Clovis' Nikon Nuggets

[Clovishound]

Went out late this afternoon to shoot a fountain long exposure at a local park. Discovered they had a Halloween festival going on. Went to another local park nearby since I was out. The light was almost gone, but I had my tripod with me.

I had trouble deciding between color and B&W. I should have shot this at a wider aperture, but didn't really think about it at the time. LR came through with it's "blur" feature.

I like both for this one, but I think the color has the edge. There is more detail in the clothing, and the statue has better separation from the background. I like the contrast between the couple and the statue.

 

[Clovishound]

The Pup and I got up early and headed up the road to Swan Lake. Didn't do as well as when we went in the spring. Here's a few.

 

[Clovishound]

The Pup and I went out to Magnolia this morning. Not much happening. The birds weren't around much, insects were mostly gone except for a few bees. I had to resort to some "tourist" shots like this one.

I did have a little anole poke his head out to see what I was up to.

I channeled the Pup on this one and tried some "artsy" macro. I took a bunch of pictures of the dead foliage of this plant. I even got out the wifi remote and tried some off the camera flash, as well as some slower shutter speeds with the flash to get the nice background.

 

[Clovishound]

And just for fun. A self portrait:

 

[Clovishound]

Well, the Pup and I got up in the middle of the night and drove an hour and a half down to the boneyard beach this morning. The right tides only occur once every 2 weeks or so. There was some rain forecast, but we took a chance on it not being hard enough to interfere. We got down there about 6AM and found that it was closed. It's located in a Wildlife Management Area, and a hunt was going on. I've been down there many times and never had an issue with that, but from now on, I'll know to look at the online calendar. The weather was still iffy, but since we were there, we went to the public beach and tried our hand at some long exposures on the jetties before getting run off by heavier rain.

Not really happy with these, but I definitely learned something from each one. I used my 10 stop ND filter on all of them. They were all 30 sec exposures. It was dark enough that I had to take the ND off to compose, focus and get an exposure reading. I was also fighting with an umbrella to keep my camera dry, so I just set an aperture and ISO that gave me 1/30 sec and then changed the SS to 30 sec. Quick and dirty, with no counting F stops on my fingers.


This was probably the best of the batch. I framed it badly in camera. Juggling too much and fighting the rain I just couldn't concentrate as well as normal. I ended up cropping fairly heavily to get the horizon where I wanted. Thank goodness for the high rez sensor in the new Nikon.

This gives a little better idea of what things actually looked like. The warm strip of sky on the horizon only lasted a short while. There was some detail in it that was interesting, but I think the long exposure erased that with some moving clouds. That, or I didn't have enough DOF for fine detail at the horizon with a focus point in the waves, although at 5.6 and 24mm it should have been fine.

I mainly included this to show a B&W. For lots of these, B&W could work better than color, IMO. I like some aspects of this one, but I probably should have moved over to the right, and include more of the jetty going out to sea.

Feel free to comment and critique the good, bad and ugly about these. I look on them as starting points. The bad news is that if I'm going to get up early and drive this far, I want to go to the boneyard beach instead, so not sure how soon before I get back to this beach to reshoot them.

 

[Needa]

Feel free to comment and critique the good, bad and ugly about these. I look on them as starting points. The bad news is that if I'm going to get up early and drive this far, I want to go to the boneyard beach instead, so not sure how soon before I get back to this beach to reshoot them.

Always good to have a backup location. Have you thought about trying the first one with a say 16:9 crop? Cutting off a little above the dark area in the sky, would make it darker in mood though and make the a dark focus point on the horizon above the break.
On the second may have tried it having moved to right an panned a little left to move the sunrise more in to the frame?
If you had time and conditions to experiment seems like a nice spot. Hope you and Pup had fun.

 

[Clovishound]

Always good to have a backup location. Have you thought about trying the first one with a say 16:9 crop? Cutting off a little above the dark area in the sky, would make it darker in mood though and make the a dark focus point on the horizon above the break.
On the second may have tried it having moved to right an panned a little left to move the sunrise more in to the frame?
If you had time and conditions to experiment seems like a nice spot. Hope you and Pup had fun.

16:9 might be better. I was trying to keep the horizon on a third, so not sure that would change the mood much. Here are some 16:9 crops, the first one is keeping the horizon at the third line, this may be the best crop IMO.

This one moves the horizon up, but I find that placement awkward.

This one moves the horizon out of the frame. This one probably pushes the limit of cropping this image, This one also seems awkward.

As to the second image, I couldn't move to the right without getting on top the rocks or jetty wall, which I felt was too high an angle for what I was shooting. Much of my problems were due to feeling the pressure of keeping my camera relatively dry. The Z7ii is weather sealed as is the S series lens mounted on it, but I wasn't comfortable getting more than a light sprinkling on it. I am in the process of getting a rain cape so I can shoot in the rain with confidence. We enjoyed the outing, but it was very much cut too short when the heavier rain set in. I made the mistake of trusting the radar and ignoring the forecast (which is frequently in error around here, and normally forecasts more rain than we actually get). If we had been able to go to our original destination, we would have waited out the rain under cover, when it showed up, and continued shooting after the rain passed.

 

[Needa]

I have been doing some experimenting with alternate crop sizes, they can be interesting. I never have been one to worry about placing the horizon on the 1/3 line, have some closer to middle that I like it all depends on the image. On the second one moving up certainly wold have change things, sometimes just the slope of the beach can be too much. It is difficult to tell from a posted photo what might be there, for all I know you were trying to keep a condo out of the picture.

 

[Clovishound]

I will occasionally use a non standard aspect ratio when an image seems to need it. I do generally stick to 3:2 and horizons on thirds, or middle for reflection images. I'm not married to it, but I seldom find that horizons off those placements look right to me. That may be just me.

I do appreciate feedback, and suggestions. Sometimes they don't work for me, and sometimes it's just the right thing that hasn't occurred to me.

And FTR, there are no condos on Edisto Island, but your point is well taken. You never know what was or wasn't there unless you were there. And those pesky condos are well known for sneaking into your frame.

 

[Clovishound]

Thought I'd make a few changes to that first image to make it look more like the early morning shot it was. I think I like the sea section better, but perhaps I took the rocks too low. It does look a little brighter in LR and photo viewer than it does posted. OK, if I click on the posted image which brings it up with a black border, it looks about the same as I see in LR and Photo.

 

[Clovishound]

I was looking through the images I took at the Center for Birds of Prey this morning, in case I missed something. I thought I'd edit this one. I probably didn't edit it earlier because the bird was landing on a rather unsightly portable perch. I thought I'd use the new remove tool in PS to remove that and the distracting radio transmitter the birds have on their backs.

This is the result.

The remove tool seldom fails to amaze me. It seems like cheating, but I usually like the results.

 

[Clovishound]

Tried the Boneyard beach again today. Wasn't really much impressed with anything I got. While trying to get a shot of a tree in the water, I noticed a pod of dolphins feeding close to shore. They were really putting on a show. I had trouble shifting to my long lens, as I didn't want to put my backpack in the wet sand. By the time I got my long lens mounted, they had moved a little further offshore and weren't as active on the surface. Here's one of the guys that looks like he had a run in with something at some time in the past, judging by his dorsal fin. .

This is the only tree in the surf picture that turned out reasonably well.

And here it is in B&W with some of the "trash edited out.

 

[blackstar]

The dolphin shot is nice. (live is better than dead, I guess)

 

[Needa]

Like the color version better than the B&W.

 

[Peter7100]

Love the dolphin shot

 

[Clovishound]

Well, I edited the rest of the images on my "to edit" list today and there were a couple better than I thought originally.

 

[Clovishound]

My buddy needed me to drive him up to Columbia. I dragged the Pup along with me and we visited the zoo. This is the first time I've been there since I've had my long lens and more experience with shooting wildlife. Not that you can necessarily tell from these, but they definitely look better to me than the stuff I was taking a few years ago when we last made it up there.

I like the ape image the best, although the first flamingo image has some nice lines. I had a small section with blown out highlights. I managed to damp them down, but they still bug me a little.

I was hoping for some more interesting meerkat pictures. I still have more to edit, but doubt any of those will be better than the one I posted.

 

[Clovishound]

Edited a few more this morning.

 

[Clovishound]

Wanted to go out shooting today, but between a cold/allergies/sinus infection and heavy rain most of the morning and early afternoon, that wasn't happening. At a break in the rain I went outside to see what was going on in the yard, and managed to get a decent shot of one of the miscreants that inhabit my yard. They are still mad at me because I gave up on feeding the birds. Unfortunately, they fail to recognize that it was because they were stealing all the bird seed I put out for the birds.

 

[Marilynne]

Wanted to go out shooting today, but between a cold/allergies/sinus infection and heavy rain most of the morning and early afternoon, that wasn't happening. At a break in the rain I went outside to see what was going on in the yard, and managed to get a decent shot of one of the miscreants that inhabit my yard. They are still mad at me because I gave up on feeding the birds. Unfortunately, they fail to recognize that it was because they were stealing all the bird seed I put out for the birds.

View attachment 413816

Took about three weeks before the squirrels found our feeder. Now, if I don't put out seed, they're partially eating our avocados. Can't win!!