Simon

I took my camera to work on a chilly winter morning after a freezing drizzle had coated the earth during the night, determined to find a decent nature shot. There’s not a lot of scenery between the parking lot and my building, but I did come across this raindrop frozen on the tip of a magnolia leaf. The overcast sky made it easier to get a good exposure, which would have been tricky on an otherwise sunny day.

Another one from the Stillwater Wetlands. A limestone path was lined with railroad ties, and I’m not sure how long the path has been there but this nail must have managed to work its way up over time. Perhaps a maintenance worker will come pound it back into place, but hopefully not for a little while.

Another shot taken by Boomer Lake. I don’t know what kind of plant this is, but it’s not really a flower. It’s some type of bush or shrubbery, I think, but whatever it’s called I liked how the sun was giving this wilting flower bulb a bit of a glow in the early evening.

For a while now I have wanted to go out and shoot this bridge at night, and finally did it with my dad while he and my mom were here for a visit. We tried several vantage points from the west end of the bridge, and I took photos with both my 35mm and 50mm lens. The former was a better choice overall, but I like the light trails in this photo a little better.

We have a tree whose leaves turn bright yellow for about three days a year, and I wanted to try to capture that here. This shot is decent, but I see a lot of room for improvement mostly because the focus was not as sharp as I would have liked. At f/2.8 the depth of field was a bit too shallow to get everything in focus, but I didn’t realize that until much later.
This photo illustrates one of the shortcomings of shooting with a 50mm Prime lens (at least on an APS-C camera, anyway). This tree is the first one in the neighborhood to turn colors each autumn, and I wanted to get a shot that illustrated how the tree stands out from the rest. It’s difficult to show this without a wide-angle lens though, and even after putting at least 150 feet between myself and the tree there was simply no way to get much more in the frame than just the tree itself. What I did instead was focus on one cluster of leaves while using a neighboring tree to create a dark green background as a way of showing how this tree tends to stand out from the rest.