Dangerous Spouse Pics

Dangerspouse

Dangerspouse

Senior Member
Went on an outing yesterday with my local camera club to the Ringwood Manor state park. It's a lovely 18th century estate museum and surrounding grounds. I challenged myself to just use one lens the entire time, and a prime at that. So on went the 40mm Micro f/2.8 Nikkor, which of course is an excellent bug catchin' lens. I do wish I had a 60 or 85mm macro though, for shots like these. 40mm is great in the studio when I'm doing macro shots on a tripod and controlling the lights. But it does require you to get the lens pretty (very) close to the subject for really good macro, and trying to do that outdoors with moving, skittish subjects is tough. Tough to get everything in focus, tough to keep the shadow of the lens from getting into the shot, tough to keep from scaring away the subject itself before you even get your finger near the shutter button. Still, when it works the results can be quite nice. These are some of my favorites. Now I just have to decide which one to enter into this week's "Bugs" challenge....

Ringwood Insect 2 (1 of 1).jpg


Ringwood Insect 4 (1 of 1).jpg


Ringwood Insect 5 (1 of 1).jpg


Ringwood Insect 6 (1 of 1).jpg


Ringwood Insect 7 (1 of 1).jpg


Ringwood Insect 3 (1 of 1).jpg


A little tough to tell, but this bad boy is encased in a very fine web "house":

Ringwood Insect 8 (1 of 1).jpg


And of course, as I was processing these pics this morning a bug crawled across my desk. I still had the 40mm attached, and my coffee spoon to the side, so:

Bug in Spoon (1 of 1).jpg
 
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Dangerspouse

Dangerspouse

Senior Member
An absolute stunner of a day here on Mt. Crumpit, made all the more brilliant coming as it did on the heals of yesterday's torrential rains. It would have been a shame to miss this opportunity, so I grabbed the D500 and a pair of lenses and headed off into our woods looking for...anything. Ok, for this week's challenge subject "From the Soil" I suppose, but really just to get out in this magnificent weather and see what I could see.

And I saw stuff! A lot of bugs, for one:

Spider 1 (1 of 1).jpg


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Spider 2 (1 of 1).jpg


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Spider 3 (1 of 1).jpg


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Bee in Flight 1 (1 of 1).jpg


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I have no idea what the following species are. Any insectologists here?

Flying Bug 4 (1 of 1).jpg


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Two Bugs Flying (1 of 1).jpg


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Emerald Bug 1 (1 of 1).jpg


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Not bugs:

Brown Frog 1 (1 of 1).jpg


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Acorn Sprout (1 of 1).jpg


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Acorn Sprout 2 (1 of 1).jpg


One of those last two will be my entry in challenge.

Can I just say how much I'm loving both my D500 and that little 40mm Nikkor Micro? I mean, I would not have stood a chance in hell of catching those bugs in flight with my D5500 (terrific camera it very well is otherwise). But that D500 just snapped into focus and kept focus on some pretty zippy little buggers today. Big thanks to WoodyG by the way, who mentioned to me the focus setting he uses to get his amazing bird pictures. It really helped!
 
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nikonbill

nikonbill

Senior Member
Dangerspouse, I like this series - got you thinking of bugs :)

The last photo is very interesting, I'm not sure what the reddish thing is but it's neat.
 
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Dangerspouse

Dangerspouse

Senior Member
nikonbill said:
Dangerspouse, I like this series - got you thinking of bugs :)

The last photo is very interesting, I'm not sure what the reddish thing is but it's neat.
Click to expand...

Thanks, Bill! I'm not sure what it is either. Plenty of sprouting oak acorns around here, but they're all brown. I'll let you know in 20 years when it gets bigger :)
 
Dangerspouse

Dangerspouse

Senior Member
My wife had an event in Easton, PA this weekend and I tagged along. Easton turned out to be a very nice town, although I only got to see a small portion of it. But there was a stretch on Saturday where the wife didn't need me, so I wandered out on foot for a bit taking pics for this week's "Architecture in B&W" challenge. I liked the first two shots I'm posting here, ultimately deciding on the glass office wall with the vulture soaring next to it.

Glass Wall and Vulture 1 (1 of 1).jpg


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CVS Arch (1 of 1).jpg


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Diner 248 (1 of 1).jpg


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Shed and Wall (1 of 1).jpg


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Barber Closed (1 of 1).jpg


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Mobile Station 1 (1 of 1).jpg


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Mobile Station 2 (1 of 1).jpg
 
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Dangerspouse

Dangerspouse

Senior Member
Out and about with the local camera club this past weekend. We went to the Orange County (NY) Arboretum, and then to the "Colored Cemetery" 2 minutes up the road. A lovely day - though tempered by somber reflection at the cemetery. (Was looking for flying things to shoot for this week's challenge, but wasn't fast enough with my 40mm macro to catch any bugs in flight. If I'm lucky today, hopefully I'll nab a pic of a hummingbird at our feeder, as they've just recently arrived.)

Bee and Honeysuckle (1 of 1).jpg


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Frog and Purple Flowers (1 of 1).jpg


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Frog 1 (1 of 1).jpg


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Flowers under Water (1 of 1).jpg


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Globe BW (1 of 1).jpg


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Cutout Wall (1 of 1).jpg


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Torii 2 (1 of 1).jpg


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A good friend of my wife recently died. She was a longtime president of a needlework club my wife belongs to, and after her passing the members took up a collection and had a bench at the Arboretum dedicated to her last month. She was a lovely lady, and my wife asked me to take a nice pic of the bench for their FB page:

Cathy's Bench 1 (1 of 1).jpg


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Colored Cemetery Placque (1 of 1).jpg


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Almost none of the graves had headstones, but a survey using underground sensor equipment showed where skeletons were located under the soil and white pipes were placed over them. There are areas where 10 or more are clumped together closely, obvious where infants were deposited. At the few markers erected, people often leave mementos.

Colored Cemetery Panorama (1 of 1).jpg


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Colored Cemetery Headstone 1 (1 of 1).jpg
 
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