Autumn Macros - Page 1

I was hoping to get a day outside this weekend, traveling by car to capture some more fall foliage scenes.  But as of today, when I look at my "leaf peepr" cell phone app, I see that the foliage just about everywhere in New England is past peak.

The exception is the Cape Ann/Gloucester/Rockport area of northeastern Massachusetts. That being said, even though the weekend is upon us, the weather is terrible.  Temps are in the mid-40's, it is raining, and the wind is gusty and blowing out of northeast.

There's even talk of snow tonight. Yuck.

So, inside projects are the order of the day. For me that means I have an opportunity to clean up some of the photos in my Lightroom library. What I discovered this morning is that I have taken a fair number of macros this fall, some of which I have posted below.

I find that occasionally I take my camera and walk around the yard looking for plants and insects to photograph.  That's where these images were taken.

This fall I seem to be experimenting a lot with auto focus versus manual focus. And with manual focus, I have been experimenting with and without focus-peeking enabled. So far, I can't say that I see any difference in the results.

These images were taken with a mixture of the following lenses:

• Olympus 12-40 F2.8
• Panasonic 35-100 F2.8 with Canon 500D macro lens screwed into the filter threads
• Olympus 60mm F2.8 macro
• Olympus 40-150 F4-F5.6 with Canon 500D
• Tamron 90mm F2.8 macro

Generally I use F2.8 to get the blurriest possible background.  Shallow depth of field is a consequence of using a large diameter aperture, and that may or may not be desirable.  However, that plus letting ISO go as high as 1600 allows for a fast shutter speed.  And that means the tripod can stay in the car! 

Slightly more than half of these were shot at F2.8.  Because at that aperture it is very easy to miss focus, I usually take several shots.  I do not shoot a burst, but instead consciously and slowly refocus for each repeating shot.  

The images that were not at F2.8 were mostly taken with the Olympus 40-150 F4-F5.6 zoom, where F2.8 is not available.

Larger Images and EXIF information on my Website here:
http://www.peterfraileyphoto.com/blogimages2014nov1

This is a flower on our male holly bush.

In white, but sometimes also yellow, you can see the four stamens

of a male holly flower.  Holly flowers, both male and female

have four petals. The flower measures only 1/4" across.

These are the berries on our female holly bush.
You can't have berries without pollination from the male flower.