Found Branch of Little Leaves

I found this branch of tiny leaves on my snow covered driveway. It struck me as an odd find (on my driveway), and so I brought it inside and made a few exposures. It reminded me of a museum piece of something altogether different that I have seen somewhere... although I can't quite put my finger on what it was. I fused together the exposures at minus one, zero, and plus one, and... voila!

I still find that I am having trouble getting my F-stop adjusted to exactly the focus that I want. Here, the F-stop was set to f/1.8, giving the image a very shallow depth of field. (Only a handful of the leaves that were closest to the camera are actually in focus, while the rest have a blurred effect to them.) Yet, when I opened up to a larger depth of field (f/5.6), I still didn't quite completely get what I was looking for in terms of focus. Here's a single image (simply cropped and edited in Aftershot Pro):

Leaf on a Minnesota Grapefruit Tree

I'm not sure exactly how many grapefruit trees are growing in Minnesota, but I can tell you that there are at least two. (Mine are both indoor potted plants.) This photograph features some leaves on the grapefruit tree that I have at my house, brought up from a sprouted seed that I found a few years ago inside of a grapefruit at my local grocery store.

Media vita in morte sumus

New leaves have sprouted on the same stem as the dying rose bud in today's photo. They seem to be thriving. The juxtaposition of life and death (new leaves; dead rose bud) reminded me of an old liturgical phrase, one that I think is used at funerals: "In the midst of life we are in death".

This liturgical text was rendered as a hymn by Martin Luther -- in English translation here: "In the Midst of Earthly Life (snares of death surround us)". Like the death and new life that I see in my flower, the hymn sets death and its woes against Jesus. Jesus died to give us new life; Jesus died to "save us lest we perish in the bitter pangs of death".

All these thoughts, simply from new leaves sprouting on the same stem as a dying rose bud....

Caption for the Zoo Polar Bear and a Dead Fish

Revisiting my old photos, I came across this polar bear from a trip to the zoo in St. Louis in 2005. (I single image processed this JPEG and then cropped it.) 

I thought, "This one is begging for a caption." My two best were: 

"Oh, no! What have I done?"

and

"Dear God, I thank You for this food...".

More Care Center Birds from the Aviary

This is another photograph of the birds at the Care Center from a couple of Sundays ago. (You can tell that I'm shooting through some kind of window, probably Plexiglas, due to the streak across the dove.) The attention of both birds is on the camera, with the littler bird seeming to display some kind of attitude; the brown streaks on the sides of its head at first remind me of headphones, or possibly even sideburns. This was a single image that I processed into a total of 5 exposures using the Image Data Converter program that came with my NEX. I sent these generated exposures through Photomatix, and then I cropped the image in Aftershot Pro.

Fiery Clouds at the Sunset over the Mackinac Bridge

This HDR image of the Mackinac Bridge at sunset (from October 2013) is a fusion of 3 exposures (-3, 0, and +3). I love the colors in the clouds, and how they have taken on a fiery orange (and some purple hues) from the sunset.

Out of Focus Pictures Article in Digital Photo Magazine

Reading the latest issue of Digital Photo magazine (April 2014), I found an article by Tracey Clark of Shutter Sisters, who wrote of her adventures in figuring out how to take 'out of focus' pictures with her iPhone. My first thought was, "Why would you want to take out of focus pictures?" which, Clark (in the article) answers: "I've always enjoyed shooting out of focus (on purpose) for images that feel more like dreams than reality." And then, I started thinking about some of my own 'out of focus' photos.

Where my own 'lack of focus' may have been a little less intentional than Clark's, I went back and looked at these images with a different sense of interest. Do they feel "a little bit more like dreams than reality"? One in particular that caught my attention was this one, an early morning photo of the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan, with a freighter preparing to pass underneath. Autofocus was no match for the low-light (and the lights), so that I ended up with what follows.