This is my plum tree.  All of those flowers have me pretty excited about the idea of having actual plums too.  We’ll see what happens as I’ve only had it about a year, and it’s in a pot.  Fingers crossed!  One more.

Spring Has Sprung is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

I was digging in the archives and came across this.  Check out the date – serious blast from the past!

Two things about this shot.  First off, it isn’t from Seattle – it is from the Keukenhof outside of the Hague in Holland.  The gardens there are an amazing mix of all sorts of flowers, but most notably tulips.  I have some other shots but lost the opportunity for some great ones when I learned that my camera battery gives little warning before giving up.  The second thing is that (as you can see from the info above), this was shot on my old Canon Powershot S400.  Not an SLR and although it was good at the time, really not even a good point and shoot!  If you’re careful and pick the right subject, it doesn’t always matter.  Make sure you hold steady and definitely shoot outside if at all possible – there is usually so much more light than inside that few things will improve your picture quality as much.

This isn’t my favorite shot in the world – I don’t like how close to the center of the frame the subject is – it makes the balance feel funny.  I do like some aspects of it like how the background blurs as you get farther out and how close the main tulip is, but most of those flaws were mine, not the gear.  Shoot with what you’ve got – just remember to shoot!

Dutch Tulips is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

Since it was dark and I was using the macro lens, I had the tripod out.  Yes, I was attempting to do things correctly.  After cranking the aperture wide open to blur the background, I thought I’d try something else and go the other direction – want to see more?  I, personally, think it is worth hitting the link.

So if the shot above was 1/2 second at ISO 200 and the aperture wide open (f/2.8), what happens when I crank the aperture down all the way to the other direction and drop the ISO to 100?  Well at f/32 and ISO 100, the shutter speed drops to 30 seconds.  That might be fine and dandy, but should give roughly the same picture, plus a little noise and blur.  What it does let you do is screw around a bit.  I happened to be holding a big flashlight I’d been using to add enough light to get the focus right before.  What happens when you spend a couple seconds in the middle of the exposure pointing it at the middle of the flower?  You get something like this:

Ooh… nice colors, right?  Draws your eye into the middle where everything is nicely illuminated.  Pretty different picture.  You could do it again – shine the light around the edges instead of the middle:

Sure, it was quick and dirty so it’s illuminating everything a bit, but it’s mostly around the petals.  Different colors pop out, but since it’s a long exposure and a flashlight bleeds light everywhere, it’s still a soft color.  I think this is my favorite of the three.  The point is, if you look at the junk laying around, especially in indoor, low-light pictures, you can do some cool stuff.  Just make sure you keep the ISO speed low and the aperture small so you have enough time to play.  On a shorter exposure, not only do you have to work faster, but the things you’re doing influence the picture more so it’s easier to “mess up”, if you can even say that about something like this.  Anyway, I’m pretty happy with the result.  You can get a lot of mileage out of some dying flowers.

Lighting Can Be Cheap is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

Also, I’m going to try something a little different here.  Thanks to the wonderful features of Photoshop CS4, there is a built-in flash-based panorama generator. Want to see it, click the link.

Same image below – scroll with the buttons or the mouse.  Which is better?  Let me know in the comments.

Tulips As Far As Your Panorama Can Pan is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

This one comes from my 100 mm macro lens.  I love the shallow depth of field, which devolves into solid pink.  On the Digital Rebel XT I shoot with, you’ve got to multiply the focal length by 1.6, so I have a 160mm lens which means I was probably 5 feet back from the flower in question.  With overcast sun shooting at ISO 200, you still have plenty of light to freeze any movement in the breeze, but late in the day or inside, this isn’t the perfect lens for hand-held shooting.  Sometimes it’s nice to try to figure out what else you can do with the lenses you have.  Macros are great up close, but that’s not all they can do.

A Storm of Pink? is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

I suppose my problem with the “festival” is that it is really a group of totally independant farms that allow you to traipse around a bit, possibly buy some popcorn or tulip postcards and charge you four or five bucks to park.  I’m not totally knocking it though.  This picture comes from a farm that proclaims itself as “Tulip Town”.  They grow tulips of every color and looking out over all of the rows, I can’t really think of anything else like it.

Washington Does Tulips is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

This is from my wanderings a couple weeks ago.  Some of my favorite flowers are one the plants that you don’t think of as flowers.  Rosemary is almost as rampant as blackberries in my area of Capitol Hill, so it’s hard not to find.  The tiny flowers are pretty neat though, especially in macro!

Spring Still Springing is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

Wanna learn all about it, or just see some purdy pictures?  Click the link:

Gonna get really elementary on you for a second.  Depth of Field is controlled by your aperture.  The aperture is a hole that lets light reach your sensor or film.  A big number means a tiny hole.  A small number means a big hole.  Lenses that are referred to as “fast” are lenses that are capable of really opening up the aperture wide, to let a lot of light in fast, which allows the “fast” capture of a picture, even in low light.  My 100mm macro lens, which I took these pictures with, has an aperture (or f-stop) that goes up to f/2.8.  Not bad.

Alright – got that out of the way.  Here comes the DoF.  The larger the aperture, the deeper the Depth of Field.  Sometimes that is good.  If you’re taking a picture of a few rows of people, you probably want them all in focus, right?  Well I’m not taking pictures of lots of people – I’m taking pictures of a flower today.  Isn’t it purdy?  It’s the one African Violet that somehow I’ve never killed and my cats have never succeeded in eating.  Furry leaves don’t go down so easy.  Enough of that – picture stuff.  Shallow DoF is useful more often than you’d think.  If you take a look at that picture above, there is a nice flower, right?  What there isn’t is much in the background.  That’s because I used a really wide aperture (2.8) which blurs most everything else out.  It doesn’t even keep the entire flower in focus, but I like the look, so good.   Let’s try it with a smaller aperture:

Here we are at 5.6.  That’s 6 clicks down on this lens from 2.8 and gives us a little more DoF, as you can see.  The flower is a bit more in-focus and the background is much clearer.  This smaller aperture also means that you have a slower shutter speed to account for less light coming in.  Keeping this lens still is pretty hard when you’re up close like this, so I’m using a monopod.  It helps a bit.  Six stops didn’t make that big of a difference, right?  Let’s go all craz and crank the aperture WAY down:

This is with an aperture of 32.  That’s a LOT smaller than 5.6.  15 clicks.  What is going on with the picture?  Well obviously I was too lazy to get the tripod out and instead of 1/25th of a second (for the first picture) or 1/5th second (second picture), the exposure time here is 8 seconds.  But it doesn’t matter right?  Because the point wasn’t to frame this and put it on your wall – it was to look at the DoF.  Clearly the camera is shaking a bit, but otherwise, the flower is entirely in focus.  Look behind it.  See that red candy bowl?  That’s in focus too.  Do you want to see the candy bowl?   Well f/32 might be the aperture for you.  If you were maybe more into looking at the flower, f/2.8 might be better.  The point is, you can control this stuff.  Not all lenses can go as low as f/2.8, but f/5.6 is very common, even on a pretty cheap lens, and that same lens can most likely do f/32 as well.  In order to control for DoF like this, you’ll want to set your camera to Av  or Aperture Priority mode.  Some cameras even have a nifty DoF mode, but that’s between you and your hardware.   In Av mode, you can select the aperture setting you like and the camera will pick the correct shutter speed to go with it.  This is probably the second most common mode I use on my camera.  Ooh… one last comment – DoF at any setting is deeper the further away you are from the lens.  My flower above may be less than an inch deep, but since it was very close to the camera, it’s still not totally in focus close up.  If I shot it sitting a few feet back at the same setting, it would all be in focus.  Just something to think about.

Got any good DoF pictures of your own?  Link to ‘em below.

Depth Of Field – Instruction-o-rama! is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

The seasons are changing for real.  Today I wore a light jacket and got hot – hot, I say!  That means something around here.  Also around here, there are flowers.  I took this picture in the Arboretum – a great place for finding things like this.  I’d tell you what kind it is, but this is a photography blog, not a botany blog.  Also, we’re back to TtV (Through the Viewfinder) – something I have fun with but also something you requested back when I asked.  Happy yet?

Spring, As Requested is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

Every year I forget how miserable I get when the sun never really comes up in the morning.  We call that half of the year winter.  I also forget how much I like it when spring starts showing up.  It was sunny for the last couple of days around here (if you ignore that rain last night) and I think spring is coming.  I dug back in the vault and pulled out this picture from a couple of years ago.  Old camera, old lens, appologies and all that.  The colors are great and the scene is cool, but my favorite part is the rows.  Rows and rows and rows.  I’m sure it’s an OCD thing.

Spring Is Coming. I'm Pretty Sure. is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures