15 Nov 19 The center piece tree in our landscape is called a Rising Sun Maple. Each year it puts on a brilliant display of yellows, oranges, and red leaves which shows off the distinctive maple shaped leaves. This year it hung on to its leaves until just a couple days ago and nicely distributed them around one end of the pond. The result was having a brightly colored carpet surrounding the waterfall end and beyond. I thought it would be fun to capture some of the carpet for both traditional images and blurred as backgrounds and I did. With the multiple individual colors in addition to the strongly outlined leaves I thought that some of the shots would also lend themselves to the leaded glass look and today's macro / close-up is of that flavor. Other than a small amount of cropping and the removal of a couple distractions, plus the obvious conversion, this is what the camera captured. Window Dressing Nikon D500; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 500; 1/100 sec @ f / 7.1 with full flash.
17 Aug 20 We've now made it down to the beach to start taking reflections of the mountains on the sand. Those of you who may be using the Dissenter browser will no doubt recognize this location from one of the several backgrounds they use for that browser. Actually, they use several Iceland locations for their backgrounds. We started taking shots around 1500 and for the next two hours did our best to work the light to capture reflections on the wet black sand. It wasn't until I had finished taking the reflection shots and had walked back to the road that I realized that there was a large home at water's edge at the base of the mountain (just below and to the right of the large shadow on the mountain at the left edge). Must be a wonderful place to live. The combination of moving water and wind made for some constantly changing "looks" on the surface of the sand ranging from the rippled look in this capture, to encased in foam, to glassy flat. Each provided for a different experience. This image was perhaps the most difficult I've tried to work up as I could not find a way to adequately give you a feel for the vastness of the site combined with the sounds of the wind, crashing of the waves, and the squawking birds. Still not sure how I could have done it better; maybe tomorrow working in cooler conditions I'll come up with what is needed. Meanwhile I may share this again Tuesday as a B & W as it works quite well in monochrome. This is straight from the camera save for some heavy handed contrast enhancement to give a feel for the rocks. Worth The Walk Nikon D500; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 100; 1/250 sec @ f /11.
