Blitherings – Page 156 – Ink, Yarn & Beer

A Pause Between Seasons

Woodland

Fall is coming; you can feel it: the air is cooler, the light is more gentle. Where trees lose their leaves, the season can be filled with color. Here, where I live, the color change is not so apparent. From summer on, the hills can become very brown, and the plants are adapted to dry climates. Colors do not tend to be riotous.

Puzzle

Nonetheless, there are subtle changes. Some leaves change colors gradually, an orange one here and there, turning brown, and falling off one at a time.

Tulip Tree Signed

Occasionally, one finds trees which are spectacular, such as the tulip tree in my front yard – it is a brilliant orange and yellow display with a suddenly naked tree.

Flower & Fruit

Other plants bear fruit, while they continue to flower. And others drop their flowers before they drop their leaves.

Fallen Flowers

Suburban southern California is home to both native plants, and plants from all over the world, but each plant has its season to grow and reproduce. The beauty of nature is found if one takes the time to look.

The Nikon V1 and 32mm f1.2 Lens for Botanical Photography

Multiple reasons routed me to the Nikon 1 system. A DSLR with a big lens is heavy, so when the Nikon 1 system first came out, I looked, but did not like the initial prices, nor the lack of lenses. Also, I wasn’t too sure if it would be successful enough to invest in.

Time passed. When the V1 dropped significantly in price, I looked again. Seeing images shot by Steve, by Craig Litton, Joe Marquez, Sue Wotton and others at Steve Huff Photo pushed me to look at it. Finally I bought it. Since then, I’ve added lenses to the bag, but when the 32mm f1.2 was announced, I was seriously interested, and bought one when I could catch it in stock.

There is no one area of photography I prefer, but flowers have always given me a great deal of pleasure, especially wildflowers. As it is late in the summer, nearly all our wildflowers are gone in the heat of Southern California, but locally we have some rather lovely gardens with flowers in bloom. When I finally had some time to test out the 32mm lens, at f1.2 to f1.6, I shot a series of flowers and leaves, using both the auto and manual focus.

The beauty of the lens is the ability to isolate a flower from either background or foreground. Bokeh varies with what lies in front and behind of the subject, and with the 32mm f1.2, it varies in quality. It can be rather nervous when leaves in the background are small and fine. Other times, distance or background blur beautiful, creating an element of serenity. Color, contrast, and detail are well rendered. The three pictures below show how the manual focus allows for choosing one’s focal area, and show how the foreground, middle ground, and distance can be chosen. Click on them to see full detail.

Altogether, I am very pleased with the ability of the Nikon V1 and the 32mm for taking pictures of flowers and other plants. Some post-processing can add to the beauty of an image, but even just out of the camera, most images are pleasing and need little work.

Dahlia

Fallen-1500 Fern-1500 Hollyhock-2 Purple Saber-Lily-1500

Lens

As a birthday present – a bit early – I got the Nikon 32mm f1.2 for the Nikon 1 cameras. I have the V1. This lens, equivalent roughly to an 85mm lens, has a separate manual focus element on it, unlike the others in the Nikon 1 series.

Yesterday, I went to a local garden, and took a series of pictures. Some I used the automatic focusing, on others I used the manual focusing. I need to figure out how to use it. The main, point, though, of the excursion was to simply evaluate the lens at f1.2, to check the bokeh, to check the accuracy, and to simply see how it worked.

Follows are some of the shots, with some post-processing, just because that is what I do, but I did very little sharpening because that was the main focal point – observe the depth of field of the lens.

Overall, I am quite pleased with the lens, but there is definitely a time and place for such a wide open f/stop. Click on the composite picture below, then click again to enlarge it, if you want to see more of the details.

Regroup, Refresh, Review – and the First Stop

Mojave Sky

Back home after nearly a month on the road. We travelled 6500 miles, drove through ten states, visited friends and family, drank beer and smoked cigars, ate wonderful meals, viewed three national parks on a very limited basis. Countryside ranged from desert to high mountains, with rain, hail, and sandstorms to accompany the sun and pleasures of the summer. Even better, we go along! One of Josh’s friends said, “It must be love if you can spend weeks in a car with your wife.” We had a great time – and time not to just travel, but time to get reacquainted with each other.

In the Mojave

The first leg of the trip was to Flagstaff, Arizona. We spent one night here on the way out, and another two nights on the way back, in a different section of town. It was about a 7-hour drive from home, which is just north of Los Angeles. The first part was a few hours simply getting out of the sprawl of L.A., but once out, we moved into the sprawling Mojave desert as we travelled east. The Mojave is an amazing area – very large, very diverse, ranging from flat and barren, odd mountainous formations, to a sparse lushness with oddities such as the Joshua Tree, which, interestingly, is related to the lily!

Of course, geology changes as one travels, and moving into Arizona, the land certainly did change, especially as we began the ascent into the city of Flagstaff. The first night of the trip was spent in downtown, in an old hotel called the Hotel Monte Vista. We were up on the fourth floor, but on a Saturday night, we could hear the noise from the street below, and the chiming of a local church bell, tolling the hours in the wee hours of the morning (which was off by about 35 minutes, I think). The noise was not distracting, though, and the hotel is centrally located, so walking everywhere was fun. We visited 3 breweries that evening, and found out that trains travel through the middle of downtown with alarming frequency. The view from our window – we stayed in the Walter Brennan Room – was pretty cool. And, better, the windows opened!

The initial impressions of Flagstaff were very favorable. For a small town, it is rather cosmopolitan, and this is, in part, because of the fact Northern Arizona State University is there. There were also some shocks – Arizona’s gun laws and politics are vastly different than what I am used to in California. For instance, signs in restaurant windows telling customers to leave their guns at home, was a significant reminder of the differences.

Certainly food for thought . . . so, for now, I will leave you with Josh pondering a menu on the patio of Beaver Street Brewery.

At Beaver Street Brewery

The Eyes Have It

Every now and again we set out for several weeks, driving all the way, and stopping at various places to visit family, friends, and see the sights. This year is a tour of scenic places, and places with character. Because I want to take some good pictures, I have been going through my lenses and checking them for accuracy in focus. Of course, some lenses are better than others, and some systems work better than others.

The Nikon D7000 has the ability to adjust the autofocus in different lenses, and store those manual adjustments in the menu, for up to twelve different lenses. I have been going through all my autofocus lenses, rather painstakingly, to sort them out. Only one is really out of kilter, and it could be that I just need to send it in to be refurbished by the manufacturer to factory specifications. Needless to say, it will not be traveling with me!

There are a lot of ways to check the focus of a lens, so I won’t get into it here. The final test, though, is on the eyes of my victim. His left eye is the one I use – don’t ask why, I don’t know! Once I like what I see in the lens, I record it by naming the picture with the adjustment in the camera, the f/stop, and file it in a calibrations directory. I’ve heard that lenses should be checked every 6 months or so, and certainly be checked out with any new camera.