When photographing a waterfall (or other forms of moving, turbulent water), the choice of shutter speed determines whether you get a stop-action view of every droplet in motion, or whether you get a smooth, time-averaged view of the currents. What is the best shutter speed to use with waterfalls? I had the opportunity last year […]
Photography
How to photograph an asteroid
Over the years, I’ve seen Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn with my naked eyes. And I’ve seen Uranus and Neptune through a telescope. But I’ve never seen an asteroid until last night, when I photographed the 2nd largest minor planet, Vesta. Vesta is currently near opposition, meaning as seen from the Earth, Vesta and […]
Shooting Daffodils
I like daffodils. I’ve been planting a couple hundred additional bulbs each fall, so that now I have a lovely spring-time display, right around this time. In past years I would walk through the garden and take a photo here and there, mainly while standing, shooting straight down, not paying particular attention to the lighting […]
China Impressions
While in Beijing for the OpenOffice.org Conference (concerning which I owe you all a report), I was able to spend a little time playing the tourist. I thought I’d share some of the picture I “took”. Each of these images is an HDR image, based on 3-5 source images of the same scene, with different […]
Don’t shoot until you see their eyes
September 18th, 2008Great Spangled Fritillary (Speyeria cybele)Pentax K10D with 100mm macro, 1/350 at f/5.6 When I was a child, I did as children do, and chased butterflies in the fields. Forty years later the fascination, if not the boundless energy, still remains. Is there any logic to the flight of a butterfly? It certainly is […]