Photographs by Frank

16 August 2011

Around the Yard on Sunday Morning

Filed under: Odontates,Other Insects,The "New" Yard & Environs — Tags: , , , — Frank @ 12:05 PM

I spent a bit of time on Sunday morning roaming the yard with my macro lens (a 90 mm Tamron) attached to the camera. It was a nice mostly cloudy day so the light was perfectly soft.

My intent was to photograph details of the many flowers (both domestic and wild) in and around the yard. As you can see from the resulting photos, the insects seem to be following me around!!!

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The meadowhawk landed on an over the hill black-eyed susan next to the more photogenic one I had the camera aimed towards. I tried to ignore it, but it kept coming back to the same spot so I had to photograph it.

It let me get to within the close-focus distance of the macro lens and the detail (especially in the eyes) is quite amazing. I’m not sure that the detail will show in the small web sized version though.


16 May 2011

Apple Blossom Time

Filed under: Spring,The "New" Yard & Environs — Tags: — Frank @ 8:04 PM

Even though it was a cool damp weekend, spring is clearly here and progressing… the black flies are out in full force and the apple trees are beginning their show.

I spent a bit of time on Sunday morning between the showers photographing one of our two apple trees.

Here are the results:

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26 June 2010

Flowers At Close Range

Filed under: The Yard — Tags: , , — Frank @ 12:00 PM

After my experience with using all three extension tubes for photographing ants and aphids, I decided to experiment a bit more with using all of the tubes (36 + 20 + 12 mm) on both the 70-300 mm telephoto lens and the 90 mm macro lens. In all cases I used the “dragonfly rig” for the flash.

To conduct this experiment I headed out the backdoor and explored Joan’s flower beds. My basic conclusion is that this is hard work!

The depth of field is very small, the range of distances that can be focused is also small and small movements of the tripod make huge changes in what you see through the view finder. No wonder serious macro photographers using focusing rails!

Anyway, here are some of the results…

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Note the mottled white/gray background in a couple of the images. One problem with flash is that sometimes the backgrounds “go black” which is usually not desirable. When this occurred, I used a crumpled up tissue that I happened to have in my pocket as a background. I hand held it behind the subject as I tripped the shutter. It looks pretty good in my opinion… “interesting but not distracting”.


6 June 2010

After the Rain

Filed under: The Yard — Tags: , — Frank @ 10:24 AM

Yesterday (Saturday, 5 June) I awoke to a thunderstorm. After breakfast, it looked like the rain had stopped so I made a circuit of the yard intending to take photos of Joan’s flowers… she certainly has enough of them…  decorated with raindrops.

Here are the results:

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File under: “Make photographs wherever you find yourself.”


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