June 1, 2009

Brazos Bend State Park #5

Unless something amazing happens this week, I plan to post additional photographs from my visit to Brazos Bend State Park.  Before I describe today’s photo, let me do a little free advertising for our parks—local, state and national.  We are very fortunate in America to have a great parks system.  No matter how many times I go to any given park, I always find something new about it.  My advice (for what it is worth):  Go and support our parks!

I tried to take Cindi’s advice and look-up the names of what I am posting, but do you realize how many different dragonflies there are?  I think there are billions; many of which, I cannot really see the difference between.  So, it’s back to:  “This is a dragonfly . . .”

Today's photo is all about the colors—earth tones throughout the image.  I tried to get both dragonflies in focus, but even at f/29 I could not get them both in focus.  After looking at all the images that I shot, I felt that f/16 was the sharpest so that is the one that I selected.  

Since I could not get both dragonflies in focus, I decided to add a vignette to make the viewer’s eye go to the dragonfly that is in focus. 

Enjoy.


Camera settings:  Nikon D700, Nikon 300mm f/4 with a 1.7x Nikon Teleconverter and polarizing filter attached, shot at ISO 200, f/16 and 1/180th of a second on a tripod.

Post Processing:

Lightroom—Set white and black points, added mid-tone contrast, clarity and vibrance and increased saturation of green background.

Photoshop—sharpened dragonfly and branch using the high pass method in the overlay mode and added a vignette to the image.

4 comments:

  1. Pretty amazing photo. The colors blend nicely and the dragonflies are putting on a nice show for your camera. Nice shot.
    Debbie

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  2. I like simple pictures; they often have an elegance that you don't find in more complicated images. And you also have a diagonal using the branch, two of my favorite approaches. I doubt that the dragonflies were still long enough to get two pictures which varied by just different focus points so that the layers could be blended in PhotoShop. This is a chocolate versus vanilla point but I like brighter prints. I know that most people are taught that darker prints are for museums and are more artistic; but, I like to see the details. Did you purposefully crop part of the wing?

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  3. I agree with Wayne. The composition of this one is very simple as is the colors. This is a good wildlife photo that shows all the details that most of us just do not see too often.
    Ted

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  4. Good work. I just like this one.
    Anne

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