Eagle Owl Attacking Camera at 1000fps

I alsways thought that it was video was never going to be my thing, but this footage almost convinces me... Amazing detail and sharpness, and you would be extremely hard-pressed to capture an owl "attacking" your phot camrea at exactly the right moment. With a slomo video like this, you can have your choice of "right moments"!

From the same website as the dog portraits.

Eagle Owl Attacking Camera at 1000fps

Portraits of Dogs as They Shake Off Water

Great dog portraits in the link! Funny pictures. But there's no dignity left for a dog. Well, they'd better become cats anyway when it comes to maintaining dignity.

Portraits of Dogs as They Shake Off Water

Fieldfare found

The fieldfares returned later in the same day, and that time my camera was ready. Admittedly, I still had to crop the picture enormously, because the birds mainly stayed in the back of the garden and I "only" have a 300 mm (450 mm equivalent, if you count the crop factor).

Better watermarks in Lightroom: Mogrify Plug-in

Here's one for conservative Lightroom users like me. The real buffs, who are at home in all the blogs, in Adobe's exchange site for LR-plugins, etc., have undoubtedly known this for a long time. And if you don't use Lightroom at all, this is abracadabra--but please come back to my blog next time!

For the few of us then, one of the very few nagging discomforts about LR2 is that there is no way to control the watermark you add to the photo upon export: it sits in the left corner, in a fixed font and size. Of course you can go to Photoshop or use external small applications (shareware or freeware!) to add textual or graphic watermarks to jpg-files after exporting, but that is too much of a hassle: we want more elegant, user-friendly solutions. And finally I found one--as the real buffs know since a long time. One Timothy Armes developed a plug-in for LR that lets you add watermarks but also borders and frames in one go while doing the export! The watermarks can be text, self-written or taken from the photo's metadata, or graphic, and you can control the font (in a somewhat awkward way, for Mac-users at least, but it works) and where it is placed. Once installed and once you have designed your watermark, it will be used automatically for all exports, unless you turn it off again: 'fire and forget', really easy!

The multipurpose plug-in is called LR2/Mogrify and can be found in the Photographer's Toolbox; a Dutch-language, extended explanation was published in April 2009 (I'm really behind!) in DigitaleFotografieTips. The plug-in is 'donationware' and I guess that after a little more testing, I am going to make a donation to Mr Armes indeed: it seems to be worth more than whatever is a reasonable donation.

I felt, then, as if there were millions of beautiful penguins out in the sea of Plug-In and I just caught one nicely on my camera--just like the penguins in the Noorderdierenpark in Emmen (NL). And yes, if you look closely, there is a different watermark, in the right-hand corner, and somewhat less obtrusive than the standard LR2 one.

I also tried Mr Armes's LR2/Blog export plug-in; the entry on Berlin that I made earlier today, was made with it. But that one I found not useful: it may make it easy to upload a photo and add a little bit of text in a single go upon exporting from LR. However, you can only make simple unformatted text and also you cannot control the lay out of the photo in the blog entry. That was too limited to me, but if it's enough for you, have another look at the Photographer's Toolbox site.

Dragonflies and the Japanese Flag

Question: What is the connection between dragonflies and the Japanese flag? Answer: a photo competition. The foundation for protection of butterflies and dragonflies in the Netherlands held a photo competition and in the article on the competition's outcome in its magazine Vlinders, the jury said that it first ditched photos that were "like the Japanese flag". No further explanation, so I had to think about if for a second or two, but then it dawned on me. The Japanese flag has a red circle in the middle of a white field, and that is--whatever else it may be in any type of symbolism or national honour and pride--not the model of a dynamic, interesting photo composition. So all photos with a butterfly or dragonlfly boringly in the middle of way too much space around it, did not make it to the second round of the competition.

I'd almost say that I wich I had that problem. I find it hard enough to get close enough to these fascinating insects to get a good picture (no, I would not settle for the amount of white of the Japanese flag) and then to have the luck that they sit still for long enough to et a sharp picture. All I can add to this first message in too many weeks on my blog is a testimony to my frustration, photographed in the Netherlands, last summer: some kind of a dragonfly that sat still for long enough, but I was too much in a hurry to push the button to take the time to make sure that I had enough sharpness and depth of field... Although it is red like the centre of the Japanese flag, at least it is not boringly in the middle and with a little cropping you can easily avoid the large (white) space around it. And then to see the amazingly good pictures that made it into the Vlinders magazine! Lots of room for improvement--let's try this summer!

Beautiful creature

You don't have to be a cat lover to see that the beauty of this one is obvious. My sister in law bought this one recently, a Ragdoll, which helps to explain why it let me quietly make a couple of portraits--our own cats would have fled after the first flash.
Should I have faded out the background a little more for better effect? Maybe just try this again with a better, more neutral background. The cat won't mind!