Get a little bit closer

One thing I like to do with cameras is to always "get a little closer". Some photographers love the wide-angle lens, but unless I need to take a large group picture or a landscape shot, I will usually have my biggest zoom lens mounted on my camera.

Since some of my favorite subjects are wild animals and often a little camera-shy, that usually works out well for me. Sometimes though, a subject captures my attention and I want to get a bit closer, like inches away instead of feet away. My beloved zoom does not handle that request very well. Instead, I will sometimes switch to either my short zoom or my 50mm prime lens. Sometimes that does the trick, but other times, I need to reach into my camera bag for something special. In the case of these tiny flowers, I wanted to capture them on a different scale than I could with just my lenses.


I dug into my bag and came out with a kit of macro filters I had picked up a while ago. I didn't have a lot of time and the breeze was making things a bit challenging since every breath of wind would move the flowers just enough to lose their focus. Still though, I feel like I came away with a few nice shots. I especially like the sharpness in the middle blue flower below. Click on it and let me know what you think here in the comments.


Are you an experienced macro photographer? Please feel free to leave comments with suggestions or resources.

Thanks seems so insuffient...

... and signs like this say it even better.


So, in memory of all who have served or are serving our country in defense of our freedom and freedom of others around the world...Thanks and God bless.

New week, new "Name That Bird"

I will admit that I have been lazy this week. I didn't even reach for the Bird Encyclopedia or even give WhatBird.com a shot yet. Crazy busy weekend. Besides, it is fun to hear what you guys have to say on all these birds I see.

This guy was all over the place, but loud, so he was easy to spot. I think at least one of these might be of a different gender. I liked the yellow color on these birds and how small they were. They were about the size of a hummingbird or slightly larger.

If you pay close attention to such things, you may notice that these are not stored at my usual SmugMug site. I am not real happy with the quality of these, so I am just storing them on my PicasaWeb site for now. There are several other shots there, so please feel free to visit the animal photo album if you want to see some different angles.

So help me out here. What is he? (she?) Comment here or over on Twitter (or both for that matter).

Lessons of a flash

A while ago, I was finally able to buy an external flash for my Nikon D60. If you are not sure why an external flash is a big deal, I'll explain a bit why my new SB-900 flash is an improvement over the built in pop-up flash.

The pop-up flash on my D60 has a few limitations. One is the limited range, subjects that are too far away from the camera will not be lit up enough for a proper exposure.

Another limitation of the built-in flash is the proximity to the lens. This is a major contributor to the "red eye" seen in many pictures.

The last of the major limitations covered here is that the pop-up flash is uni-directional. That is to say it is not able to point in any direction other than straight ahead.

In spite of these limitations, the built-in flash has it's uses. For one, the fact that it is always with you, which is incredibly useful if you need to take pictures in dark or low light conditions.

Another benefit of the pop-up flash is that it can be used to trigger certain remote flashes like the SB-900. This allows you to get better lighting arrangements then you could with the built-in flash alone. With some cameras, that is a simple camera setting to tell the camera's built-in flash that it is a "master" for other "slave" flashes.

The Nikon D60 does not have this setting in the camera which means that the flash needs to understand that it needs to flash when it sees a flash. Sadly this is not a readily apparent setting in the flash. It is there, but it takes some digging to get to it. I will create a blog post (and maybe an Instructable entry) for this as I know there are probably some other D60 owners with an SB-900 flash and are trying to figure out how to do this.

Now is the time for your opinion. Leave a comment here with your thoughts on what topic I should tackle next:
- Step-by-step enabling SB-900 to work with flash control from D60
- Why off-camera flash matters (with samples)
- Enough with the tech talk, show me more animal pictures
- Something else

Fortune cookie said: "Good news...

"... will be brought to you by mail."

Would my Visa bill be surprisingly smaller?
Car loan paid off?
Or would I just have less junk mail to deal with?

So when I got home, I rushed to the mailbox. It was pretty slim pickings. Junk mail from an old college and the electric bill. But there in with those was a bigger envelope of the kind that you use to mail CD's. The return address was a familiar photographers studio name.

It was a CD of photography tutorials. I had attended a workshop presented by David Ziser the previous week and this was a result of that. The CD is packed with some great tutorials. I've already checked a couple of them out and can't wait to make some time to watch the rest.

Anyway, it reminded me that the workshop was great and that I wanted to encourage anyone in the vecinity of any of the remaining sessions should make the time to attend Digital WakeUp Call. I drove 2 hours to attend and would do it again in a heartbeat. It was an incredibly valuable workshop and entertaining as well. I see David is in California this week for a few dates and Louisiana and Texas are next on his schedule, so if you are in any of those areas, hit that link and check it out. (FYI, I get nothing if you go, other than the satisfaction of being able to recommend something I found very beneficial to me.)

So in this case, the fortune cookie was right. Now about those lottery numbers on this fortune cookie...

Site Redesign

While I have done some development work, I am not a web developer or designer. So you may have noticed my main Flowing Desert web page was a bit rough around the edges. I was just getting things started and wanted to get something up. After a critique from a marketing pro, (that I had volunteered for) I started working on a redesign.

A recent fortune cookie said "Put up with small annoyanced to gain great results." Well, learning enough about web development to accomplish this revision (I'm calling it FlowingDesert.com version 2.0) certainly involved more than a few annoyances for me and some were not in the small category. Time will tell if it produces great results.

Stay tuned as I am getting close to releasing some changes. The first change is the new Twitter Icon Archive. I will be making changes to that page first just to test out new stuff with CSS. I look foreword to comments and suggestions.

Honk, Honk!

New week, new Twitter icon. Waterfowl this time around. In fact, we could probably call them IronGeese. You see, I took this picture while I was watching and photographing Ironman Arizona this past November. I made it there for at least part of the day for the third consecutive running of this race.

First in April of 2007, I volunteered on my motorcycle and spent quite a few hours on the course as an official race vehicle. Next, in April of 2008, I attempted to complete the race as a participant. (successfully in about 14.5 hours). This time, I was there to repay some friends that were there to cheer me on who were competing in the new November edition and to try and capture some sports photos.

After a while, all bikes look the same and so I looked around and saw these guys flying overhead. I'm not sure if they were coming or going, but there were sure honking a lot.

I call this one Wingman. "You can be my wingman anytime." (name that move).

The Sun

The sun is the light source that brings us beautiful sunsets (along with smog and other pollution).

We depend on it for our lives. It gives us heat and light. More and more people are using solar power to charge batteries and supply electricity for houses.

But it is a powerful beast that sometimes can cause us problems. Some years ago, there were solar flares that caused some disruption in pager and cell phone services. Now some scientists are reporting that a Powerful Solar Storm Could Shut Down U.S. for Months. A solar storm could cause widespread problems that would be worse the more technically advanced the country. The less involved computers and technology are in a society, the less problems will be caused when they are unavailable. I wonder what impact a solar storm would have on individual solar recharging and power systems.

But while looking at pictures like these, I have to wonder what impact these solar storms would have on photography or if there would be any noticeable change to our visible light. Until the storms heat up, feel free to head over to my photo galleries and take a look at the different pictures I have there.