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Nikon D700 + Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm @ 210 mm, cropped — 1/500 sec, f/6, ISO 280 — full exif
Foraging Under the Cherry Blossoms
I glanced out the window to notice some little kids playing with the fallen cherry-blossom petals, and ran to grab the camera...
Nikon D700 + Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm @ 420 mm, cropped — 1/400 sec, f/6.3, ISO 6400 — full exif
Big Piles o' Petals
Unfortunately, when I grabbed the camera, neglected to notice that I'd left it in a five-stop exposure-bracket mode, so only every fifth frame was reasonably exposed. (For non camera geeks, this is only slightly better than leaving the lens cap on, or forgetting to put in film.) At least I was able to recover something from most of them, because I shoot in raw format, not JPEG.
Nikon D700 + Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm @ 380 mm, cropped — 1/500 sec, f/6.3, ISO 720 — full exif
Thar She Blows
Nikon D700 + Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm @ 240 mm, cropped — 1/500 sec, f/6, ISO 800 — full exif
A Touch Too Close To The Edge For My Taste
as far as I could tell, there was no adult around
These trees along the river quickly started molting the day after I posted “Lunch Under the Cherry Blossoms”, and now they're mostly a splotchy mess of blossoms, leaves, and stems, changing on a per-branch basis. The following pictures are from the same two or three trees right above the river...
Nikon D700 + Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm OS @ 340 mm — 1/500 sec, f/8, ISO 2000 — full exif
Branch of Blossoms
Nikon D700 + Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm OS @ 500 mm — 1/500 sec, f/6.3, ISO 560 — full exif
Mostly Leaves
Nikon D700 + Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm OS @ 340 mm — 1/500 sec, f/8, ISO 200 — full exif
Somewhat Ratty Mixture
A wonderful effect when they start losing the blossoms are big explosions of petals when a gust of wind comes along... a sudden flurry of sakura snow. It's absolutely beautiful, but not too easy to capture in a still picture. The “snow” from someone throwing a fist full of blossoms is a bit easier... I think I have a few nice ones in last year's “Fistfuls of Blossoms in Urban Kyoto”.
Meanwhile, the little kids, still sans adults for an uncomfortably long time, had moved from petals to rocks...
Throwing rocks into bodies of water seem to be a universal constant in the kid-desire universe.
(Eventually, a mom did come to collect the kids.)
Jeffrey, these are wondrous snaps!!! 🙂 🙂
And I’m pretty glad you were keeping an anxious eye out on those kids too you know. Hope your blood pressure is normalised by now.
Annie
P.S. Back here our local BBC London Radio chat show had a phone in session yesterday on “why the blossom is so fantastic this year”…its not just the cherry, its the magnolias, the pear trees and apple too.
Oh, psshaw (is that how it’s spelled?). Take one of your RAW shots, export it as-is to JPEG, and then try to fix exposure in both (no “auto-tone”). I bet three cups of coffee the difference is hardly noticeable in output sizes you put up on your blog.
The ones underexposed two stops would have come out relatively good as JPEG… just more noise and grain due to the lower bit depth…. but the ones overexposed two stops would have been pretty bad. Compare the “+2EV” versions in “Overexposure and Underexposure, and the Compensation Thereof“. Of course, the bigger issue is white-balance adjusting, for which JPEG suffers greatly. It would have been a particular challenge for these shots because of the mixed/changing lighting throughout the sequences. —Jeffrey