Tag: Nikon 105mm f2.5 AIS

A Day in the Garden

As we head toward 100 F weather this weekend, I am glad to have taken the time to head out, once again, to the local botanical garden.  It is always such a refreshing place to be – new things to see, changes to the familiar.  I went out with my Nikon Df, and a classic lens, the Nikon 105mm f2.5 AIS.

While I was there, I brought along my Nikon FM2N and a roll of Ilford HP5 to use with different filters – orange, yellow, and green – to see their effects on B&W film. Hopefully I will develop my own roll this next week! And, on the way out of the garden, I took a wonderful tumble, scraped and bruised myself quite nicely, and had a good mouthful of dirt to go along with my lost dignity. I’m quite sore!

The Beauty of Color

The natural world is endlessly variable and surprising in what it brings to our eyes.  In photography, much can be done to manipulate color, contrast, detail, and so on; this imparts mood and emotion vial tonality, shading, nuance.  Playing with post-processing software is time-consuming (because it becomes so fascinating at times) and can lead to fun and interesting results.  A palette of presets in software can be a blessing, or a curse.

Below are some pictures I took yesterday at the local botanical garden.  Some trees were alight with color, others were wonderfully subtle when backlit by the setting sun.

The first group is the same image, processed four ways.  I used Photomatix Pro, LR 5.7, and VSCO presets for LR.

These next images were of the colored leaves. Here in SoCal, colored leaves don’t exist in abundance! The leaves of native plants tend to be somewhat pale and small. Many are fragrant from resin, which makes for terrifying fires. The local botanical garden has brought in plants from different parts of the world, some of which put on a beautiful display in the fall. Lucky me to catch them!

At times I wish I lived someplace else. I miss the hardwood woods that change color in the fall and the rush of excitement when bulbs peep out through the snow. I don’t miss the snow, though – having lived near Buffalo, NY, I remember those winters, as I do the damp, miserable cold of Chicago in the winter. While SoCal is sometimes too monochrome, the beauty is there, too, if you look for it.