It takes a few efforts: Spider lily tamed

A few weeks ago I saw intriguing red flowers by the wayside and took some pictures, but was not very satisfied with the pictures: they were good enough for the memory, but not for a serious photo. This weekend I came across some more and tried again. A simple example of the oft-told lesson about photography: don't let go of a subject until you have caught its essence. I think that this second time, I have tamed these wild flowers--for the moment, anyway.

These flowers are called Spider lilies or Higanbana, and have a practical use to keep pests out of rice paddies as they are supposed to be poisonous. Another story associated with Spider lilies is that because they "usually bloom near cemeteries around the autumnal equinox, they are described in Chinese and Japanese translations of the Lotus Sutra as ominous flowers that grow in [...] Hell [...] and guide the dead into the next reincarnation," says the Wikipedia.

Autumn is coming to Japan

Slowly nature is turning to autumn, here in Japan. Not the time of the vibrant colours yet, but some leaves show that change is coming.

Would have made great photos: And Through The Alps on Vimeo

A beautiful video, an "avalanche of images" as the maker calls it, of riding a motorbike through the Alps. Would have been even better as photos, this photographer thinks, for instance so you can choose you own speed of viewing. In fact, many of the video shots are much like photos in which nothing much is moving. Just great stills :-)

Second thought of any viewer (I hope, and certainly it was my second thought): I want to do that too!
Moreover, in my case: I want to do that soon, before my little nice Ford Puma gets too old for such an expedition. As it said in the newspaper where I found this: full screen viewing is advised!

And Through The Alps from Gerard Kevorkian on Vimeo.

September photo competition: Farms and gardens - 02 September 2011 - New Scientist

A theme with relevance and beauty is chosen for New Scientist's September photo competition. Check out the link!

September photo competition: Farms and gardens - 02 September 2011 - New Scientist

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

New spring, new lens

Treated myself to a new telezoom, a 2.8/70-200, especially because I wanted the large aperture. And boy, does it make a difference in the viewfinder! With such a clear view, you can use manual focus much better. However, this is also my first lens with HSM focusing and that is impressive too: smooth, silent and fast; so you don't really need manual focus.

But the main reason for wanting the 2.8 opening is that it reduces the depth-of-field so you can have very selective focus. Hope to make use of that in the coming days--and coming years!

The disadvantage of a big opening is that it is a big and heavy lens. Yet even here I was pleasantly surprised: the 1.3 kg have a very good handling, nice balance with the camera and you can use it very well 'shooting from the hand', without a monopod/tripod.

For the moment then, just a little example of what may be done with such a lens: a random insect on a random flower in a random place (the backyard of my house). The lens has a good bokeh, I think. I am pleased with this new toy!

Autumn in the garden

Is it not strange that people--like me--want to take pictures the likes of which are everywhere? What is it in, for instance, simple autumn colours of a Japanese maple tree that attracts us, that makes us press the button and makes us want to share this with the Net community? Everyone (in the right climate zones) can see things like this, they do not need such a picture to get an autumn feeling, let alone to know that autumn has arrived.

At a photo workshop I once did, we had a discussion: is a photo an expression that the photographer wants to make, or is it a means to communicate a message to the viewer? I was the minority of one defending the communication theory. And here I go and show you a picture that is purely expressive of my feeling of beauty of autumn in a corner of my garden.

I'm all in favour of falsificationism (one counter-example may be enough to show that a theory is wrong), but I guess we need not reject the communication theory: it's different for different kinds of pictures. A press photographer in Afghanistan, in Sudan, or in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro has something to communicate in the first place. And I also guess that any photographer must keep in mind that even his/her expressive photos communicate something to the viewer--will it be the same feeling that the photographer had?

I'd welcome your reactions: is this a superfluous picture that has no communication value, or should I go on and put such pictures on the net, simply because I like them?

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).

Making good on my promise, interlude

I have to apologize to the Japanese Acer palmatum in my garden, because it is no longer dull brown: it just took its own sweet time to turn fully red. Maybe I can take some pictures of its autumn colours later this week. Timing is of the essence!

Making good on my promise, part 2

I had my eyes open for autumn colours, but somehow this autumn the trees seem to go brownish without too much good colour. Even the Acer palmatum 'Osakazuki' and the Amelanchier in our garden, put there because they usually have great autumn colours, are disappointing a bit this year. Only with the benefit of backlight and the 'golden hour' before sunset do the photos come close to what I had hoped.


Only the little Fothergilla major is making good on its promise of delivering autumn colours even in this year. Yes, there is a paradox in having a little Fothergilla major, but in Friday's Gardeners' World the presenter also remarked that hers had stayed much smaller than she had hoped, just like ours. But just like her, we can rejoice in being able to look down on all those fiery-coloured autumn leaves :-)

Making good on my promise, part 1

This weekend I began making good on my promise to do some photos of autumn colours this time. Hopefully some more stunning ones will follow in future instances, because there are not many colouring trees yet. But for starters, this was not too bad. I liked making the discoloured leaves not the single subject of the picture (going against my own precept of simplicity), but putting them in "by the way" in a picture of the "other-worldly" form of the flower-base still standing on our Cornus Nuttallii.

Looking around for more coloured leaves, form caught my eye instead of colour. Hence the second photo, of the walnut in its bolster. Natural symmetry.

Other autumn pictures

My autumn depression is not as bad as yesterday's entry suggested: I may not have autumn colour photos, but the other typical autumn subject in nature is present in my photo collection: mushrooms and toadstools. Though I don't know the difference between the two. My dictionary says mushrooms are the edible kinds, toadstool the poisonous ones--never mind, I'm not going to collect any; two-thirds of the species in the Netherlands are on the Red List of endangered species. You can enjoy their beauty by watching--and photographing of course!

The photo, made in Holland a few autumns ago, may be of a mushroom called Oudemansiella mucida (synonym: Collybia mucida, teaches the Dutch part of the Wikipedia). I made a close-up with selective sharpness (f/4.0) to emphasise the fragility and the subtle colour; not for nothing the Dutch name would translate as 'china/porcelain mushroom'.

One thing had to be retouched, I admit: there was a bit of cobweb hanging from the hood which I clone-stamped away in Lightroom (who needs Photoshop?). Forgotten to 'look around' my subject when I took the picture! But if I hadn't told you, you would not have known, would you? If you find the spot where this photo was retouched, you earn a bottle of wine. Come and get it! ;-)

Ready for those autumn colours

Good tips to make photos of autumn colours just that little bit more intense and interesting, I found in the Digital Photography School.

Flipping through my photos for a fitting illustration of this link, I discovered that I have no nature pictures expressing autumn. Do I suffer from unconscious pictorial autumn depressions? (Wonder what my physician would say about that description of symptoms.) Well, no more now: I must make that ultimate autumn colour picture this year!

Sunflower patterns

Harvest of the sunflowers. Most are to be kept for the birds, coming winter (if we are advised to feed them again; at the moment, because of a contagious bird disease, we'd better not stimulate their getting together). But birds don't wait: some of the flowerheads were already mostly eaten (first picture).

For photographers (and mathematicians!), sunflowers are irresistible because of the patterns that the seeds make in the flowerhead. And as usual: patterns come out better if your eyes are not distracted by colours, so the second picture comes in black-and-white.

Dundalk, earlier this year

Dundalk-1000767
Originally uploaded by DFW-Photo

When selecting photos for the camera club's next meeting, I stumbled upon this one. I had forgotten about it, and won't show it there, but still I think that the play of hard but curved lines is kind of neat, especially in black-and-white and, even more especially, because the curves and diagonals of the empty street are contrasted--maybe you should even say they are 'broken' by a few verticals coming from the bottom of the picture. First there is the lantern, which still belongs in the man-made hard landscaping. But then there are the three young trees. Still leafless (it was early spring), and vulnerably small. The black-and-white makes the picture a bit ominous, to my mind: will these little trees survive? Yet the natural forms against the hard lines seem to say that nature will not be subdued! And if you then look closely, there is more of nature in the picture: more planting at the bottom, and some wild grass (you cannot call it a lawn) in the top-right corner. There is hope.

Between f/2.8 and f/64 (1)

At Earthboundlight a blog entry appeared this week to answer a reader’s question: ‘Why would you want to have an f/2.8 lens?’ Bob Johnson, the author of Earthboundlight, looked at this question from the landscape photographer’s point of view. In Ansel Adams’s days, with the big plate cameras, you needed f/64 to get the ‘grand vistas’ sharp from front to end—that’s why Ansel Adams was member of the Group f/64. Current lenses ‘only’ go to f/22 (sometimes f/32), so landscape photographers tend to use those small apertures—and a tripod, because you get long exposure time at small lens openings. Luckily landscapes tend to stay in place long enough ;-)

What Johnson did not say was that at smaller formats, you get the same depth-of-field at lower aperture numbers. That is why it is so easy (relatively!) to make macro photos with compact cameras: with their tiny sensors, they get that flower detail all sharp at full opening, where a DSLR (especially a full-frame one) must stop down to f/22 to get the same. So for a landscape to be sharp from foreground to horizon, you can make do with f/22 rather than f/64 on a DSLR—if you want it all sharp.

It gives a classical look to—especially—landscape photos to have them sharp all over. Give it a sepia toning and you’d almost believe it was a 19th century picture! But most of the time, you don’t need sharpness all over to get the effect you want: selective sharpness is much more creative. You don’t need that grass and branch in the foreground to be sharp for them to have the effect of suggesting more depth to the photo with the manor house in the background.

Selective sharpness also works in close-up photos: this minuscule blueberry flower was all you need to see sharply—it conveys the spring feeling much better with the strong bokeh (‘unsharpness’) than a picture bewilderingly full of sharp details would have done.

Both these photos were taken at f/2.8—I only have one lens that opens so widely. The wide aperture has the advantage that you get more light into the viewfinder, so you see more clearly and you (or the camera) can focus more precisely. Moreover, f/2.8 often signals professional lenses, which also have other advantages, like minimum distortion of straight lines, minimum flare, minimum chromatic aberration and other flaws. Their only disadvantages are weight (that kept me from choosing one as my standard lens)—and price…

Sensible suggestions: Photographing dragonflies

The magazine Vlinders of this month (3/09, the journal of the Dutch butterfly foundation—they also include working groups on dragonflies and the like) has an article on photographing dragonflies by Kim Huskens, from which I’d like to copy some of the many[!] sensible suggestions.

Camera talk
Apart from the usual arguments about technical pros and cons of DSLR’s versus compact cameras, they include some things specific to photographing insects and especially the fast-flying types, such as dragonflies.

Starting with flying fast: you need a camera that reacts very quickly, both when it comes to focussing and to the delay between pushing the button and the actual picture. Most of the time, DSLRs win out on these points from compacts. However, some of the newer ‘megazoom’ or ‘bridge’ cameras score very well on these points, too—Huskens does not mention those, and I admit I’m not aware of the state of the art either, but with 30+ pictures per second, or HD video options, you’d stand a good chance of capturing that dragonfly that the DSLR-amateur misses with ‘only’ 3-6 frames per second.

Another advantage of compact cameras lies in what often is a disadvantage: their small sensor. For that means they also have a large depth of field: you can make great pictures of insects in their environment and get a great view of the environment. Their disadvantage is of course that you cannot get that insect free from the optically disturbing background.

For the rest of this blog, I am thinking of a DSLR, because now we get to changing lenses). Often, you’ll have to get close to get the beast filling a good deal of the screen/viewfinder. With special tele-macro lenses, you don’t need to get that close; with a normal 50 or 90 mm you’d have to get within a couple of centimetres of the target and they do not often wait for that… Bumble bees may sometimes be slower, early in the day or when they are cold, so the secon picture was made with a 50mm macro lens (thanks to the crop factor, that was 75 mm equivalent on a full-frame (D)SLR). The pictures in Huskens’s article were made with, I suppose, the famous Sigma 2.8/150 lens (she does not say if it is the current 2.8 version). For me with my Minolta/Sony stuff, there is the Tamron 3.5/180, with the advantage of a bit longer focal range. High on my wish list, because getting a dragonfly filling the viewfinder in real is better than using my 100-300mm at around 1.5 meter and cropping afterwards (as I did in the first picture here).

Making the picture
With insect photography, there are a few special things to think about. When you get close, you must take care not to cast your own shadow in the photo. Apart from losing a few stops of light, you’d scare off the dragonfly before you can press the button. So keep the sun behind you (for getting the detail of the animal) but not straight behind. Don’t try backlight.

Walk slowly and keep your distance while circling to a good angle. Huskens advises to get low, so that you don’t seem so big and threatening.

For determining the dragonfly (if you can…): keep in parallel to the long body (not as in the third picture) so that it I sharp from front to tail. Often you need to see both the side and the top of the dragonfly’s body; sometimes you need two photos, then.

It helps to know the behaviour of the dragonfly: some families of dragonflies sit still quite a bit, others keep coming back to the same spot after short hunting flights, but there are also families that keep flying—obviously, those are the hardest.

Shoot first, ask later
‘Shoot first, ask later’ is one of my favourite one-liners when it comes to taking photos: when you see something promising, release the button as soon as you can, so that you have at least one memento of what you wanted to put in the picture. Only then begin to follow all the rules and tips to go for a good picture. Especially with dragonflies and the like, if you begin slowly, you may miss your one and only chance to get the beast at all.

Silly season is over, and so is the rain

The French just started their month of holidays, but I’m back again, back to photos and blogs! Hope you all are on the net, too!

It rained this morning, but after the rain the diffuse light filtering through the clouds showed all details of the plants in the garden to their utmost advantage. Subtle colours on the Phytolacca esculenta (pokeberry) are my sample picture of that. These weeks I find the pokeberries fascinating with their berries changing from green to blackish-red.

The raindrops on the leaves make the sights in the garden even better. Alchemilla mollis (Lady’s mantle) is famous for the way it keeps drops of rainwater—or dew, for that matter—on its leaves for a long time. How come some kinds of plants do, and others don’t? No idea! But I do know another advantage of Lady’s mantle: it has short, stiff stems, so that the leaves do not move with every whiff of wind; I tried to take a picture of raindrops on fern leaves (to have something different than the eternal Lady’s mantle macros), but they would not hold still for long enough, even though there was just a tiny little bit of wind around the house.

Sitting ducks and moving targets

Bumble bees may be among the slowest-flying insects, but it is not easy to catch them quite right! This weekend in the garden I tried, but the only reasonable photo is the one you see here. It takes a lot of practice, hi-speed photo bursts and still you need luck. Moreover, when concentrating on shooting the bumble bee, of course I forgot to "look around" my subject, so that now we have this distracting light-green blob of the day-lily's leaf in the background, precisely where it bothers most. And the so-called slow-moving bumble bee still was too fast a moving target for a sharp picture at 1/750^th of a second. So much frustration hidden behind a photo that still is decent enough to dare and show it on the Web!

The second one, a dragonfly, is the sitting duck of this entry's title. A few minutes before, this dragonfly (or one that looked very much like it) laid eggs in the pond and I was too late to get the camera from the house. But tired of laying eggs, or just waiting for prey to fly by, it sat quietly on a reed and I could get close enough for a 'portrait'. Admittedly, I still had to crop the photo to avoid the 'Japanese flag' effect, because the tele-zoom has 1.5 meter as its minimum distance.