Wet, cool day...

kygarden

Off sick from work today...but I still feel well enough to take a few pictures.

Nikon D200 / Nikon 60mm Micro

Fountain Grass




One of my beds, asleep for the winter...




I think my deck needs some work this spring!




My helleborus is blooming That's one rugged plant!




Redbud seed pod and leaf resting on a soft bed of moss outside my door I love moss.

kygarden

A few more.

This isn't exactly the best tree for climbing. I guess you can see why!


Honey Locust




Old metal fence posts leaning against an ash tree.




Colorado Blue Spruce tree.




Back near the pond, a hickory grove. A few other types of tree mixed in too.




More moss! I think it's "blooming"




Another shot of moss - growing under some large oak trees.

photodoug

you did well. some very interesting comps. DOF worked well for these.

BlueHoseJacket

Looks to me like you had the shutter "bug" to me.roflrofl Hope you get to feeling better. Nice shots

kygarden

Thanks to both of you.

Oh yeah, I've got that bug too! I wish that's the only one I had Hopefully it'll be over with by the weekend.

Dixie

I feel that you have some really good captures and used great creativity in finding relative mundane items and turning them into interesting subjects.

I do wonder about the color balance on all of the exposures. To me they all appear to tend towards yellow. If the color balance is intentional, you have my apologies for my incorrect analysis of the shots. If it was not intentional, then maybe you had a custom white balance dialed-in for an earlier shot and forgot to reset it or the temperature was just set wrong for the existing lighting. ...and of course, there is always the possibility that our monitor calibrations are just different.

I took the liberty of adjusting the white threshhold on one of your photos to show you what I mean. If I am overstepping my bounds, please tell me and I will gladly delete my attachment example.

kygarden

Dixie wrote:

I took the liberty of adjusting the white threshhold on one of your photos to show you what I mean. If I am overstepping my bounds, please tell me and I will gladly delete my attachment example.

No that's ok. You're probably right about that one in particular. I used a custom setting Nikon calls "Vivid" and on top of that I used the "Cloudy" white balance because it was indeed cloudy and sometimes I think the pictures look a little lifeless in auto white balance. But probably the combo of vivid AND cloudy WB saturated it a little too much. Your edit looks more close to real life. I think I should have left it in auto WB.

Dixie

Those settings would explain the color shift. I really do like what you did overall with the captures and especially in regards to the compositions.

I agree with your feelings about shooting in cloudy conditions. The light does tend to come from all directions and that causes most photographs taken in those conditions to be flat. When I shoot under those conditions, I go ahead and expose using the correct temperature for the cloudy weather and then add some punch in post processing by adding some saturation and slight contrast to help add some color and depth to the scene.

kygarden

Here's a shot I took this morning with the same general conditions, using the vivid custom setting but auto white balance this time instead of cloudy.



I'd probably be better off in this case to even stick to the normal tone curves instead of vivid because looking at this one, to me it still seems a little too saturated in in areas...mainly the greens. Not too bad though. I read an article once where they were talking about vivid colors in photos and they showed a lot of people various photos. The photos everyone liked best in the article were the ones with really rich saturated colors. While sometimes we may think too much color can sometimes look fake, apparently a lot of the general public seems to like it that way.

Dixie

Yep, that made a big difference. If anything, the auto WB went maybe just a little to the cool side, but IMHO a big improvement over the first. Going cooler would tend to accentuate or over saturate the blues and even the greens since you took away the yellow and added blue by going cooler. I would suspect that maybe the Vivid had something to do with that, but don't know for sure since my cameras don't have that option.