Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 120 mm, crop — ¹/250 sec, f/5, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Cattail
what wonderful detail

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Prior to last week's visit to Vancouver and Whistler, I'd been enjoying the dynamic clouds during my trip to Ohio for the summer. (I posted some sorta' pretty cloud pictures here, here, and here.)

I'm back in Ohio now for another week or so, but the weather has been cold and drizzly, so I'm not getting any of the wonderful cloudscapes we had before. Still, I have plenty of pictures from before the Canada trip. The ones on this post are from a 10-minute walk with the camera down by the lake, one afternoon three weeks ago...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 20 mm — ¹/200 sec, f/11, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm — ¹/640 sec, f/6.3, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Cattail and Clouds

I love the clouds in the picture above, but I had to apply some HDR-like processing to get the rest to come out. Only, I didn't use HDR... just some of what Lightroom calls “Fill Light” added to bring the grass out of darkness. It took 5 seconds.

I also used the local corrections that are new in Lightroom 2 to add a slight touch of extra brightness to the cattail. That took longer – perhaps three minutes – because I had to carefully paint the correction onto just the cattail and its stem.

For comparison, here's the original:

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm — ¹/640 sec, f/6.3, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Cattail and Clouds
( original )

I knew that having the sky/clouds in the background would make for a challenging situation, so I stood on my toes to find an angle that put the sky out of the picture...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 125 mm — ¹/250 sec, f/4, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos

Like any kid who grows up in the countryside, I loved to play with these things when I was a kid, using and abusing them until they erupted in a seed-scattering explosion that surely pleased Mother Nature. I've got some pictures of Anthony tickling his cousin Josh with one that I'll have to get around to posting.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — ¹/250 sec, f/10, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
I See a Turtle
( what do you see? )