The subject of this shot is one of the fairly-traded artworks we have around the house, Wanting to test what will be the new lens I'll use for portraits, I shot this with a 50mm f1.8 nikkor at ISO 500, 1/20sec. The image hasn't been sharpened, or altered with software processing, except a retouch of a small area on the nose and chin (right side) to mask actual phyiscal damage on the carving. The lens is perfect: dirt cheap, very sharp and shoots like a 75mm on my camera's digital (APS) format...
I returned to take a better shot of a green orchid, but they'd removed it. As it turned out, I may have done better to consider this subject. I used a new 50mm f1.8. I set the aperture at f5.6 and spiked the ISO to 1250 to get enough depth of field.
I sold most of the zooms I'd initially bought and have moved more yo sharper, faster fixed lenses. These butterfly shots were taken with the Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 macro lens with vibration reduction.The blooms of the butterfly bush are like Crack to these creatures. So while this lens gave me lots of working distance; this specimen lighted so close to me, I had to strain to stay far enough away from it to get the whole wingspan into the frame.
This is one of the first and few photos I've ever shot in the RAW format. This is totally new for me, but I see the advantage. I never would have been able to tease this image out of the shot had I taken this exposure in the jpg format, Clearly though, I'm still learning the ropes where Photoshop is concerned. I'm happy too to find such beautiful images within miles of our house, I shot this with an f/2.8 28-75mm Tamron, using a Nikon D200.
Of the photos I shot yesterday (November 11, 2007), I'm most excited about this one. I think it's one of my best ever, I didn'actually see this image when I shot the photo. It's a small portion of a larger shot (see photo below) f/2.8 28-75mm Tamron, D200.
This is the full frame of the photo above. Fortunately, the leaves in the forground, above and at the bottom, were both in the same focal plane. Otherwise I couldn't have composed the smaller photo above, having focused the shot on the over-hanging leaves above when I took the photo.