Mark Cassino Photography - Mark's Blog

A few snaps of hepatica and a lone blood root - first spring wildflowers of 2014 (click on a file for a larger file):

All photos taken with Pentax K-3 and A*200mm f4 macro.

I hate to let a month go by without a single post, so here are some found still lifes of beech leaves in the snow, shot this afternoon while scouting out the status of the spring wildflowers. Click on the image for a larger view:

All taken with Pentax K-3 and DA 17-70 f4.

Yea! The snow has melted a bit! Here’s a snapshot taken on the sidewalk in front of my house:

Click on the image for a larger file. Taken with a Pentax K-3 and DA 17-70 F4 ALIFSDM.

I am currently exhibiting several prints in the gallery space at the Transformations Spirituality Center in Nazareth, Michigan. Here are a few highlights of the exhibit (click on the images for a larger file):

Hidey Hole Chipmunk


Forest Floor Still Life


Wild Columbine


Halloween Pennant


Snow Crystal

If you are around or near Kalamazoo, stop by and see the images - they will be up till late March, 2014.

A few more shots of pine barrens and scruffy woods taken in late December. Click on the images for a larger file.

These images were taken in the Allegan Forest with the Pentax K-3 and DA 16-45 f4 lens.

Here are a few snowflake photos from earlier today. All taken with the Pentax K-3 and reverse mounted D-FA 50mm macro. Click on the images for larger files.

Last post for 2013!

We had a little freezing rain last night and this morning everything was decked out in an icy glaze. I first took a few photos around the house, using the Pentax K-3 and DFA 100mm macro. This first one is a bit of holiday cheer, as I put some outdoor Christmas lights in the background (click the images for larger files):

A barberry branch - the bright red berries were gone, but the thorny branches looked nice, glazed with ice:

I then decided to head out to the Allegan Forest, in hopes that I could find some greater expanse of trees glazed with ice so as to make a landscape photograph. As I drove the 35 miles into the forest I realized that the ice storm had been much milder here and there was little ice on the trees. Their branches were simply glazed, but did not have the flamboyant icicles that I had seen in Kalamazoo. I almost turned around and headed back to the east, where the storm had been more severe, but since I was there I decided to give it a try. Shortly after I entered the woods a light snow kicked up and it turned out that the thin glaze of ice on the trees made the perfect substrate for the snow to stick to. In a few minutes every branch of every tree in the forest was coated in fresh white snow and I spend a good bit of time there in the woods. I have a lot of exposures to work with and sift through, but here are a couple of first outtakes:

I’ll probably have a few more shots from the forest to share in the next week or so…

Here are a few new snow crystal images - the first for this season. These were taken with my usual setup with a few changes - the camera has been upgraded from a Pentax K-01 to a Pentax K-3, the lens has been upgraded to a Pentax SMC DFA 50mm f2.8 macro, and the flash has been downgraded from a full service DSLR unit to a simple manual flash with just one power, running through an Olympus Safe Synch adapter to avoid frying the K-3.

We’ve had at least a foot of snow this last week - rather early even for Michigan - so it looks like the season if off to a good start. Click on the images for a larger view:

I made a dumb mistake and accidentally set the shutter speed to 1 second for these next couple of shots (doh!) - fortunately the exposure is almost entirely from the flash, so the effect of motion blur was limited. I did lose quite a few other shots, though. The first of these is 4 images focus stacked, since the crystal was not flat on the glass plate: