James Hill Photography - Efland, NC - jmhphoto.com

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Des-0253

My energetic niece, taunting me this afternoon at her brother's birthday party. Normally one to ham it up for the camera, she was being a bit mischievous today and tried to hide behind the door before I could get a shot off. She almost succeeded but ultimately ended up giving me what easily turned out to be my favorite shot of the day.

Thanks for all the comments on the baseball shot I posted a couple days ago. I haven't had time to follow up/comment much yet, but I've certainly enjoyed easing back in and seeing/hearing from a lot of familiar folks.

It's still hot, and I didn't shoot anything today, so this is another shot from the archives. And in an ultimate showing of laziness, I'm pulling it straight from one of my first galleries uploaded to Smugmug. One more day until I'll have lots of new festival and river photos to choose from.

Cherry Blossoms

Had dinner at Mom and Dad's house tonight and as I drove up to the house I was amazed by their flowering cherry trees, which as you can see were in full bloom. The weather was overcast with a light drizzling rain, and the cherry blossoms were almost glowing.

I was pleased with quite a few exposures, which made it tough to decide which one to use as a daily, so I posted several other shots in my What's New gallery.

Grass-1452

A shot of Dad's lawn from a bug's perspective, looking into the setting sun.

The soft-focus was achieved by shooting through the grass which was between the lens and the blades I focused on.

I used the 70-200 2.8 with stacked 20 & 36mm extension tubes, which allowed me to focus at about 6 inches.

Cabin-0461

This is what home looked like early Monday morning. The trees, especially the two corkscrew-willows, were simply amazing with all the wet snow clinging to them. Since I don't see it very often, one thing I had forgotten about snow is it's tough to shoot! The light was only favorable for a short time and the wind was enough to ruin a lot of the more graceful scenes early on, but it certainly was a pleasant change from all the dead winter vegetation. But all that's over now - Bring on Spring!

Well, are you coming or not?

Stopped by to visit with these neighbors of mine this evening, just as a brief thunderstorm was breaking up. They were both soaking wet and covered in pollen but they didn't seem to care. After greeting me at the fence, they wandered off to continue grazing and I caught this one looking back over his shoulder as if to say, "come on in, there's enough for you too."

Several more shots are in my What's New gallery for those interested. I'd really appreciate any suggestions or critiques from the horse people out there, as I'd like to start shooting at some local stables and I'm sure there are a lot of things about horses that you guys see instantly which I might be overlooking.

PollenMaker-3503

Shot this today while on a break from mowing the yard. I hate mowing so I keep the camera handy as a diversion just in case I run across anything interesting. And, as luck would have it, I did. I ran across a really cool looking grasshopper. Unfortunately, he was a little too disfigured from the mower to be a much of a macro model - poor guy. : (

Then I saw this pine flower on a low hanging branch and thought it might be an interesting subject for a closeup.

Shot handheld with the 70-200 and 36mm extension tube. I'll likely try this again with the tripod, on a day with no wind, for a little more sharpness and DOF.

Vertigo, anyone?

Trying to break out of the norm and see things from a new perspective.
This is a relatively new pedestrian bridge that crosses the Eno River and leads into the city park where all of my festival shots have come from. This was the first time I crossed this bridge so I wanted to capture a few photos to mark the occasion. Not content with a straight-on approach, I wondered what it would look like if I hung upside down from the top. It probably goes without saying, but it was much harder to compose a decent shot than I expected. ;-)

Edit: It seems many have missed my little winkie there at the end. I did NOT actually hang from the top. I just wondered what it would look like if I had. The difficulty was in getting the comp I wanted to make the shot look convincing. This was shot standing on my own two feet, then the image was flipped in post. While trying to compose this I was wishing for an inverted view, like the old view cameras.

Hoverfly feeding on pollen which had collected on my lens shade.

I shot this guy during the same outing where I shot the damselfly from two posts back. Just like the damselfly, I first noticed him when he kept trying to land on my lens shade while I was busy shooting weeds. I actually tried to capture a shot of him hovering right in front of the lens, but that was truly an exercise in futility. ( I do have many solid frames of a very pretty pale blue though if anyone needs or wants a few.)

After giving up on the in-flight shots, I decided to take the lens shade off and hold it in my left hand to try and get his closeup. He stayed right with me through many shaky attempts. I found it rather difficult to hold the shade, hold the heavy 70-200, and adjust the zoom all at the same time and with the same hand. I probably looked like I was "losing it" to anyone watching me. Of course this shot involved extension tubes, as he's just a few inches from the the end of the lens in this.

I put a few less aesthetically pleasing yet more detailed shots in my Bugs, Insects, and other Tiny Creatures gallery. They give a better idea of how much pollen was actually clinging to plastic lens shade.

Truck-0356

This old guy is a fixture in my neighbor's front yard. I've probably shot 50 images of him since moving in here and this is the first one that I actually like. It's a little hard to believe, but this is a full color image, almost straight from the camera.

20090225--0118

Shot as an additional piece I needed for another image today - I liked it all by itself.

It's been a while since I've submitted anything to the dailys, but hopefully I'm back for a while. It'll be good to catch up.

Survey-7886Copy

Sunday Morning Comic Relief

A few of you asked, so here is my take on what a pig wearing lipstick might look like. My Photoshop skills are average, and I'm certainly no makeup artist, but I think it turned out quite nice. I haven't seen any better, yet I must confess that I haven't really looked either. If you've seen another, pass along a link.

Posting a little early for Sunday (US timezones, anyway) because I'll start sorting and preparing for my move tomorrow morning. I'm going to try to stay away from the computer for a few days, with the exception of checking email and submitting a DP from the archives each night.

Have a great week and I'll see you in the funnies.

Filtered Cherries

Sometimes I wish I could paint. Mostly when I have a really hard time getting what I want with a particular photograph. I mean it would be so much easier to just add light, shadow, and color with a brush, right? You even have complete control over focus. It sounds simple, but believe me when I tell you my artistic abilities stop at the end of my shutter finger. I guess that means I'll keep resorting to software and pixels, and a lot of trial and error. By the way, these did NOT come from the garden, I actually had to buy these at the store tonight.

Medium carbon steel, quenched & tempered.

At least that's what the three bars stamped into the top of this bolt indicate to people who have reason to know such things. This is basically a desperation shot since I spent all my shooting time tonight browsing deep into a few non-daily galleries. I spent a good amount of time searching out B&W work, and I found some really good stuff out there. I sometimes forget that folks have a ton of great images that never make the daily circuit.

When I realized it was getting late, I grabbed three items laying on the coffee table, along with my P&S G2, and proceeded to shoot some closeups. The three items were a bolt, a bill, and a bull. I shot all three together and then the bull and the bolt separately. I didn't shoot the bill by itself because, honestly, who wants to look at someone else's bills? I picked this shot for the daily because it's been a while since I have posted a SP. :)

The other shots are in my What's New gallery, and that's no bull.

Extremely Rare Animals (only one of each has ever been captured on film (or pixels))

I managed to sneak up on these two fascinating creatures at the Festival for the Eno this weekend. The big one in front is a tiger (it even says so on the sign) and the one in back is a pterodactyl, or more properly a Pterosaur, at least according to wikipedia. (the Ps are silent, so why are they even there?) I was extremely fortunate to stumble upon these wild creatures, as NC is not a place known for rusty big cats or metallic raptors. Just imagine how my heart raced as I stalked these two, maneuvering to within mere feet (and inches) for this shot. I thought for sure I would be attacked, possibly requiring a band-aid (TM) or worse, a tetanus shot.

I found a neighbor and friend of mine (who happens to be a metal sculptor) lounging nearby. Daniel Mathewson, who is a really nice guy (although a little twisted) appeared to be VERY knowledgeable about the history and habits of both creatures.

Japanese Maple

More grey skies, more rain, and more maple. (see yesterday's shot if you didn't get that last bit) This time it's a Japanese Maple from my folks yard, where I had a few minutes to shoot some of their landscaping before lunch today. This is a beautiful tree, but it is very dense and pruned in a formal fashion, which made isolating bits and pieces a rather difficult task.

I was pleased with the overall look of the whole set but, as with my evergreen collage, there was really only one composition that I felt worked on it's own. So I threw a bunch into a collage and here we are. : ) The original crops are in the What's New gallery.

I also noticed where I could create the illusion of a branch continuing through the collage once I started arranging the images. Unfortunately, I didn't have any other shots to finish that illusion this time. I'll have to keep that in mind the next time I'm planning something like this.

Common Blue Damselfly (Enallagma cyathigerum)

This little guy apparently wanted his picture taken. He landed on my lens hood while I was shooting some wildflowers this evening. I thought he was going to let me pick him up at first, but he flew as soon as I touched him. He didn't go far though and I was able to get a few posed shots for his portfolio. The rest of the shots from our impromptu portrait session are in my Bugs, Insects, and other Tiny Creatures gallery.

Shot with the 70-200 and a 36mm extension tube.

Spidey-2070

Day 6 of the extension tube experiments. This shot was made with the 70-200 and 56mm of extension tubes.

I caught this guy moving out of the corner on my eye while I was shooting a bunch of small purple flowers which have popped up right beside the cabin. Apparently he's found a nice little nook in one of the logs to make his home, and that's just fine by me, as long as he continues to stay outside.

I really wish I had a little more DOF on this shot so that his eyes were a bit more in focus but I was shooting hand held due to his location on the wall - there was just no way to set up the tripod for this shot. The shots I took at smaller apertures all have motion blur. This one has been rotated 90 deg. clockwise as he was facing up the wall.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Anyone care to guess what kind of weather we had today?

70-200 f/2.8 with a 36mm extension tube. Unless something better comes up, I'll have another one with some color to post tomorrow.

John Dee Holeman putting out a fire.

Thanks for all the comments on yesterday's daily, even though I really goofed on the guitar info. I should have realized that wasn't John's new one in his hands, after all, I have photographed that same guitar many times. With that out of the way - I didn't pick up the camera today, with all the editing I had to do, so here's my favorite shot from Saturday's concert/birthday celebration, with a little touch of picnik thrown in for fun. The original can be seen in the newly posted gallery.I don't know if the stage lighting changed (dimmed) since my last shoot here on New Years, but for some reason the auto-focus was having a really hard time locking onto anything this time. I resorted to manual focus early on and paid the price dearly, with the largest percentage of out of focus shots I've ever experienced. I have a renewed respect for anyone who can shoot at f/2 in a very dimly lit room and still manage to accurately focus the old fashioned way on moving subjects. I'm ready for some outdoor events with good old sunshine to work with. :)

“What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn't have any doubt - it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn't want to go anywhere else.” -- Hal Boyle

Young Whitetail Doe Watching Me Through The Cabin Window.

You ever get that feeling someone's watching you while you work? I had that feeling last week and looked up to see this girl checking me out through the front window.

Drive-by shooting.

This is a shot I took through my windshield while sitting at a stoplight about a month ago. The backlit trees caught my eye due to them all being in various stages of springtime atire. I think that's a redbud up front in pink, and a magnolia in back in dark green. I'm not sure about the light green and the yellow but, I'm almost positive that's an oak dead center in the back and still bare.

As usual with this type of high contrast scene, what I saw and what the camera captured were very different, so played with this in picnik tonight just to see what I could come up with. I sort of liked the look of this one, so it's my daily for tonight.

Update: Wow, I really didn't expect so many to like this one. I did like the composition, which is why I kept it around, but the file out of the camera was just too high in contrast and way too busy, with some areas in sharp focus and others blurred by the water on the windshield. It was actually painful to look at. All the effects seen here were done in picnik, with the exception of a standard levels adjustment in Lightroom. The picnik filters I used were Focal Zoom, with a high setting and switched the Mode to Lighten; Orton-ish, again with high bloom and brightness settings; and Focal Soften with a lower setting than the default. That's it. I just played around with various sliders until I thought it looked interesting. Glad some others liked it as well. ;-)

Water guns and garden hoses...

After eating lunch with the family today, my nephew decided he wanted to go have a water gun fight. As usual with water gun fights, it didn't take long before the garden hose came into play. I've always wanted a waterproof camera but I don't have one, so I didn't get as many up close and personal shots as I would have liked. However, I did catch this moment when Kameron tried to lure me in by claiming he was only going to spray himself. Somehow the look on his face wasn't convincing. It's always good to know the reach of your zoom, but even better to know the reach of the hose. :)

Camera-shy

Buzzed Out

Found deceased in my shoe.
Shot hand held using a 60w bare bulb for light.
SOOC except for sharpening and slight crop.

Update: Since a few of you have mentioned it, yes I did happen to put my foot into my shoe before I realized he was in there. Lucky for me, he was already a goner. He came out snagged on the bottom of my sock and just a little disfigured, hence the broken antenna. I still have him and will likely try to get some better shots of the eye with more DOF as soon as I figure out how to light it without a glare.

Contemplating the next BIG step.

I was going to post an asparagus abstract, but I have an awful lot of green in my dailies right now so here's a cool little bug. He appeared to be thoughtfully considering if he should walk all the way around or just make a leap for the next petal down. He eventually took the leap but not before I bumped the flower with my lens and sort of gave him incentive. I've been playing with an extension tube on a wide angle lens, which means the focal distance is VERY close, so the lens was practically resting on the flower for this shot.

March 30, 2009

Wow, it's hard to believe March is gone already. I've been cleaning out tons of image folders all day, so I didn't even pick up the camera except to put the batteries on the charger. What I did do was look through all the shots I've taken throughout the month of the corkscrew willows planted beside the cabin. I love these trees - they have such interesting branches that twist and curve every which way, and they grow really fast too. But the darn things are really tough to photograph well, especially when bare.

I picked these five images of the willows to sum up March - cold rain, snow, blue sky, new growth, and of course more rain. :) The originals can be found in my What's New gallery. And I finally got around to putting the March snow gallery up too. That only took a month!

I also really need to reinstall some editing software other than Lightroom, since Lightroom doesn't do text or collages (it was a major trick just to get it to do this simple one) but after using Lightroom for all of my editing for almost two years, Photoshop just feels like a major hassle anymore. Any suggestions on a lightweight editor with simple layout capabilities (preferably free or cheap) would be appreciated.

Update: thanks for all the suggestions everyone. I thought I'd let you know about a free editor I just ran across. Photoscape appears to be a pretty cool little editing program with a bunch of built in collage (Page) options. Warning for US folks - a lot of the settings/measurements are metric only. :) It has your basic editing functions and seems to be fairly intuitive to use. I'll probably use it just for collages, but it's free and fast (I put together several in just a matter of minutes) so I thought I'd throw it out there for anyone interested. www.photoscape.org

My Neighbors Garden-2460

This guy will be a part of dinner Monday night - a few of his older brothers made the table tonight.. Anyone care to guess what it is?

Edit: Yes, it's a yellow squash blossom. I learned just recently that they are not only edible, but very delicious, also. This was shot with my 70-200 and a 36 mm extension tube. I put another example in My Neighbor's Garden gallery.

Carolina Wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus)

This young guy hung out with me during a downpour this afternoon. I had seen him land on the swing a few times this week but he never stuck around long enough for me to get a shot. Today he took shelter from the torrential rain and proceeded to clean my front porch of any bugs he could find. It was quite comical watching him inspect every nook and cranny along the floor and roof rafters. He came out of several spots with cobwebs clinging to his head. I took this shot after he made a quick dash to my shed and back, which game me an opportunity to set up the camera right against the window. He shook the rain from his feathers and then sat there singing for a while. Wikipedia says these birds are noted for their loud calls, and I believe them. It was amazing to hear such ear-splitting volume come out of something this small. We hear them all the time in the woods but, until today, I never knew what kind of bird was making all that racket.

Whatbird.com has a pretty good audio clip of the calls for anyone interested. I just discovered that site and it made identifying this bird pretty easy, even for me.

Dogwood Blossom

This is from the dogwood tree growing right beside the cabin. It's a beautiful tree but surrounded by so much clutter that I haven't been able to get a wide shot that I liked. It has a storage shed under it, a power line above it, and it's really tall (and straight) for a dogwood. Not able to get the wide shot I wanted, I decided to go in for the closeup and ended up liking what I saw.

For those of you still curious about yesterday's 'fire shot', I updated the commentary and added a link to the original image. I also rolled around in the weeds again today, but haven't finished going through the images yet. More weeds to follow. : )

Eggland's Best Eggs

Love 'em or hate 'em, there's no denying the EB guys have left their mark, quite literally. Personally, I like the EB eggs and usually have a carton on hand, but every single time I open a carton I am reminded of the following exchange from an episode of Futurama:

LEELA: Didn't you have ads in the twentieth century?
FRY: Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio... and in magazines... and movies, and at ballgames, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written in the sky. But not in dreams, no sirree.

I had breakfast for dinner tonight - now I'm wondering what I might dream about...

20091005-2827 Dried Pears

I've had these pears drying on my window sill for quite a while, waiting, shrinking, accumulating strange growths; essentially begging to be a photo. Little did I know that this project would end up consuming the better part of an evening, and even then I still didn't get exactly what I had planned. That's what I get for thinking a one light setup should be easy. Maybe what I really needed was a third pear standing in the rear, deep in the shadows and barely visible.

There is a lot of cool texture in the skins, unfortunately all my macros were either out of focus or underexposed too much to make a decent image. I'll play with them some more I'm sure.

Strobist info:
Flash set on 1/64 power, shoved into a large white plastic bowl with diffusion material over it, (which became like a giant softbox for these little guys) held just out of frame top left. Used a white shirt-box as a fill reflector, just out of frame camera right.

And it rained...

quite heavily at times. I thought briefly about running to the car to take a few of those artistic blurry shots through the windshield that everyone but me seems to get so right. Then this happened and I thought better of it. This continued most of the night with intermittent thunder in the distance. It made for great sleeping weather with the windows opened enough to hear the sound of the rain hitting the tin roof. They're calling for more of the same today.

Calla Lily Rose Gem - Zantedeschia aethiopica

It rained almost all day today but finally stopped before dinner, which Mom had invited me over for. She mentioned that she had bought some new plants and by the time dinner was over, the sun started filtering through the remaining clouds so I decided to see if I could get a daily out of them. Lucky for me, her new plants were still in small pots and easily moved to where I could shoot them standing up - a welcome change from lying on the wet ground. ;-)

I've put a few more shots of these and a few new shots of the yellow and white irises from a couple days ago in my Flowering Plants gallery. BTW, I planned to cut a bunch of those irises to take to mom on Mother's day. Boy was I surprised on Sunday morning to find that the deer had eaten every single bloom and about half the remaining buds on Saturday night! Sorry, Mom. I'll try to bring you the remaining blooms if they make it through the night.

Just playing around in front of the mirror tonight. I took way too many exposures and couldn't decide on a single one to post, so you get my top 6.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Edit: I replaced the original collage with one that has all images flipped correctly. Looks a bit less like me, to me, but I guess this version is what everyone else should see. :)

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Featured Galleries

Daily Photos :

2009 Festival for the Eno Highlights : Assorted shots from the 2009 Festival for the Eno.
New images will be added randomly over the next several weeks.

2009 Festival for the Eno Highlights

My Neighbor's Garden : Photos of the various flowers, trees, and other plants growing in and around my neighbor's garden.

My Neighbor's Garden

Make a wish : A small collection of dandelion macro images.

Your Bio

James Hill Photography - Efland NC - www.jmhphoto.com - Nature, Abstract, Macro, Youth Sports, and Event Photography

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