2 posts tagged “macro”

soft focus

2 comments

While the soft focus effect isn't something I was going for, it was quite a pleasant surprise. It was only last night that I was perusing the Hoya website and checking out their soft and special effect filters. The effect here isn't such a filter - it's simply me with a 300mm telephoto lens, 2x magnifier and fogged up glasses. Yes, I thought the foggy effect was sweat on my glasses, so I ignored it. But what an effect!

figures dancing around the tree

I was also busy getting super close to flowers this afternoon, trying to capture the little details that most people don't see. For instance, in the red flower to the left, I've always thought that the centre part looks like figures holding hands and dancing around a tree. See that centre yellowy but with the spotty orange "trunk". That's the "tree". Other people think I'm crazy.

heavy with flower

I've been shooting in Raw mode lately. This is really cool because I can twiddle the images a whole lot easier that with jpegs. My EOS 350D came with a rather drab raw processing program, but if you're willing to look past its pretty hopeless interface you find all the neccesary options for brightening or fixing your photos. There is a problem with shooting in RAW though - each photo is 8MB big on disk, and also has a 3MB jpeg version as well. So not only can you shoot 1Gb of photos without breaking a sweat, you transfer them all from the camera and end up with doubled up shots!

_MG_1676

I was happy with today's flowers. I actually shot about 200 images, and am currently exploring software that can manage them all (Picassa looks ok, except it has no ability that I can see to detect or manage duplicates). The interface is quick and it understands the .cr2 file format, which many products don't do.

Anyway, tell me what you think of my flowers.