I recently spent a couple days at a northern Minnesota lake doing a bit of fishing and, of course, a bit of photography. There’s something about early morning and late afternoon light on water that is hard to resist. Especially when the water is smooth and the clouds contribute to the composition.
Daffodils, the the sunshine in the garden.
On May 11th, I joined a group of birders at the Boulder Lake Environmental Learning Center in northern Minnesota as part of the Document Spring project. The group had started out earlier to identify as many birds as possible, I believe it was around 70, before the Document spring group arrived. We went on a short hike during which I tried to take photos of birds that are not willing models. I also offered advice to the group on camera settings and technique. I also spotted what I thought were interesting subjects.
…it knows the way to go.
As time permits, I am continuing to learn more about focus stacking. Since spring is doing it’s best to finally make an appearance in northern Minnesota, the garden is doing it’s best to respond. A few small flowers have sprung up and it seemed a good opportunity to try capturing two small clumps of blooms.
The first group is a stack of 22 images, the second was 19. If you look closely on the first, you will notice the tip of one leaf in the foreground where I missed focus. I missed several on the second. I’m excited by the possibilities of using focus stacking and look forward to applying it in other ways.
My set-up: Canon DSLR, Canon 100mm 2.8 Macro, ASUS Android tablet running DSLR Controller (works with most Canon DSLRs). I export images from Lightroom as Photoshop layers, then use the Auto-Align if needed and Auto-Blend for combining the stack. There are many videos on You-Tube that describe the technique.
It’s been awhile since I’ve roused myself early enough for a sunrise, almost missed this one too. The chunks of ice are remnants of Lake Superior ice that blew in during our most recent storm.
I am continuing to play around with macro photography and after finding this feather thought it would make an interesting subject to work with. At this time I am not using focus stacking, that comes next. I included the ruler shot for scale, it’s in mm, which in this case is about 5/8th inch.
