It's a Macro Morning

Wow, I can't believe it's been almost a month since my last BLOG entry. I've been busy with work and family matters and just haven't had any time to go out and shoot.

Tomorrow I'm leaving for a business trip to San Diego, California where I hope to have time to get out of the hotel and conference hall and shoot some photos. Hopefully I'll be able to write a BLOG entry or two while in San Diego. This will be my first visit to the San Diego area.

Ok, now on to the reason I started writing this BLOG entry. This morning while my wife Dawn and I where checking on our vegetable garden in the backyard (we should be harvesting green beans and red bell peppers shortly) we noticed that one of her many lillies was blooming so I decided to use it to practice some macro photography using a new set of extension tubes I recently purchased. Extension tubes are spacers that fit between the lens and the camera and push the lens further away from the film or photo sensor which results in a magnified image just like using a magnifying glass to read small text. There is a downside to using extension tubes and that is it reduces the amount of light that falls on your film or photo sensor and it also reduces the sharpness of the overall image.

Each the following three images in this series is a progressively closer macro image of the lilly taken with a Canon 40D and Sigma 17-70mm Macro lens. Because of a slight breeze the second two images had to be taken at ISO400 so I could get the shutter speed fast enough to stop any motion blur caused by the wind moving the flower.

ISO100, f/11, 1/100 sec at 40mm without Extension Tube.

ISO400, f/36, 1/50 sec at at 70mm with 21mm Extension Tube.

All images copyright Daniel Ray Photography.

ISO400, f/22, 1/30 sec at at 70mm with 31mm Extension Tube.

A Good Friday It Was

Since I was off work for Good Friday we decided to head down to Galveston and let the kids play on the beach. This was our first trip back to the island since hurricane Ike made devistated the Southeeast Texas cost on September 13, 2008. While driving from Iinterstae 45 down Broadway to the east side of the island we found many buildings (homes and businesses) that had been destroyed or damaged by the sea as it rose and inundated the island during the hurricane.

On the positive side we also found that many of the businesses along the seawall were open and the island was crowded with people. It looks like Galveston is on the road to recovered.

The forecast for the day was for temperatues in the upper 70's to lower 80s with overcast skies. There was a lot of windblown sand, low clouds and sea mist blowing in from the Gulf of Mexico which limited visibility to less that a mile.

Hazey DayGalveston's east end condominiums obscured by a haze of windblown sand and mist from the Gulf of Mexico

Beach PlayAustin and Zachary playing at the beach

Race to the WaterRacing to see who can hit the water first and catch the biggest wave

Inquisitive seagullThis little guy was stalking us and most likely hoping we would toss him something to eat

Wait for meCan you hear him telling his two older brothers to 'wait for me'?

Building a Sand Castle

Just PaintThat's her motto

One Yellow Post

Yellow Flowers in the Dunes

Sand Dunes

Gliding on the Sea Breeze

Taking a BathSeagulls were taking a dip in a pool of fresh rain water

Perched and ReadyThis guy was perched on the edge of the seawall and was very uneasy with us walking so close to him

No Swimming

Sand Piper on the Rocks

Shrimp on a Stick
We ate fried shrimp, grilled shrimp, shrimp gumbo ...

Love Pink and Respect Blue
I took this candid image on the Galveston seawall just before sunset. I really liked the grouping of the scene with the young couple, the police officers, the girl on bike in the middle and the contrasting colors of the pink blouse, flip-flops, bike rim and sweat shirt on the left and the three blue police officer uniforms on the right

End of the DayGalveston Island snset. Hopefully I'll be capturing more of these this summer.

All images copyright Daniel Ray Photography.

The Color Purple

After work today I was weeding our small vegetable garden and noticed the wisteria that we trained along the wooden fence was flowering. By the way, wisteria is one of my favorite flowering vines and I love the color and smell. As I walked around the yard after the garden weeding was complete I noticed many of our flowering plants were of varying hues of purple or they had purple details. So I pulled out the camera and tripod and captured these images which I decided to share with you.

Orange Symphony (Osteospermum Hybrid)

Lavender (Lavandula)

Wandering Jew (Tradescantia zebrina)

Daniel Ray Photography.

All images copyright

Flowering Wisteria

Black and White Wednesday #2

Welcome to Black and White Wednesday. This is the second post in this series.

Early one morning last week I woke up early with the intention to capture a colorful sunrise. As I stepped out the door to leave I noticed that a thick fog had settled in and would more than likely not be very conducive for a sunrise photograph. But I was already up so I decided to venture out and see what I could find. After stopping for a cup of java I noticed this high rise office building appeared to vanish up into the fog. After setting up my tripod and camera I snapped a few images before a light rain started to fall which quickly put an end to any more attempts at photography that morning.

I was lounging in our backyard hammock and noticed the setting sun producing heavy contrast on the bare branches of this crepe myrtle tree. The tree really isn't actually as twisted and tangled as it appears in this image. The long telephoto lens I used to capture this image compresses the foreground and background to create the perception of a tangled mess of branches.

All images copyright Daniel Ray Photography.

One Fine Houston Evening

I'm reading the book Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson for the second time. It seems the first time I read it I didn't comprehend much of the information provided in the text.

Last evening I was feeling the call of the camera so I decided to put some of the knowledge I gained from reading the book to good use. So at about 7:00 PM I head out to see if I could capture a decent sunset and possibly some night photos.

I'm not thrilled with the sunset photos. Not because of the sky but because other than buildings and trees there isn't much else to in West Houston to use as the foreground subject in a sunset. Mountains are hard to find in these parts!

These two images are of a building near our house. I was actually driving back home after getting the sunset images and saw the sun reflecting off the building. So I pulled into a shopping center parking lot and setup my tripod and camera and snapped these two images all while a rent-a-cop sat in his/her truck and watched me the entire time.

All images copyright Daniel Ray Photography.