I sometimes like to surf the web and visit other photographers blogs and read what they have to say. Some will talk about the philosophy, deep spiritual feel, or a story in their photography.

I have to confess that I don’t have anything to say with my photography other then they are just pretty pictures.

I feel good when I view my images, but they are just pretty picture with no deep thoughts or special meaning behind the image.

It’s like when you see a painting with some wild strokes of colors, strange designs, or a small red dot on a large white canvas, and the artist says there is a meaning in the painting, but darned if I can ever figure it out.

I guess I’m not a deep enough thinker for that type of art. I do like to create abstracts with my macro, but none of it has any meaning other then it just looks cool.

When I tried to sell my abstracts at the art shows, it failed miserably. I took all the abstracts out of my booth after the first year because everyone bought the pretty pictures of something simple that they could recognize and connect with.

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I call this the stairway plant, but I doubt that is the name of the plant, and even if I would have saw a name of the plant, I probably wouldn't remember it today.  So, I call it the stairway plant as it reminds me looking down a spiral staircase. 

I was an instructor at the Out of Chicago Flower Conference held at the Chicago Botanical Gardens a few years ago.  It was really windy one day, so I took the group of photographers that I was leading into the Tropical Greenhouse where we didn't have to deal with any wind. 

I was looking over a railing on a ramp I was walking down and spotted this plant.  I thought what an interesting plant and captured a quick shot of it.

Because there was a lot of depth from the top to the bottom of the plant, I shot it at f/32 to get it all in focus. I used Smart Photo Editor to process the image.

Here is the processed image.

Here is the before, out of the camera image.

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Here is a Dalhia flower that I processed with two different looks.

Cropped, sharpened and processed in Smart Photo Editor.

Here is the original out of the camera.

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Backlighting and Shadows

When:
Summer

Where:
Edge of a pond,
Michigan

How:

It was early morning, and the sun had just peaked over the top of the trees as I was strolling along the edge of a pond looking for subjects to shoot.  

As I was walking, I happened to look up into a Sycamore tree and saw this interesting combination of backlighting and shadow.

The alignment of the leaves was amazingly perfect. I set up the frame with a nice tight shot to eliminate all the clutter of leaves and concentrated just on the main show.  

I set my f/stop at f32, as I had a lot of depth between the front leaf and the background leaves. I placed my point of focus on the small backlight leaf, which was about halfway between the front and back leaves.

It’s all about being in the right place at the right time and always scanning with your eyes for subjects like this. I could have easily walked past this but was lucky on this day that I looked up.

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This is not my usual macro/close-up image but while I was shooting macro/close-up images at the Meijer Botanical Garden in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I looked up into this very tall group of palm trees in the tropical greenhouse and just had to shoot these crazy patterns in the palms.

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