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[jason8957]

I ordinarily don’t like prickly pear cactus. They grow everywhere around here and I don’t find them to be very pretty. But, for a short time in the spring they bloom with beautiful flowers. In Austin, near where I work, there are plenty of these prickly pear and I think that the blooms look nice in the late afternoon sun. I have been slowly driving by some of these areas waiting for the blooms to start. This week, they started, so I brought my camera to work and went wandering around after work looking for some photo opportunities.

The prickly pear seem to bloom either yellow or bright orange color. Large buds appear on the edges of the pads and start blooming. Below are a few of the yellow flowers just about to open. I took this shot at 200mm focal length and f/2.8 so that I could fully blur out the background and make the flowers stand out.

The cactus flowers are also a feast for the bees. Just about every flower had a bee in it getting covered with pollen.

There were still a few other wildflowers about, including this puffy purple flower that I can’t name.

Walking around I heard a lot of noise in the brush and turned around and found a fawn hiding in the cactus. I was able to snap off a few quick shots before it ran off. These deer are all over the place around here.

So this was my city cactus bloom photo shoot. I knew that the time for the cactus to bloom would be coming around soon and I couldn’t really make time for an afternoon drive out in the country, so I decided to see if I could get what I wanted with an urban photo shoot. I was generally able to frame the shots so that you wouldn’t know that there are large office buildings close by. I just paid close attention to my backgrounds and used a lot of bokeh.

Believe it or not, these photos were all taken in one of the busier parts of Austin. I included more of the pictures in a mosaic below.

Thanks for reading and leave a comment.

  The Cactus Are In Bloom I ordinarily don't like prickly pear cactus. They grow everywhere around here and I don't find them to be very pretty.

[jason8957]

Hiking in Caprock Canyons State Park (Day 2)

On day 2 of my camping and hiking expedition to Caprock Canyons State Park, I woke up to cloudy skies and didn’t have an opportunity to photograph the Milky Way before dawn like I had hoped. But just after breakfast, the wind picked up and blew all of the clouds away replacing the great soft-box in the sky of the day before with clear blue skies. I went off to hike another area of the park with…

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[jason8957]

Hiking and camping at Caprock Canyons State Park #Texas #hiking #camping #landscapephotography #landscapes #nature #outdoors

I decided to go camping for a few nights at Caprock Canyons State Park up in north Texas near a little town called Quitaque. From the weather forecast, I was expecting it to clear up and be cold. I was hoping for some night sky shots before dawn and hiking the canyons during the day. When I got there late Thursday afternoon, you can see that it was completely overcast. I set up camp and hoped the…

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Learning to Trust the Camera

#Nikon #howto #DSLR #blog

I have been considering whether or not I want to write about this topic. It may not seem an important struggle to many, but I can be stubborn and so perhaps this is theraputic. Up until recently my photo-taking process has been: Aperture priority mode; let the camera sort out the shutter Select whatever ISO I think is best Select the kind of auto-focus or manual focus I want Select the kind of…

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[jason8957]

Violets and Extension Tubes

Another rainy day and I was itching to do something with my camera. I noticed that my girlfriend’s African violets were really blooming, so I decided get the extension tubes and do some close-up pictures. I have a set of relatively cheap extension tubes by Kenko. They are basically hollow tubes with no optical element of any kind that serve to separate your lens from your sensor. The ones I have…

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[jason8957]

A New 14mm Lens

A New 14mm Lens

I got a new lens! I got a wide angle lens primarily for night sky photography. I wanted something wide and fast so I can get the dim stars across wide sections of the sky. The lens I purchased was the Rokinon SP 14mm f/2.4. There were lenses that are considered better, but they are more expensive. I researched, read reviews, and determined this is good lens for what I am willing to pay right now.…

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[jason8957]

Lonely Park

Been in a bit of a photographic funk lately. I haven’t found the right opportunity and place to go shoot. It is either cloudy/rainy or I am busy. I did run to the park out of shear frustration and take some long exposures one evening. It was very cloudy and there wasn’t much sunset light to be had, but I really needed to get out of the house with my camera. In this, my composure idea was the…

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[jason8957]

Long Exposure Car Lights

I had been wanting to find a decent place in Austin to take some long exposures of traffic in the evening. I haven’t done much of this before and I wanted to give it a try. I found a parking garage next to I-35 that was open and I drove right up to the top. I set up my tripod and tried to face downtown. Downtown is off to the right and I couldn’t really get the highway and downtown in the shot…

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[jason8957]

Hiking at Balcones Canyonlands

Most of my posts are about photography but this one will be about hiking as well. Winter in central Texas is really ideal hiking weather. The temperatures are very mild, usually not getting above 70°F and It doesn’t rain much in January. Contrast this to July and August, during which daytime temperatures can hit well over 100°F in the afternoon, which takes all the fun out of it for me. On Sunday…

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[jason8957]

Lake Brownwood State Park

I took my daughter camping to Lake Brownwood State Park, which is near Brownwood Texas. I was looking for a campground that would be dark, and away from the city lights at night so that we could see the stars. Most of the nearby parks were full, except for Inks Lake, which is low right now. I had never been to Lake Brownwood, so I decided to go out there. There were plenty of wild animals at this…

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[jason8957]

Windmills

If you travel much in the western part of Texas, you will see lots of windmills. There are the old windmills that pump water for livestock and the new large electricity generating windmills. I thought it would be fun to try to capture both in one shot, with the older rusty windmill in the foreground and the larger new electrical windmill in the background. I saw an opportunity to do this on a…

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[jason8957]

Simplicity

I have been in a quest to understand what makes a good landscape photo. One thing that comes up every where I look is simplicity, or a lack of unnecessary objects in the composition. This could be wayward power lines, tree branches, trash, whatever clutters up a photograph and detracts from the composition. I started looking at my landscape photos with this in mind so I can try to fully…

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[jason8957]

Back to Inks Lake State Park

I set out on an unsuccessful trip to Enchanted Rock State Nature Area for hiking and photography in the late afternoon, but when I got there the sign indicated that the park was full and I wouldn’t be allowed in. This park often fills up on the weekend and I didn’t know if I would get in so I had Inks Lake as my backup plan. In January, they lowered the lake level for dock repairs or whatever, so…

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[jason8957]

Leander, TX

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[jason8957]

It was a miserable, cold, misty, cloudy day. But it was the last day of my time off for the Christmas break and I was tired of being in the house and not out shooting anything because of the weather. So, I went for a drive and ended up at Inks Lake State Park out Northwest of Austin. I figured that at least I would try some black and whites with the overcast sky against the lake.

In the below pictures, I experimented with using black and white with the cloudy sky. I could probably use an ND filter to smooth out the water, but I don’t have one that fits this lens. I tried to make this simple with small boulders or plants in the foreground, the trees to hold the left side of the photo and the wide lake on the right with a contrasted sky. I don’t really think that these pictures work all that well.

I also experimented with a foreground cactus. I wanted the green to show up in the cactus so this is a color image. I struggled with how much vertical space the cactus should take in the image with respect to the lake and sky. I ended up attempting thirds of the frame for each. As you can see, it was a dark, gloomy (and cold) afternoon.

I moved to a different area of the park to a place with nice reflections in the water and I figured it would be almost abandoned on a New Years day with the temperature below freezing and aside from a couple of other people, I was alone.

Below are the rocks reflecting in the lake, with the angled lines coming together at the waterline to almost form an arrow. I didn’t get this photo originally, but I did find that two of my pictures had the same focal length and exposure, so I merged them as a panorama and cropped this out of it. I didn’t care to have much of the sky as it was a flat gray anyway. This is my favorite picture of the day with the rocky reflections.

There were quite a few ducks and geese in the lake, so I put on my 70-200mm lens and waited with freezing hands for them to swim closer to me. They didn’t get very close to me, but I got a few of them in places where they showed well against the water and there was a decent background.

In the below photo, there is a duck and the rocks in the background with the reflections stretched across the water. I like the way it shows the scale of the rocks. This is my second favorite picture from the outing.

At this point my hands were getting numb. I got up and hiked around a bit, but didn’t see anything else that I wanted to photograph. It wasn’t cold enough for the waterfall to be frozen. Next time I will probably get an ND filter and do some long exposures.

Thanks for reading, please leave a comment.

  Inks Lake It was a miserable, cold, misty, cloudy day. But it was the last day of my time off for the Christmas break and I was tired of being in the house and not out shooting anything because of the weather.

[jason8957]

Focus Stacking

I have recently been trapped inside the house by the weather during Christmas break, but I still wanted to play with my camera. So, I have been resorting to setting up things in the house to photo, as in my full frame/APS-C sensor comparison blog. Today, I decided to experiment with focus-stacking using Photoshop. I have messed with this before, but not really had a practical use for it. So, I…

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[jason8957]

Georgetown at Christmas

Georgetown Texas is the county seat where I live and the county courthouse is usually decorated well for Christmas. I went down Christmas evening when there wouldn’t be much traffic and took some photos. Below is a two image panorama of the back side of the courthouse. I was across the street and my 24mm lens was not quite wide enough to take in the entire scene, so I took a couple for a…

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