Macro Moments: Week 19 – Elephants
Posted on November 16, 2016
This week, Susan at Musin’ With Susan has come up with what I think is an inspired idea for her weekly Macro Moments challenge. Under the heading ‘Broaden Your Scope’ she invites us to use our Macro lens for anything other than macro.
It’s a great idea because I suspect that I’m not the only one who feels that they don’t get enough use out of their macro lens, or at the very least ought to resort to it more often. I read somewhere that a macro lens can be very effective for portraits. However, the resolution means that it can also be quite – shall we say unforgiving – for this purpose.
Perhaps it’s not too surprising to discover that even non-macro images can indeed be noticeably sharper when taken through a macro lens (specialised and innately more expensive than a standard kit lens, decent enough though they can be). When I tried it out this afternoon, the quality difference and superior sharpness was quite obvious: analogous to the difference between just brushing your teeth and brushing, then rinsing with Listerine.
Anyway, here is a very small selection of Madame’s collection of model elephants:
Nikon D800 with Nikkor 105mm f2.8 Macro lens. 1/125 (flash) at f19, ISO 4000 (!)
And just to prove that this really wasn’t a close-up, here’s the uncropped, unedited original image:
Tuesdays of Texture: Papermaking
Posted on November 15, 2016
My first contribution to Tuesdays of Texture featured paper lanterns made by traditional methods at the Moulin du Got. This week I’ve gone back a few steps in the paper-making process to the stage where rags and other stuff are broken down and stirred, with this wooden paddle, into what can only be described as gunge. Like this:
52 Weeks Photo Challenge: Week 15 – Soft
Posted on November 14, 2016
The wool of the alpaca is well known for its exceptional softness – and sells at a premium that reflects this. Although this individual had just been sheared earlier this year, its topknot gives a good idea of the texture of its coat.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Tiny
Posted on November 12, 2016
It’s something of a family tradition that Madame – whose talents are limitless and certainly extend to cake-decorating – makes birthday cakes for our twin grandsons. For their third birthday, they wanted trains and so she came up with these, intricately decorated with sliced up Liquorice Allsorts (those that managed to escape my evil clutches), Smarties and fruit gums. Naughty but nice.
All you need to know
Posted on November 11, 2016
Nothing much to add in explanation of this image of our local village’s electronic information sign. Except perhaps that those clouds really were as dark and threatening as they look: about five minutes later we had a brief but heavy hailstorm.
Macro Moments: Week 18 – Oil-lamp
Posted on November 10, 2016
This is a detail from the body of an antique oil-lamp, part of a collection on display at a local exhibition of crafts and hobbies that we attended last Sunday.
I cranked up the ISO so as not to have to resort to flash, which wouldn’t have done any favours to the warm glow of the metal.
Nikon D800 with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 lens at 70mm. 1/90 at f8, ISO2500. Cropped and edited in Lightroom.
Thursday Doors: St Andrews (part 2)
Posted on November 10, 2016
As promised, this week we have some more of the interesting doors on offer in St Andrews – although, just to be awkward, we begin with a gateway: to one of the old buildings of the University (the Latin expression over the gate reads ‘In principio erat verbum’: ‘in the beginning was the word’).
This is a wider view of one of the most prominent commercial buildings in St Andrews, the J & G Innes bookshop, with its original windows and wooden frontage:
Rather more dourly Scottish is this example:
Down by the harbour is the rather more modern Harbourmaster’s Cottage:
Some more traditional doors, gentrified by the people who live behind them:
Thursday Doors 10 November 2016
Tuesdays of Texture: Autumn Leaves
Posted on November 8, 2016
For my latest contribution to Narami’s Tuesday of Texture challenge at De Monte Y Mar, this is a photograph I took only last Sunday afternoon on a stroll around our local village. Plenty of textures here, as autumn leaves pile up on the tarmac against this old metal gate:
52 Weeks Photo Challenge: Week 14 – Winter
Posted on November 7, 2016
As it happens we woke up this morning to our first significant frost of the year – a sure sign that winter is on its way. It had all thawed before I could get my camera out, but here’s a winter scene that I photographed a couple of years ago during a walk ‘around the block’ (about three miles). The low sun on the barren tree in the foreground made the whole image stand out for me.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Chaos
Posted on November 5, 2016
When we bought our house in France, it had been unoccupied for some time.
Unoccupied but not unused. Our neighbours – sheep farmers at the time – had taken to use it, probably initially as a storeroom, subsequently as a general repository for what can only be described as ‘all sorts of crap’. So our first view of what became our TV room was this, which I think could fairly be described as chaos (as well as a few other choice epithets).
Chaos
It looks better now:
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