My wife and I took a little drive to the ocean—our small way to celebrate Earth Day. The unremarkable Featured Image is simple demonstration of how much detail a full-frame sensor can capture; I used […]
Tag: nature photography
Mighty Monarch Withers Wind
After rummaging through old photos, I wonder why I didn’t post here this flyer fluttering against the breeze. Perhaps the pic was discarded for lacking clarity. But three years later, I value the dreamy soft […]
Burtech Blues Break
I stand corrected about the water pipeline work, which seemed to reach its mainstay on Jan. 12, 2018. Two days ago, Burtech contractor crews started to earnestly tear up our street, compelling closed apartment windows that keep out noise and dust and, disappointedly, pleasant weather.
My repast has been longer walks, to parts of the neighborhood where the natural sounds of birds, other wildlife, and breeze rustling palm fronds are soothing ambience. This afternoon, while walking down Meade Ave. towards Texas Street, I passed a lone rose rising defiantly behind cement wall, challenging the urban, human landscape’s listless, lifeless incursion.
Forbidden Fruit
I suppose these lemons could be bitter and deadly. Or, perhaps, the sign seeks something else: Pilfering deterrence. The tree hangs perilously, and temptingly, over the sidewalk and easily within reach of most passersby. Poison […]
Real Southern California Christmas Tree
For all my snowbound friends wondering what December is like here in San Diego, look no further than this orange tree in a neighbor’s yard on Monroe Ave. a few blocks from my apartment. While […]
What’s the Story, Morning Glory?
Park Blvd. divides University Heights East and West—for reasons that make no sense to me. This San Diego community is about 12,000 people living in an area around 1.132 square miles. My hometown, Caribou, Maine, is residence to a little less than 8,000 folks in a city spanning 79.3 miles. Oh, Hell, I fuss. But you get the point?
Yesterday, as I walked West to East, down Monroe Ave. towards our recently rented apartment, a beautiful cluster of morning glories demanded that I stop with iPhone 7 Plus and honor them with a portrait. I shot the Featured Image—an auto-generated HDR composite—at 12:13 p.m. PDT. Vitals: f/1.8, ISO 20, 1/474 sec, 3.99mm.
From a Hole a Tree Grows
Award-winning photography this ain’t, nor is it meant to be. I composed to capture two things referenced in past posts—the little library box on Maryland Ave. (near Monroe) and a tree that replaced an older […]
The Predator
While walking down Maryland Ave. late this afternoon to the grocery store, what looked like two birds locked together swooped by me. As I turned my gaze across the street, the one dropped the other before perching on a building. There waited the first hawk I ever recognize seeing. Had the Leica Q been with me, I could have manually focused in the moment and close-cropped later during post-production for detail. Instead, I made do with the iPhone 7 Plus second camera, which acts as a 2x optical zoom.
The smartphone poorly addressed the lighting, measuring from the brightly-lit background—something I could have compensated better for if not in a rush. The bird wouldn’t wait around long. The Featured Image, and its companion, are both heavily edited; in the first, I purposely blew out the sky’s highlights to contrast against the urban structure and to brighten bird and building.
Beetle Mania
The killer feature(s) of my beloved Leica Q: Manual focus and Macro mode, both of which are controlled by rings around the barrel of the lens. They’re best when used together, as the Featured Image […]
Purple Passion Flower
While I attended a basic botany class in college, my familiarity with plant life is limited—unlike clouds and bugs, or even the stars. Walking down Cleveland Ave. the other day, purple flowers hanging from vast vines rapped my attention. I snapped some closeups using iPhone 7 Plus, which were okay. On the evening of July 27, 2017, I meandered back with the Leica Q in tow and, using the dedicated Macro mode and manual focus, captured satisfying shots.
They’re purple passion flowers, and new flora to me. Interestingly—no surprisingly—their presence is “absent/unreported” in California, according to USDA. Oh yeah?
Hey, Spider
Six years ago in October, I photographed a stunning sunset spider using Google Nexus S smartphone. On July 17, 2017, at 7:16 p.m., another opportunity came—and I felt bad for the arachnid.The nighttime web attached to bush and parked car. If the owner(s) were to go out…
I shot several portraits with Leica Q, using dedicated Macro mode, and also iPhone 7 Plus. The digital camera delivered better than the smartphone—not that the Apple device did poorly. The Featured Image is a close crop from the original using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. I shoot in DNG (Leica’s chosen RAW format) and convert to JPEG. Vitals: f/2.8, ISO 100, 1/80 sec, 28mm.
Morning, Mourning Cloak
This AM, my daughter’s cat Cali started meowing mournfully before the front screen door. She desperately wanted something outside. As a formerly outdoor/indoor kitty, she suffers when birds or bugs come close by door or […]