Photographs and thoughts on photography and camera collecting
I take many of my pictures while walking around near where I live. Just at the moment it’s difficult to see anything but the magnificent foliage. So here are a few shots taken while walking around Roaring Brook Lake. Above a picture of the road around the lake:Lake Shore Road.
Dock at Spur Beach.
Fall Leaves.
A splash of color.
Leaves on a tree.
Another one of my wife’s roses: this time a tree rose. Taken with a Sony Alpha 500 and Minolta AF 100-200mm f4.5 lens. I had a lot of difficulty with the color of the roses and looking out of the window right now I can see that the reds are still not what they should be. I’m disappointed in the way this camera renders reds. They seem to be over saturated and over exposed. I think the hues are off too. Try as I may I don’t seem to be able to reliably fix them. Sometimes I get closer than others. Still, even if the reds are a bit off I like the picture. I find the swirly out of focus areas to be “interesting”
We were recently invited over to some friends for drinks and appetizers. Their house has a nice outdoor area with a fishpond overlooking one of the coves on our lake. I was sitting there talking to some people when I noticed this vase of flowers sitting on a ledge. Something about it caught my eye. Maybe it was the pastel colors of the flowers combined with the grey of the ledge and the rose colored stucco behind? Maybe it was the way the vase and the flowers contrasted with the rough stucco behind? I know that I liked it and couldn’t wait for the conversation to end so that I could get a picture.
I usually take pictures of flowers because a) they’re convenient – we have lots of them in the garden thanks to my wife’s never ending ministrations; b) my wife likes me taking pictures of her flowers; c) I like the bright colors – they cheer me up. However, because of the above I’ve been taking a lot of flower pictures of late and I’m getting a bit bored with taking flower pictures. So I thought I’d see what a black and white conversion would do to one of them. I was interested in seeing what/if the picture would lose something if the colors were taken away. I quite like the result.
Taken with a Sony NEX 5n and Carl Zeiss Jena 58mm f2 Biotar (Exakta mount) in our garden at the Lake House.
I already mentioned that we had a birthday party at our house. I also mentioned the Quantaray 24mm f2.8 that I used for some of the wider shots and my attempts to use its macro capabilities. Here’s another one with that lens in macro mode – of a fuschia hanging on one of our trees.