PhotoWalkPro

Even though I venture into a lot of different areas on my blog, it all leads back to the same place and that is producing photographs that I like. Whether it’s a photowalk, or Photoshop, a nice new camera body, or inspiration found in someone else’s images, it all sort of comes back around to “How can I take and make a better image?” So here is a little something that I shot this weekend as a little homage to Spring. I was going to pick a few flowers and make a little studio setup to shoot them but then I remembered something my friend Vincent Versace once told me. He said he never shoots picked flowers because once they’re picked, they’re dying and he would much rather shoot something that is living. With this in mind, I grabbed the Westcott diffusion panel, a tripod, and the D300 and headed out to the front yard to shoot a few early Spring daffodils. The images were shot with a Nikon D300 and a Nikkor 60mm Micro lens on a Hoodman 300X UDMA compact flash card. Since I was outside shooting the flowers and the wind was blowing a bit from time to time, I chose to shoot in shutter priority mode at ISO 200. Even though I was on a tripod, I was shooting at about 1/200 to 1/400 of a second to minimize the movement of the flowers, I also chose the higher shutter speed so that I could use a larger aperture, giving a softer look to the petals while isolating them from the background. If I had shot at f/16, you would have been able to see the detail of the mulch in the background which would have been a distraction from the main subjects. All of the images were imported using Adobe Bridge and processed using nothing but Camera Raw (I used Photoshop to resize for my blog page). The Wescott diffusion panel did a spectacular job of taking the direct sunlight and turning it into a beautiful soft wrapping light source. I doubt that I could have taken the same images without it.

HAPPY ST. PADDY’S DAY

Related posts:

1. Shooting Flowers Without a Studio
2. A Focus Tip For Landscape Photography
3. Photoshop is not DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY
4. Tulips and Camera Profiles
5. How to Improve Your Photography

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.