Through the Lens

Today, I went to 2 state parks around Around. Guadalupe River and Pedernales River state parks. It was sub par. I was hoping to see a little more water in both places and more greenery. But I was disappointed. The landscape was pretty barren and searing heat did not help either. Add to this, a full house of tourists and I pretty much lost all enthusiasm to photograph. Long weekends are bad times to photograph landscapes and parks. Another lesson learnt. I am posting a few pics. I know they are not the best, but have to keep the trend going. :)

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This weekend's trip was to Inks Lake and Longhorn Cavern. These 2 places are about 65 miles northwest of Austin, around the town called Burnet. The Drive through Texas Hill Country was excellent and we were able to reach the spots at 8, which is when the park office opens. It was already bright and I went straight to Devil's waterhole, the farthest point in Ink's lake. There is a trail that takes you to a small waterfall and the lake. Ink's lake is more of a campsite than a nature park. The Lake was fantastic and it was swarmed with tourists. That is always a bad thing as far as photography is concerned. When we reached the falls, around 8.30-9 AM, it was already very very bright. It is simply not possible to catch the early shots in this park, unless you camp overnight.
I did a blunder that killed almost all my shots. I did not set the ISO to a proper setting. I simply overlooked that setting and it was set at 800. A ISO 800 shot on a bright sunny day is simply begging for over exposure. And that is what happened exactly.

Rule:
Before you even click your first shot in each location, go through all the settings in your camera. That was a really amateur mistake, one that I will definitely not repeat.

From Inks Lake, we came to longhorn cavern. I was really looking forward shooting with tripods and to my utter surprise, No tripods allowed. Yup. It is an underground cave with minimal lighting but NO TRIPODS. The reason that the tour guide gave was that setting up a tripod for shots will take a long time and thus, will only delay the hourly guided tour they offer. A valid reason, although it just killed my enthusiasm. The tour did not have any surprises. It did feel really really long and monotonous. The best part was when the guide turned off the lights for a minute, just to show us how dark it really is inside an underground cave. It was pitch black. My eyes would not adjust to the darkness as there was absolutely no light inside. While coming out, I found out that they do allow photographic tours and I can schedule one in advance. Maybe next time.

Oh another thing, the rookie mistake that I did with the ISO settings actually helped me in the cavern. :)


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PS: The 2 metal things that you see in one of the pictures, is the light switch they had in the cave. It is structured that way to prevent water from entering from the top

PS2: The picture with the butterfly and the flower was clicked on the spur of the moment and I did not have time to compose the image. The Composition can be a lot better on that one but it is a cool moment though.

Today, I went to Zilker Botanical Gardens in Austin. Though I have been in Austin for almost a year, I have never visited the botanical gardens before. I took some closeups there.
All of the shots were taken with my 55-200 lens (which is not exactly a macro lens) and for some shots, I used a closeup lens/filter.

Mode - Manual
ISO - 200/400
Metering - Matrix
WB - Auto (Seems to work fine)

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Friday Evening. It was another hectic week at work and weekend is a welcome relief. While heading home, I went to Barnes and Noble and picked up John Shaw's "Closeups in Nature". Cool thing about B & N is that they have a great atmosphere to sit and sample the book and that is exactly what I did. The book has some great pictures, just like any other book on photography. I read the section on exposure and metering. With new found enthusiasm, came home, picked up my camera and started clicking random pictures, trying out the stuff I read. After a lot of trials, I kind of figured out what exposure and metering are.
*Used Spot metering for all my shots. Gave me the flexibility to meter exactly what I wanted to be emphasized.
*One mistake I made was to set "Saturation" in my camera to a "+". Ken Rockwell's site suggests this to get good vibrant colors. It did give some really good colors but over saturated bright reds in particular, hence killing some shots (Picture of the 2 red flowers in the slideshow below. The red in that could have been a little softer)
*Another mistake is to use a ISO 800 setting. I did that as I could get away with faster shutter speeds. But some images ended up with a lot of noise.:(
A tripod is definitely needed for macro shots, particularly when you use the max zoom offered by the telephoto lens(a 200mm in my case) at low light. I did not have one and hence, some images ended up shaky. Out of the lot, about 10% of the images were ok. More experiments over the weekend.:)

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Thanks to Saran for her suggestion to add the Glossary of photographic terms used. Here you go

Ken Rockwell has come out with his version of "How to use the Nikon D50". It definitely is worth a read if you are new to the SLR world or if you are seriously planning to buy the D50.

How to use the Nikon D50

Ken Rockwell has some really good stuff in his "How to" Page. Kudos to the man for taking time to update the webpage.