shooting upwards.

These were all taken around March-April, when the weather was still nice and grey. I set my camera's white balance to Daylight to preserve the colours; despite the cloudy day, I didn't want these shots warmed up. (I also rarely use 'auto' white balance anymore, which probably would have had the same effect.) I like that they look cold and icey, especially the last shot of the newly emerging blossoms. I think they also look a bit like slides from a microscope, particularly the shot of the green leaves. Shooting into what is essentially white light meant that the foreground subjects were a bit dark. I didn't want to use my on-camera flash because it's crap (and I didn't have anything at hand to diffuse it) so I adjusted the shadows afterwards in post.

I think they turned out quite nice. The plants are in isolation with no noisy background colours or shapes (no need for selective colour), with just a little help from Photoshop and an English spring time.

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)

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...

Gone fishing

On an early morning walk to the beach in the Philippines I saw these three fishermen casting their net into the water. They then paused for a few minutes to watch the rough waves, which gave me plenty of time to take this photo.

A moment of reflection? Caution at the choppy seas? Or maybe not enough fish.

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)

Junk food

Whatever you can get your beak on.

Star cluster

I don't know the name of this plant. All I know about it is that the flowers are yellow and before they are pollinated and fall out they sit in these neat little star-shaped pods.

Getting this close to a subject makes me wish I had a macro lens handy. I suppose I could always do macro-type shots with my Panny, but that's an extra camera to carry around.

Delicious cake

Squirrels like muffins too...

...but I like them more, so it gets to scrape the crumbs from the paper liner. No wonder he looks a little miffed. Nom nom nom.



I should finally be getting my Nikon back on Tuesday, so yay for me. I sure did miss it. My Panny has served me well in the meantime. This was taken with my FZ-45 and it does look nice and sharp (after post), but there's nothing like a good old manual zoom and optical viewfinder. Shame I won't get it back in time for the Notting Hill Carnival, but that's one less thing to lug around/get damaged/get stolen. Now lets see if the weather holds up.