Posted by mcc on Jan 15 2014 in Landscape Photography, Pictures Of Trees, Midwestern Landscapes, Michigan, Allegan State Game Area, Allegan Forest, Pentax K3
Posted by mcc on Nov 10 2013 in Allegan State Game Area, Allegan Forest, Macro Photography, Pentax K3
My Pentax K3 arrived earlier in the week, so this weekend is my first chance to give it a test drive. All I can say is that the more I use this camera, the more impressed I am. Here are a few shots from this weekend - ordered by how well I like them (favorite first) -click on an image for a larger file. These closeups were all taken with the Pentax K3, A* 200mm f4 macro, tripod mounted. Live view, with focus peaking was used to take most of these shots.
Moss
This morning I visited the Allegan Forest, which is crawling with hunters this time of year. In a field that reliably hosts Halloween Pennant and Calico Pennant dragonflies in the early summer, I took a few intimate landscapes. This moss shot is a stacked focused composite of several images.
Yesterday was a very windy day and lots of sprigs of berries, like this, were littering the ground. Not sure where they came from. Unlike the previous shot, this is a single exposure.
More Moss
Another stack focus shot - a different kind of moss.
Didn’t want to adjust anything here…
Eastern prickly pear is pretty abundant in the forest - you gotta be careful where you drop down to take that bug photo.
Berries on moss. These almost look like grapes…
Another stack focused shot - some random leaves on the ground in November…
And lastly - during Saturday’s windstorm my wife and I went to South Haven in hopes of seeing big waves crashing against the lighthouse. Well - you gotta have high winds and they have to come from the right direction to make those big waves. But here is a snapshot of the lighthouse - again in the mode of test driving the K3 - with a Sigma 70-200 f2.8 EX lens. This is the earliest version of the lens, non-macro and non-DG - but it seems to work OK with the K3:
Pentax K3, Sigma 70-200 f2.8.
Posted by mcc on Sep 19 2013 in Landscape Photography, Pictures Of Trees, Midwestern Landscapes, Allegan State Game Area, Allegan Forest
Posted by mcc on Aug 25 2013 in Insect Photography, Allegan State Game Area, Allegan Forest, Dragonfly Photography, Odonata Photography, Pentax K5
Dragonflies have been scarce lately. I must just be going to the wrong places - my last few trips to the Allegan Forest have yielded only a few encounters with straggling Blue Dashers. The red meadowhawks that usually appear in high summer have been absent so far. Yesterday I visited the McLindon Trails to see if this park would bring a change of luck. I can’t say that dragonflies were out in abundance - they weren’t - but I did manage to find a few red meadowhawks. And since it was not breezy I was able to continue experiments with stack focusing in the field.
Here are the two stack focused shots I was able to get. Two shots of a whitefaced meadowhawk (click any image for a larger file):
And a non-stacked shot of a red meadowhawk:
And finally - a blue dasher from last weekend:
That’s probably it for August of 2013 - come September the Autumn Meadowhawks will probably dominate the scene…
Posted by mcc on Jul 18 2013 in Insect Photography, Allegan State Game Area, Allegan Forest, Dragonfly Photography, Odonata Photography
Posted by mcc on Jul 15 2013 in Insect Photography, Allegan State Game Area, Allegan Forest, Dragonfly Photography, Odonata Photography
Posted by mcc on Jul 06 2013 in Insect Photography, Allegan State Game Area, Allegan Forest, Dragonfly Photography, Odonata Photography
I am still working on stack focusing dragonflies in the field. So far, this has been a frustrating experience. Stack focusing in Photoshop is a great tool, but the program gets confused by the delicate wings of the dragonflies - which, of course, never stay still. And then those dragons just can't resist bobbing their heads around as the behold the world around then and contemplate their kingdom.
Well - yesterday I spent a few hours in the Allegan Forest in some fields north of the river. There was swarming with blue dashers and I made a lot of conventional portraits and took a lot of images that I hoped to stack together. I am working through the many gigabytes of files that I took, and so far have done nothing with the conventional portraits- but here are best of the stacked shots I've gotten so far.
I am a perfectionist and if you look at these closely you will see that all have imperfections. In addition, I have not figured out how to get flash on all of the stacked shots - since they are taken inthe matter of a second or two and the flash cannot charge fast enough to keep up. That means that the subjects are not as well lit as they would be with flash - and while there are lots of Photoshop tricks to compensate for that, there is no substitute for actual light on the actual subject at the time of exposure....
But - we'll get there.
These were all taken with a Pentax K-5 and A* 200mm macro, hand held with support from a monopod.
This first one is the probably the most successful shot so far - 18 image staked with little or no distortion or haloing in the in the wings. (It seems to be pretty easy to get the head and body to stack nicely - the meshing in the wings, plus the fact that the wings shift with the breeze, introduces challenges with them.) Click on each image for a larger file.
Another shot of the same subject showing the kinds of issues that come up. Note the halo-ing on the dragonfly's right wing. By the way - the nice colors in the background are wild bee balm in in bloom.
More to come. I need to continue to work on technique here and somehow figure out how to lull the dragonflies into greater complacency... What a task!
Posted by mcc on Jun 22 2013 in Insect Photography, Michigan, Allegan State Game Area, Allegan Forest, Dragonfly Photography, Odonata Photography, Wildlife Photography, Macro Photography
Here are a couple of dragonflies and one damselfly from a trip to the Allegan forest yesterday. Click on any image for a larger file.
First - what I think is a Carolina Saddlebags, though the Red Saddlebags is very similar. I do not see the large “window” in the saddlebag on the wings that the Red would typically have, so my guess is the Carolina.
Here is another shot, not as good, but that shows the coloration on the face and wings a little better:
And then a common 12 Spotted Skimmer, which were out in abundance over the pond I was visiting:
Lastly, some sort of Bluet Damselfly. I used a different technique for this shot and focus stacked 16 separate images together to get better depth of field. I have not tried this in the field before, and it actually seemed to work pretty well: