Take a picture once a day, whether you need to or not

[Khaldun]

There was a whole group of Lego Avengers, they were all great.

[Count Nerfedalot]

I love Spring. Almost as much as Fall.


I still haven't replaced my camera, but every once in a while the phone surprises me, and not always unpleasantly! 

[IainC]

For my last day in Switzerland, my girlfriend and I went to the Chinese Garden in Zürich.


Chinese Garden by Iain Compton, on Flickr


Chinese Garden by Iain Compton, on Flickr

[IainC]

I was up at daybreak today so I decided to be productive and hiked about 6km down the bank of the Dnipro and back with my camera. These are the two best shots from that trip.

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Dawn Over the Dnipro by Iain Compton, on Flickr[/img]

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Founders of Kiev by Iain Compton, on Flickr[/img]

[Khaldun]

Great shots. Love the silhouette of the statue.

[RhyssaFireheart]

Those are gorgeous images there, Iain, both of your recent posts.

[MisterNoisy]

And in keeping with tradition, I'm going to follow a bunch of gorgeous pictures with another bug:



Click beetle on my car's door handle this morning.  Little bugger hung on through the whole drive to work.

[Khaldun]

Leafbug sitting on a vine in my garden.

[RhyssaFireheart]

That is an awesome close-up shot, Khaldun.

[apocrypha]

I think your camera's bugged. 


*gets coat*

[Mosesandstick]

Nice one! Good detail.

[murdoc]

I was playing with a macro lens and took some pictures to mount and hang.. The pictures themselves are just ok, but turned out pretty good as 'art' for the boys room.

[Khaldun]

Second one is especially nice.

[apocrypha]

Yeah they're nice!

PS, lens, lenses. 

[IainC]

I've done a bit of playing aroudn with macro tubes. Welcome to the world of no depth of field at all.

[Khaldun]

Focus stacking ftw. Or just making a great choice about where to place the focus, like in that second Lego shot. Definitely a tricky subspecies of photography.

[apocrypha]

The other option is *lots* of light and a lens that'll go down to tiny apertures like f64, but then you start trading off sharpness for DoF. And you still don't get a whole lot of DoF!

[murdoc]

Yeah they're nice!

PS, lens, lenses. 

 

[CaptainNapkin]

2 snakes, 1 branch... rated M for Mature.
Sorry for shitty cell phone pic, but it's not every day I walk out of my house to find snakes fornicating in the landscaping 

[Bunk]

So I spent the weekend at a family camping trip at Horne Lake on Vancouver Island. Pictures of the lake were pretty dull, but I did get a few other shots worth sharing.

A family of geese came up to the site from the lake. I'm sitting in a chair at the water's edge taking these. They ended up less than ten feet away for a good few minutes. My urge to get cool shots outweighed my fear of being assaulted by geese:






There's a huge cave system at Horne Lake that my dad and I hiked over to explore. We opted out of the $60 3 hour tour (we'd been hiking for hours already) but went in and explored a couple of the open to the public caves. Totally worth it, even just for the drop of 20 degrees C the moment you step inside them.



My dad following me up. We're about 100' in and then 20' up from the entrance at this point:



Great trip, even though it made me realize my 69 year old father is still in better shape than me.

[Khaldun]

Wide-angle lens practice. 





Focus stacking practice. Missed the moth's tongue by a millisecond--it was in the focal plane and then it wasn't.





Dog up to his usual tricks.

[apocrypha]

LOL @ your dog

The (very nice) moth picture is a slightly odd aspect ratio, is that deliberate?

[IainC]

I went out on Saturday night to take pictures of the Lavra while it was all lit up. Unfortunately I didn't realise that it was all locked away at night. I wandered around trying to find a good vantage point to photograph it from a distance but, before I found one, the lights were turned off. I did however get some photos of the Holodomor memorial which is very close to it. It's a monument and museum to the victims of famines in Ukraine during the 1920s and 30s as a result of Soviet agricultural policy.


Holodomor Memorial-3.jpg by Iain Compton, on Flickr

[Khaldun]

LOL @ your dog

The (very nice) moth picture is a slightly odd aspect ratio, is that deliberate?

Not really. I need to recrop it a bit I think. If I recall rightly there may have been a leaf on the right that I didn't feel like cloning out.

[Khaldun]

Love the nighttime colors on the memorial, Iain. Dark stone in front I think adds some interesting contrast too.

[Mosesandstick]

Loving the photos guys. Here's a couple from my holiday in Bali.

Balinese rice fields.


2015-07 Bali 017 by Aled Moses, on Flickr

Mucking about with the night sky. Which is pretty hard when you didn't bring your tripod.


2015-07 Bali 012 by Aled Moses, on Flickr

The highest peak on the island.


2015-07 Bali 029 by Aled Moses, on Flickr

[Ironwood]

Loving those cave pics Bunk;  are there any more ?

[Stewie]

4 pics from a recent trip to Utah, all on imgur here: http://imgur.com/a/kxdqe or can see em below.

Horsehoe Bend
Antelope Canyon Lady in the Wind
Delicate Arch
Balanced Rock

[Bunk]

Loving those cave pics Bunk;  are there any more ?

Not much I was happy with unfortunately. Getting really deep in to the caves required a lot of climbing, which wasn't going to happen with the gear I was carrying. Plus it was too dark for autofocus, so getting good shots like those involved a lot of luck.

[Bunk]

You couldn't have asked for a much better amount/type of clouds in the sky for those.

I was going to ask how did you manage that bizarre focal effect on the first one with both sides blurring out, then I looked again and realized, the bend really messes with your depth perception of where things are.

[Stewie]

yeah none of the pics i took (roughly 2700 on the trip) do justice to the sheer size and scale of some of these areas.
 

[Khaldun]

Like the Delicate Arch shot particularly.

The Bali panorama is great.

[Samwise]

[RhyssaFireheart]

That's a fabulous pic, Samwise!

[Samwise]

Thanks!  Went on a road trip up the coast earlier this week; I'm still sorting through the photos.  Here's another one I like, from the same beach (Glass Beach in Ft. Bragg):


(Eriogonum parvifolium, aka cliff buckwheat)