Weekly Photo Challenge: Admiration

It was a nice afternoon, so I went for a walk in our local park.  I found this wildflower blooming:

ISO 400 4.3mm f/8.0 1/250

Pretty amazing when you consider that this was the same area that was the control burn at the beginning of March.  Here is what it looked like then:

ISO 160 170mm f/5.6 1/640

I blogged about it here.  I couldn’t help but admire how fast things were growing back.  The photo from today was taken with my point and shoot.  I used the macro setting, which I think does a nice job of shooting flowers in particular.  In Photoshop I cropped the photo and sharpened it a bit.  The photo from the controlled burn was taken with my Canon 50D and was edited in Photoshop into an HDR image.

Pretty amazing how quickly the area changed isn’t it? Do you have a favorite place to go and shoot under different conditions or at different times of the year? Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Harmony

It’s worth it, I think, to have public parks, they make it a little easier to feel in harmony with nature. Maintaining a natural setting requires some work.  Setting fire to a prairie seems counterintuitive, but it does actually help keep the land healthy and productive.  This weekend there was a controlled burn at a nearby park, so I went to take some photos:

ISO 160 170mm f/5.6 1/640

It was a sunny morning, so I was able to set my ISO low and still have a high shutter speed.  The image you see above is an HDR image.  I bracketed the photo while I was shooting so that I could create an HDR image later in Photoshop. For this shoot I was using my 70-200mm lens; it allowed me to get great shots but not get in the way.

The images in the gallery below tell more of the story of the burn.  I decided to not edit them at all, keeping them as close to what I saw for the viewer.

ISO 160 200mm f/5.6 1/1250

ISO 160 80mm f/5.6 1/1000

ISO 160 70mm f/5.6 1/2500

ISO 160 135mm f/5.6 1/2500

It was interesting to watch them work.  This particular park of the park is beautiful when it is in bloom.  The burn will help keep it that way.

Don’t you love it when interesting photography shoots just drop in your lap? Have you ever seen this type of work being done?  What do you think of the HDR version?  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!