Rick’s Rants and Raves

I’ve done a wee bit of photographic experimentation recently. These experiments don’t really form a cohesive thought process, or attempt at anything in particular, other than to just see what I can do.

Falling Water Bottle

In the last week of school, I volunteered at my son’s field day, running the sack race. 99% of the kids were great, and I only had to deal with the remaining 1% for a short time, so it was a fun time over all. The weather was beautiful with a clear blue sky and occasional cotton-candy clouds. In between groups of kids, I was killing time by throwing my water bottle in the air then catching it. As the water inside twisted and sloshed against the blue back ground, I was reminded of one of my favorite pictures on Flickr. After the field day was over, I decided to try to take a picture of my sloshing water bottle in the air to see what I could come up with. After about 5 minutes, I felt like I’d gotten a few decent shots. Here is the result:

This is the best of the individual shots.

Summer Breeze

Did I mention that it was a gorgeous day? At one point I was lying on my bed, looking out my window at the beautifully lit tree, watching the sheer curtains gently billow in the breeze. It seemed like an iconic sort of shot to represent a perfect summer day.

Heron through a scope

After dinner one evening, Anne and I went to a local metro park and went to a waterfowl nature preserve. It was getting a bit dark, and I didn’t have high hopes for much photographically. But I had the camera just in case. There was a young rabbit who was brave enough to let me shoot him (with the camera), and a raccoon with a youngster (the youngster skittered as soon as he heard my shutter). A long ways across the pond was a great blue heron perched in a tree. Evidently that’s how they sleep at night, regardless of how precarious it looks to us humans. I took a shot with my 55mm lens knowing that he’d be a few pixels tall in the resulting image. Then I sat down at the park’s long-range scope, and got a really good look at the bird. At that point I figured that if my eye could see it, then so could my camera. So I held my camera lens up to the scope eye piece (I hadn’t brought a tripod), set everything to manual and took a few shots. This is the best of them. It hasn’t been edited at all.