Exploring the wonders of creation through a 50mm lens...and other lenses too.

While we were driving home the other day my son kept pointing to the rear window of the car and saying “Beetle.” I couldn’t see what he was pointing at, but when we arrived and got out of the car we went around and found this giant yellow Cottonwood Borer who had apparently hitched a ride with us. He flew into a nearby pine tree and I ran inside to get my camera so I could take a few pics while holding my son with my other arm. Together we watched the beetle, which we later discovered was a Cottonwood Borer, wind his way around a few branches before taking off for other destinations.

We have these trees down in Oklahoma called Goldenrain Trees, and each year they drop little seed pods in the summertime.

Originally I was just going to do one of those stairwell shots that people take all the time, and shot from the bottom up. Then I realized it might be interesting to try the concept from the top down, and noticed that the resulting image looked kind of like a big ol’ paperclip. Like most stairwells this one was rather dimly lit, so I had to do quite a bit of tweaking afterwards (including upping the exposure by more than +2). I figured this might happen when I took the picture, which is why I used such a low ISO in order to limit the post-processing artifacts that can show up when tweaking pictures in the computer. It was also a bit difficult to get everything in the shot because I had to stand on my tiptoes and try to hold the camera steady, and even with all that the left-hand side still got cropped a bit. Overall I am very pleased with how this turned out though.

Look out for wet floors! Or streets. Or sidewalks. Or grassy knolls.

I don’t know what this is, but it was poking along minding its own business on a tree outside our house. I hoped he wouldn’t mind posing for a quick snapshot, a request which he kindly obliged.