Island in the Net by Khürt Williams
Technology and Photography Musings. Established circa 2000.
I enjoyed another fun and informative photo-walk with the Somerset Photography Meetup.
I enjoyed another fun and informative photo-walk with the Somerset Photography Meetup. We took a leisurely walk through the Leonard J. Buck Gardens in Far Hills, NJ, stopping quite often to take photos of the many flowering shrubs. The bad winter weather has delayed the blooms of many of the plants in the garden but I managed to get some great shots anyway.
I got up this morning and checked my phone to see that I had a text from my client. The delayed opening is delayed further. This winter weather is affecting my revenues. I expect to have a 25% financial shortfall this quarter. Sigh!
I had a strange night. I went to bed around 10 PM but had difficulty falling asleep. I had weird dreams about wide-angle zoom lenses. The entire night! Perhaps because I was reading through some of the photography articles on my iPad right before bed. I'm not sure, but I was not too fond of it. I woke up feeling tired.
As I made my breakfast, I thought that perhaps I needed to get something out of my system. It's been a while since I used my camera equipment. Using the 35mm meant going outside and walking around. Perhaps I could find something inside to shoot with the 85mm. I saw the flowers on the dining table and decided to shoot that. But then I realised the 85mm has a long focusing distance. I wanted to shoot something close-up. I remembered I had Frank Veronsky's Lensbaby Composer and macro kit.
I experimented with different f-stop settings until I found one that gave me the depth of field that I wanted. f/8 didn't give me the results I wanted, so I tried f/11 and f/16. I lit the flowers from above using three 60W daylight compact fluorescents. I shot in manual mode on a tripod and a Sekonic lighter-meter to set the exposure.
The images were processed in Adobe Lightroom and Color Efex Pro.
I went for an early morning walk along the canal near Kingston and Princeton. My wife always comments on the flower bed outside our favourite restaurant, Eno Terra. That morning I decided to stop and look.
