I'm now selling my photos!!!

I now host galleries of my favorite photos @ www.lloydshell.zenfolio.com Feel free to surf over there to see photo's that may have drifted into the darkest reaches of the archives here on Blogspot.

I also have begun selling my photographs when requested, I can handle most sizes and finishes either locally or via my on-line printing service.

Thanks for looking!

Lloyd
lloydshell@gmail.com

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Ah..... Blossoms on the trees. Could Spring really be here?

I usually don't get giddy when spring hits but this year I am determined to do so. What other reason could be better? The earth is going to be pretty and green again!!!!

Got home from work yesterday and noticed immediately that the swelling buds were starting to blossom. Needless to say my camera hand started to itch and I immediately grabbed my tripod and Macro lens and set to work. Most of these shots were taken at close to 1:1, the buds are really tiny, 1/4 inch in diameter tiny.

For depth of field I shot this at f16, a f-stop I would normally avoid, but is necessary to get a useable amount of depth of field.

I really wondered what this would look like in B&W, so I did a quick conversion. Not convinced that I have it right, need to fiddle with the Levels and Brightness a smidge. Do kinda like it though.

I opened the aperture up a bit and moved a little bit further back, I wanted to balance reasonable sharpness of the buds with blurring the background as best I could. I rather like the blur in the background, another reason to like this lens.

I then thought it would be fun to go for ultra thin depth of field. I tried to get just part of one bud in focus and then the rest progressively more blurry. I achieved what I wanted, but I am not sure if the photo is a failure or not.

Back to f6.7 for a more reasonable amount of DOF, I love the color and light/shadows on this blossom.

I then wanted to experiment a little with very deep depth of field, stopping down to f22 gives me a much deeper field, but I do loose some overall sharpness, I think the tradeoff is worth it.

This is the exact same shot but at f2.8 as wide of an aperture as the lens can go. At this close of a focus my DOF is about 1/8 of an inch. That makes getting the salient stamens in focus on a tree that is moving a pretty chancy thing. I think I did OK, need to play with it more.

Stay tuned for more flower shots. You will probably be sick of them by summer.