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Macro on windy days outside it just impossible, unless you fire away and hope for the best. I have started playing with an old Minolta Rokkor-X 50mm macro f3.5. The lends is manual (but I prefer manual macro), but has just as good bokeh as your new toy. It is good to see that your new toy does perform well in the bokeh department, exactly what you would hope for in a macro where most of the frame usually is out of focus.

I probably could have paid more attention to Crop, but I just don't have it in me. I was mostly testing the lens.

Pictures aren't loading for me squid.

Something to do with Google's images, right-click on link and select "view images". Just don't have time to fix it. Son is busy dropping a stinky so I am burning time...

More of The Pirates Charles, this time at a show at Air Conditioned in Santa Monica last week. This was a challenge; the lighting was spastically changing (venues in LA have some of the worst lighting I've ever seen) and would flash green-red-blue-yellow-magenta-etc. with occasional moments of well-balanced bright lighting thrown in. The solution was to set the camera for Continuous shooting and just holding the shutter button to capture several shots of the same framing, and hope at least one of them grabs the quarter-second of good lighting among the five seconds of awful. The desaturated shots were those that were nice and sharp, but otherwise had poor color due to the unpredictable light.


One of the best shots from the night, in terms of color. It's frustrating knowing the venue could have provided good light, but didn't... oh well.

SPOOFE wrote:

more pics

I love that your pics have the same style. Mine are all over the place. uck.

Given the nature of their performance and their attire, they’re quite a photogenic bunch!
I YouTube’d some of their stuff, street performing to larger venues. While it’s not immediately my taste, it’s definitely a refreshing change and one that could fit certain moods.

Did you use any noise removal software on them pics, or is that all from the D90’s own NR processing?

Spoofe, I think you should try and embrace the colored lighting. It's probably to shoot in in terms of the amount of light entering the lens, but it can be used to very great effect. I have some pictures (somewhere) from a Linkin Park concert, where the white lights were harsh, but the colored lighting came out very artistic and dramatic. Even if you have to underexpose and get a very dim picture, you can probably do some kind of variation on Black Sabbath's Vol 4 cover art.

bzzzz bzzzztt bzzz



One of the last trees of the season. Found three in a row blooming in the office park and at least fifty bumblebees working them over.

@ Vold
Wow, i'm surprised that the GF1 being as spending as it is doesn't have wireless flash, even my little A230 shows support for wireless independent flash devices... hmmmm. Awesome pics as usual and geez man, what planet are you from, some of those plants just look like they are from another planet!

@Richie
Its all good, I can visualize the look and effect you were trying to go for , so no worries. I'd love to see what you could do with an old WWII era record player with the large "speaker" like thing out the side, very Victorian.

@Spoofe
I have to agree with Richie on that.... not quite my style but that last photo especially shows that these guys aren't camera shy.....

And since I haven't posted anything in here for some time, I walked outside about 20 minutes ago (at 10 going on 11PM) and noticed that 1 flower out of an entire little bush, had bloomed while all of the others stayed closed.... pretty neat. Its not quite the amazing macro shots you guys got, but here is what I got of it.






Just out of curiosity..... are you guys at all editing your photos before posting? I noticed that mine in comparison looks washed out, and still can't tell if its the limitations of the camera, the lens, or my horrible use of settings... Thanks

Did you use any noise removal software on them pics, or is that all from the D90’s own NR processing?

It's all the camera, and I think it was set to Low. I don't apply NR as part of my workflow, even though I recognize that I probably could and should.

Spoofe, I think you should try and embrace the colored lighting.

I think it's just a matter of me being sick of the poor lighting at venues, giving me a pile of pictures that are almost exclusively one color (and, far too often, red). I've only been to a handful of spots with lighting approaching anything decent. 'Course, that's my own stupid fault for shooting shows so much, so I shouldn't complain...

Welch wrote:

And since I haven't posted anything in here for some time, I walked outside about 20 minutes ago (at 10 going on 11PM) and noticed that 1 flower out of an entire little bush, had bloomed while all of the others stayed closed.... pretty neat. Its not quite the amazing macro shots you guys got, but here is what I got of it.
Just out of curiosity..... are you guys at all editing your photos before posting? I noticed that mine in comparison looks washed out, and still can't tell if its the limitations of the camera, the lens, or my horrible use of settings... Thanks

I can imagine if that lone flower had a voice: 'Ah what a beautiful spring morning! Guys? Ah crap!'

(Actually, don't many trees open their flowers at night? Can't remember...)

Yeah I'm playing with photoshop atm since I'm taking pics in RAW. Usually I'll just tinker with the sharpness and contrast, and if anything more I'll note it with the pic if I post it on here. That said I've recently upped the sharpness in the camera settings, and will also be using different colour profiles. I'm slowly trying to get past the need to edit stuff so much and just get the result I want without too much messing around.

Welch wrote:

@ Vold
Wow, i'm surprised that the GF1 being as spending as it is doesn't have wireless flash, even my little A230 shows support for wireless independent flash devices... hmmmm. Awesome pics as usual and geez man, what planet are you from, some of those plants just look like they are from another planet!

Hehe, the 'pod plants' are little baby pitcher plants, or a close relative. The orchids can get pretty funky looking, too. My dad is an avid gardener, and I don't know half the stuff he grows (sadly, none of it is smokable), but I do go out and shoot in his garden from time to time, since he's too lazy to break out his 40D.

Yeah, lack of wireless seems to be a big thing Panny is behind on. Even the $599 Oly E-PL1 has wireless trigger capability. It didn't bother me at the time because I wanted the GF1 for street, but now that I got a macro lens it might be a bit more limiting. I can always use a hotshoe extension cable or a pocket wizard if I won't need E-TTL and FP-sync (and who needs 1/2000s flash for macro or studio portraits?).

Just out of curiosity..... are you guys at all editing your photos before posting? I noticed that mine in comparison looks washed out, and still can't tell if its the limitations of the camera, the lens, or my horrible use of settings... Thanks

[/quote]

I always shoot RAW. Most of my shots are imported in Lightroom with adobe default presets, and if I feel the shot needs it, I'll adjust the contrast curves, WB and (less frequently) colour HSL. For the arty(er) shots, I like to play with the sepia/cyanotope/etc presets in LR. Now that I got photoshop working in 32-bit on my system (the 32-bit version was crashing all the time till I upgraded), I might check out Nik Silver EFX or Colour EFX though.

Richie_G wrote:

(Actually, don't many trees open their flowers at night? Can't remember...)

Yep, quite a few... lots of them in the desert especially. One of my favorites that we used to have when I lived in Florida where "Night Blooming Jasmines" They arent a whole lot to look at, tiny little white trumpet shaped flowers but...... o.........m...........g, they put off the strongest scent you can imagine. We had them about 100 feet away from our hot tub and when they opened at night, you would have sworn that they were right next to you, very strong, very fragrant, awesome flower. If you've got a "The Body Shop" near you, I bought the girlfriend a "Night Blooming Jasmine" candle from there and the scent is dead on to the real thing.

Here are a few casual portraits taken over the weekend with the PL45/2.8 for anyone interested.

Birding is probably not the first thing you'd think to do with a PL45/2.8, but I happened to be passing by the KL Bird Park, and until Panny comes up with a 105/2.8 lens for MFT, this is my longest native FL.

Because the birds are pretty tame and habituated to humans, you can get pretty close to many of them (sometimes too close).








Love the eyelashes on the hornbill.




Peacocks like to fluff their feathers when they get aggressive, which is great for photos.






Mister Miyagi was here.


Probably closer than you should really stick a $900 lens to a hungry Emu.


Some contrast loss from shooting through grilles.


Chiiiiiiiips~!

Lovin' those bird pics. The closest I've gotten to wild birds like that was peacocks at the zoo (habituated) and a blue grouse in Rocky Mountain National Park (about as dumb as a barnyard chicken).

Just out of curiosity..... are you guys at all editing your photos before posting? I noticed that mine in comparison looks washed out, and still can't tell if its the limitations of the camera, the lens, or my horrible use of settings... Thanks

Now that' I've got a reasonably firm feel for how the camera works, I've finally started shooting in RAW and the additional post-processing flexibility is worth it. The bumblebee shot above was originally a bit overexposed, which washed out the sky and flowers. I turned down the brightness in RAW which helped a lot (a huge advantage to tweaking brightness and contrast in RAW space, rather than RGB space, is that you don't get the instant washout/blackout effect when making modest adjustments). I then modified the color tone in RAW to enhance the pinks. Finally, a slight amount of noise reduction and lens correction were added.

Can't make up for lack of light, though. Your flower shots look like they might have been taken in the shade or with a partially overcast sky, which limits the contrast. Another thing to consider is your composition. The amount of green and brown in the backdrop suggests you were shooting downward toward the ground or horizontally against heavy foliage. Even with the bokeh obscuring the details, the exact same subject becomes a totally different picture if you can find an angle that captures a wider color gamut (from sky, clouds, other flora, etc.).

Do you have a circular polarizer?

ludi wrote:

(about as dumb as a barnyard chicken).

Like this? (Oldie from the G9).


Well, Jeff Goldblum dropped in earlier for a photoshoot. Admittedly: one fly was hurt in the process, yet I feel no remorse.





Hmm, I hope you can see all of each shot, it's trimming mine down a bit because I'm still using 1280x1024.

Edit: PS Voldenuit, are they pics of the family?

Richie_G wrote:

Edit: PS Voldenuit, are they pics of the family?

Yes, mostly family and one random kid that I ran across at the bird park, who was more interested in climbing things than the trained eagles flying overhead

That's a pretty good magnification you were getting there - which lens were you using?

Using the Tamron 90mm 1:1 Macro lens at the moment. I still don't think I'm getting the best out of it, I want to get more of the shot in focus. I'm guessing making the aperture smaller will go some ways to doing that.

Richie_G wrote:

Using the Tamron 90mm 1:1 Macro lens at the moment. I still don't think I'm getting the best out of it, I want to get more of the shot in focus. I'm guessing making the aperture smaller will go some ways to doing that.

Check out this guy. He shoots his macros with a PL45/2.8 Macro and a GF1, some amazing stuff there. He works at f/18 a lot. You can also use software for focus stacking, but I haven't tried any of those out.

Well, after the last ophidian-related thread I had the urge to shoot some snakes. Fortunately, there was a snake farm nearby (the rainforests here have lots of snakes, but they're very hard to spot in the bush, many are poisonous, and there are a plethora of scorpions, spiders, leeches and all variety of stinging insects - many of which carry communicable parasites) so I didn't have to "Indiana Jones" it.


Green Dog-toothed Cat Snake. Isn't he adorable? I hardly think he's big enough to eat cats, though.


Painted Bronzeback Snake


Long Nosed Whip Snake


Cave Racer

Lest you think cuddly little cute snakes are all they had at the farm, here are some bigger and badder snakes:


King Cobra! This baby was at least 10 ft long, and was kept in a chicken wire cage I bet it would have no problem busting out of. It also got quite agitated whenever anyone stepped near its enclosure, although sadly it never got to flaring its hood for me.


Temple Pit Viper. You may remember them from my last snake-related post.


What's this?


It's a Big-Eyed Pit Viper (apt name). I like how the backlight and the veiling flare from the glass make it look like a 70's sci-fi movie poster. Now all I need is a girl in a chainmail bikini...


White Eyed Python

Hope you enjoyed them.

Voldenuit wrote:

Temple Pit Viper. You may remember them from my last snake-related post.

Composition winner! So many bright colors in one clean shot.

ludi wrote:

Composition winner! So many bright colors in one clean shot.

Heh. Thanks!

I actually broke the Rule of Thirds by placing the eye in the center-ish, but I felt the body and the red backdrop made very nice intersecting 1/3 diagonals.

Oh, and the Red and Gold in the background? It's a golden Buddha with a red drape being lit by a spotlight - one of the advantages of shooting with a low DOF/good bokeh lens.

PS: Would like to add, this is the original capture - no post-capture cropping necessary. Some days, it just works the first time

Nice shot of the chicken their Richie, its got that "You talkin to me!!" look on its face ahaha.

I love the one that Ludi pointed out, and even though you may have "Broken" the rule of 1/3's I don't think you did, since you've got it weighted perfectly with the rest of his body and a clear space with bright colors on the other 2/3's of the picture, very nice shot indeed, gotta show us what it looks like after some serious PS editing . My other favorite is your "Sci-Fi" cover snake, just the look in its eye says "I'm about to strike sucka, you best step back!" would also love to see that one PS a little bit !!

Close up animals with attitudes..... now were talking.

Quick shots with the Olympus Pen E-PL1 Micro Four Thirds cam with the kit lens.

Been a busy week of shooting for me, I guess.

Went to the Penang Butterfly Farm, where I snapped these:



Lovely backlight:




Macro macro man...


I want to be, a macro man...

(PS: this is not a crop from the earlier frame, but in fact a full frame view of what the PL45/2.8 Macro is capable of. I might even have been able to get closer, but didn't want to scare it off)





Bye bye butterfly...

[quote="Voldenuit"]

How much for a print... that is some insane detail on its wings, you can see each scale and the hairs leading up from its body...... just..... plain....... wow.

Haven't been out shooting much, mostly appreciating the works being posted here (nice butterfly, Welch ), but we had some late-season rains today that left up some nice clouds for a full (or mostly-full) moon tonight, so I felt like sharing:





Blurry clouds, didn't feel like freezing the motion, felt more like smearing some light across the lens. My car needs tune-ups galore, else I'd be up in the hills for these, but it's the best I can do in the middle of the valley.

I wish I could claim that Butterfly picture... thats all Vold's! What did you do in order to get the rich colors/popping clouds/trees in those shots spoofe? It almost looks like you shot them in HDR, just longer exposure?

It's pretty much the long exposure, my good man, and the way lights happen to be in the front yards of the neighbors' houses. I tweaked with contrast to get some more highlight pop in the leaves on the first one, and of course to make the clouds stand out from the sky, but I love the sometimes-otherworldly lighting a 5 or 15 second (or hell, 15 minutes, go nuts!) shot can make.

And apologies to Mr. Vold for the misattribution, I did a durrrrr...