Weekly Photo Challenge: Jubilant

When I see the word jubilant I think of bright colors, orange and yellow:

ISO 400 4.3mm f/2.7 1/200

I had been stalking these wildflowers most of this week, but rain has made it difficult to get a good shot.  I finally caught a break two days ago in the evening when the rain stopped and the sun made a brief appearance.  I took this photo with my point and shoot camera on the macro setting and set the ISO at 400.  There was a slight breeze, but at 200th of a second, this flower seems frozen in time.  I kept the editing to a minimum.  I cropped and sharpened a bit in Photoshop, then added a grain filter and vignette in Lightroom.

What do you think of the editing? Do you also associate certain words with colors?  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

A Nest Update

I am happy to say that all five of the robins in this year’s nest have hatched.  Here is a family photo:

ISO 800 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/400

Part of the reason I am sharing this photo is because of the size difference between the birds.  The five of them were hatched over a 36 hour period.  Look how much bigger the one at the bottom of the frame of the photo is than his siblings.  He is eating whole food now, at least some of the other birds are still on a regurgitated diet.  Now that everyone is hatched the next step is to see if they will all adequately be fed.

This post is a continuation of a series.  If you would like to see earlier photos of the nest and see how I am getting these photos, please click here.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: From Above, A Nest Story

I was super excited this spring when a robin began building a nest outside our kitchen window.  I have written about how I set up my camera to get images of the birds.  For the series of images in this post I am using my point and shoot camera.  Never underestimate the usefulness of your camera that is “just” a point and shoot.  I took all of these photo with my Canon Powershot:

ISO 800 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/160

This year’s nest with five lovely blue robin eggs.

ISO 800 4mm 0ev f2.7 1/100

This robin was approximately two minutes old when I got this photo.  The mother had left the nest to discard the egg shells, I watched her leave and then got the photo.

ISO 800 14mm 0ev f/5 1/60

This photo was taken 8 hours later.  The feathers have started to form.  When I tweeted this picture, Chris at Learning, Running, and Creating, was the first to notice how clearly you can see the second robin making its way out.

ISO 800 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/160

So, no surprise the next morning there were two in the nest.

ISO 1600 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/200

This photo and the next were taken this morning, and as you can see it was a busy 24 hours in the nest.

ISO 1600 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/250

So now we are waiting for the last egg to hatch.  Hopefully all the birds will make it, but in all honesty, five is a lot for one nest.

So, you might wonder why I am taking this series with my point and shoot.  The answer is simple, space.  My Canon 50D does not fit in this space. Or, I guess to be more exact, it fits, but then can’t focus.  I have been unable to angle the 50D in a way that would allow for a picture.

Maybe you are wondering about how I get these shots with the grown robin parents around?  I spend a lot of time watching from inside.  My office has pretty much moved to the kitchen.  The adult birds have a pretty regular schedule.  Most mornings sometime after 7, and at about 4:30pm, they are out of the area.  I use that time to set up and adjust my camera equipment.  Also, for whatever reason, this year’s birds are pretty tolerant of me.  I eat my lunch outside near them most days, and they just stay on the nest.

Thoughts about this post? feel free to leave them below in the comments section. If you haven’t seen my photos from last year and would like too, you can click here.

I am also capable of saying things in 140 characters or less. I tweet about photography @marantophoto if you would like to follow along.

This post was written in response to the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge.  The theme this week is From Above.

Cheers!

Thursday Lingering Look at Windows, From Inside

I took a tour of the Budweiser Brewery in St. Louis and when I saw this window, I knew that I would add it to the Thursday Lingering Look at Windows.  I took the original shot with my point and shoot camera but then made an HDR image out of it in Photomatix.

ISO 800 17mm 0ev f/5.6 1/100

More Dramatic in HDR

Cheers!

In Defense of your Point and Shoot Camera

Most of the time when I am taking photos I use my Canon 50D.  I have a Canon Powershot ELPH as well, but most of the time that is used for photos of the kids when we are out and about.  The Powershot is lightweight and easy to use.  I generally don’t think about it much, it might be fair to say I take it for granted.  For this post I would like to share two photos that would not have been possible without my small camera:

ISO 200 9mm 0ev f4.5 1/13

This photo was taken in a very tight space.  My 50D would not have been able to fit in this space and focus.  The Powershot settings I adjusted, waited for the robin to leave the nest,  took a quick picture, and then hurried away.  This shot is nothing complicated, it is just a quick shot, I wanted to be in that space for the least amount of time possible.

Then there are times when your larger camera is in use, but you see another photo:

ISO 200 20mm 0ev f/5.6 1/40

I had my larger camera set up for documenting the robin’s nest, and this bunny was very curious about what was going on, or maybe just hungry.  Without the smaller camera, I would have no photo.

Now, I am not ready to give up my 50D, but I just wanted to put in a good word for my Powershot.  Any thoughts on your favorite camera(s)?  feel free to share in the comment section.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: (The Set-)Up

The weather here has been pretty crummy this past week.  During that time a robin has been busy building a nest outside my kitchen window.  I’m pretty excited about this development.  I got some great pictures last spring when we were lucky to have four baby robins grow up in a nest in that same spot.  This morning the weather had cleared so I set up my camera, and then went back inside to take some photos using my remote shutter. I couldn’t resist taking this photo of my set-up with my point and shoot when I saw it outside my window this morning:

The robin is off the nest and framed in-between the tripod legs.

With the camera I have set up outside, I got this shot:

ISO 400 50mm 0ev f/7.1 1/50

I’m hoping to have some robin babies appear in the next few weeks.  My camera set-up is my response to this week’s photo challenge, up, at WordPress.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Pale

I love that Ailsa at Where’s My backpack? picked pale as this week’s travel theme.  I generally love bright vivid color or the drama of black and white, so it was fun to look for some pale images.   The photos I have chosen I took at the City Museum in St. Louis, Missouri.  If you are a photographer looking for a bunch of unique things to photograph under one roof, you should check it out.  I will say this though, it is a busy place, so maybe go early.

ISO 800 11mm 0ev f/5 1/8

ISO 1600 15mm 0ev f/5.6 1/10

ISO 1600 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/13

I take more photos with my Canon 50D, but for these photos I was using my Canon Powershot ELPH.  To be honest, that day I had both cameras and used both, but for these photos I was interested in trying some of the settings the Powershot had to offer.  The fish mosaic was shot using a sepia tone preset.  The stone statue I used a blue monochrome setting.  The female face mosaic I used a color picker setting to accentuate the pale reds and make the other colors more monochrome.  I was happy with these particular shots.  Another thing that I was happy to see was the relative lack of noise, despite the higher ISO, 1600, in two of the shots.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Color

Color is the theme at the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge.  Nice timing because just this week we are starting to see some of the colors of Spring.  For the challenge I took some photos of my favorite flower, the daffodil.

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/125

This first photo I took using my Canon 50D.  I did a bracketed exposure because I knew I wanted to try some HDR post-processing using Photomatix.  I used a fast shutter speed in part because it was windy when I was taking these pictures.  This particular photo has been processed using the “painterly” setting in Photomatix.  Of the different settings I tried, this was the one that showed the most detail in the petals.

ISO 100 11mm 0ev f/5 1/100

This second photo I took using my Canon Powershot ELPH.  I used a setting called “super vivid” to get this effect.  While I sometimes like what I get using this setting, this photo I think shows a pretty common “side effect” of using super vivid.  Sure there is a lot of color, but you lose some of the detail.  It is interesting to me that some of the flower has detail and other parts just don’t.  So, as with most camera settings, there isn’t a one “setting for everything” button.

Cheers!

 

 

 

Searching for Spring

I know Spring is coming.  It has been a bit slow in getting here though.  We have had a lot of (needed) rain.  The other morning I went running at 7am and it was 29 degrees and windy, not my ideal!  With that in mind I went for a walk in the park searching for signs of Spring.  Here are two photos I found:

ISO 800 4mm 0ev f/8 1/1000

I deliberately blurred the background because I found it distracting from the buds on the trees.  The fast shutter speed gives away the fact that it was windy and I needed the speed to freeze the motion of the branch.

Here is my next shot.  I was a bit sad to find these on the bench.  Someone picked them and then left them there, I’m not sure why you would do that.  Although given that this is at a playground, it is possible that it was a little someone who just didn’t know any better.  Anyway, daffodils are my favorite:

ISO 800 4mm 0ev f/8 1/800

I liked the color in the flowers contrasting with the lack of color in the bench.  I didn’t arrange this photo at all, the scene was just like this and I took the picture.  Kind of neat when that just happens!

I took both of these photos with my Canon Powershot ELPH.  In Aperture I cropped them.  No other editing for either photo.

Cheers!