Morton Aboretum

[chicagojohn]

OK, so after I left the Lisle Balloon Festival lift off at around 7:30 am, I drove up SR 53 about 5 miles to the Morton Aboretum and paid the $12 entry fee. This is the first picture I took. And I just say, that the tree was indeed leaning toward the right; it's not a horizon issue.


ttree by ChicagoJohn, on Flickr

This is the first flower picture I took, so I decided to call it "flower 1"


flower1 by ChicagoJohn, on Flickr

This is the second flower picture I took; hence "flower 2"


flower2 by ChicagoJohn, on Flickr

So when I was walking around the lake, I decided to try a picture with my green filter.


black and white pond and bridge by ChicagoJohn, on Flickr

And then I took a picture of a catfish feeding near the edge of the pond.


catfish by ChicagoJohn, on Flickr

Then this little guy came out and challenged my presence. He reminded me of the movie, Taxi Driver...


are you lookin at me by ChicagoJohn, on Flickr

So by that time, it was around 10 am and the sky was getting very dark. So I headed home.

When I was approaching home, I saw I was driving under the leading edge of a wall cloud. And this had pronounced banding in it. I wanted to stop and photograph it, but, quite frankly, I was too frightened.

I came up to this one intersection where they had a guy with a flag to control traffic; he had me stopped. I looked to the left and saw an area of intense dust, shall we say. It was rotating. I had to get home quickly, so I decided to drive forward and I rolled down my window and pointed out this to the guy directing traffic.

He said, "I don't see the funnel", but he let me go anyway. I quickly drove home and got the dogs and our tortoise into the basement. Thankfully there was no damage; no tornado on the ground reported.

So anyway, in post processing my images today, I put some banding in one of them in remembrance of this event; to remind me of the cloud effects.

[hunter58]

Nice images John. The first image is nice, it's a tough shot to expose and still get detail in the background without blowing out the highlights totally. Flower 1 could have used just a little more DOF. I really like the Black & White shot, good subject and POV for that one.

On a side note I don't think that is a catfish it looks more like a freshwater Carp of some type.

[chicagojohn]

Thanks for the clarification on the fish, hunter58. One big carpe diem, baby!! That thing had to be a foot and a half long, and it had like feelers on its mouth....

On the first shot, I virtually always shoot in RAW which, as you know, produces a file with a bit depth of 12. And to make a long story short, what you see here is the result of the development process to produce a viewable image from that file; i.e., adjusting of the various levers in PS; not due to any particular camera skills of moi.

The B&W shot is something I've been wanting to try for awhile, but never seem to have the right lens for to fit my filter. This was shot using a Tiffen green 58 filter, a very intense green. So the effect is to pass through green light preferentially, and that creates a different effect when converted to B&W. (In color it is, um, very, very green

I agree with your thought on the DoF in the flower shots. I had a 90mm macro with me and could have done some stacked images with that, etc. But on this particular day, I decided to experiment with my 70-300 which is what the flowers, carp, and monk were shot with. There will be a learning curve with it, I'm sure, but over the past four years I've had it, I've only used it to take pictures of the moon, so it's time to go down that curve

Thanks for your comments.