Pumpkin Plant

The pumpkin plants are growing really well and looks like we will get several pumpkins from it. The leaves are pretty big and interesting so I thought they would make a nice black and white picture.

More from the Spaghetti Squash

I did another picture of the Spaghetti Squash in our garden. This time I wanted to get mainly the leaves of the plant. Once I had the image in my photo editing software I did a black and white conversion to the image and applied a "green filter" effect. The nice thing about digital black and white photographs is the ability to apply the colored filters when you process the image on the computer. If you were shooting film you would need the filter in place on the lens.

Spaghetti Squash Plant Flower

There are several flowers on my spaghetti squash plant now. I went out this morning and took a few pictures of them. I used a macro lens to get this and the flower was in shade so I used a reflector to bounce some light back onto it. I had to have the camera on a tripod and compose the picture then while I was holding the reflector I used a remote to trigger the camera. Maybe I should try using a kid stand to hold the reflector next time!

More Steller's Jay

This is another photo I took of the Steller's Jay when we were out camping. The shutter speed was to slow to freeze the wings as the bird was moving so you end up with this blurred effect on much of the body. It was a totally unintended look but I thought it looked pretty cool. ***By the way, in case you don't know you can click on the picture for a little larger view.

Flower on a Light Box

I was doing a little experimenting with back lighting a flower by setting it on a light box. With a subject that has a little bit of transparency to it you get a nice effect with some light filtering through the subject and a nice white background.

Steller's Jay

This Steller's Jay was photographed a couple weeks ago while we were camping up at Eagle Lake, just north of Susanville. We lured it in by tossing out some peanuts for it to come get. We took several photographs as we tossed a peanut out time and time again for this bird to come back for and by the time we were done there was 3 or 4 of them coming to get there free lunch.

WATER DROPS

Another blog I read had a post about photographing water drops and the pictures looked interesting so I thought I would give it a try. I had a container filled with water sitting on the kitchen counter then over it I hung a zip lock bag with water in it that I poked a small hole in to provide dripping water in a constant location. Next was to set the camera on the tripod and focus on the spot the drops were hitting and then take several shots trying to time it just right to get the drop impacting the water. I also had a flash set up just to the left pointed at a piece of foam core behind the container so it bounced the light back at the drops from behind. The blue look is from changing the in camera white balance to incandescent lighting. Then a little bit of typical post processing and some cropping to get the images above.