Slipper Time

 This past weekend I took a drive to Coopers Rock state forest in search of the elusive Pink Lady's Slipper orchid.  In previous years, I had found the orchids just below the handicap parking sign of off the large parking lot.  I was disappointed that there wasn't a single one.

I drove on to the head of the trail that leads down to the Henry Clay iron furnace.  It was here that I had hoped to catch the Rattlesnake Plantain orchid in flower.  Go figure, I didn't see a single one this time of the year.   What I did see, however, was a lovely stand of Pink Lady's Slippers.   I had a field day with my camera there.

I seem to have captured them at their peak.

Another plant that I recognized is the Halberd-leaved Violet (Viola hastata):

I also took this shot of a pair of mushroom growing out of some moss:

 

Getting Creative

 I've been exploring a little bit more of  the bells and whistles on my Canon 77D.  With few exceptions, I've been pretty muck locked into using the camera's Aperture Priority (Av) mode.  Recently, I've tried shooting something with the Creative filters.

Here are some of the filter effects that you can use:

• Grainy B/W 
• Soft focus 
• Fish-eye - processed to simulate fish-eye lens shots
• Water painting - for images that look like water paintings
• Toy camera - simulates distinctive colors and vignetting of images from toy cameras
• Miniature - process to resemble miniature scale models, similar to tilt-shifting
•  HDR art standard - images resemble paintings with low contrast and flat gradation
•  HDR art vivid - images resemble vivid graphic art with flat gradation
• HDR art bold - images resemble oil paintings with vivid color and depth
• HDR art embossed - images resemble old, faded photos

Yesterday during my lunch break I tried the fish-eye effect on some daffodils.  Here's the result:

I'm going to have to try some of the other effects.   Since I rarely carry my LensBaby  Composer around, I can see where these creative filters will give it some real competition.

A New Old Lens

 I while back, I managed to score a Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM lens on ShopGoodwill.com. As always, a Goodwill auction purchase is "as is."  Turned out that both automatic and manual focus on the lens would not go below four meters.  There has apparently been a long-standing problem of this sort with that lens.  It has a part with a design flaw that makes it very easy to damage. A repair company was able to replace the flawed part with a redesigned one that isn't as easy to damage.  It wasn't a cheap repair, but it's not a cheap lens, either.  Of course, the lens also got a thorough cleaning as part of the repair.

Although I already own a couple of 50mm f/1.4 lenses, they are both vintage, manual focus lenses.  Perhaps because of that, I hadn't been as attuned to their superior light gathering properties. Since this new one is made to work on a Canon digital SLR, I can more easily appreciate the superior optics.  Foremost is that the lens can work really well in low light and natural situations.

Another great feature of the 50 is the focal range.  It's great for portraiture because it give a nice blur to the background.

Here's one of the best shots I've taken with this newly repaired lens:

This is a great spangled fritillary butterfly on an iron weed. I shot it with the lens wide open at f/1.4, where it is said to be "soft."  Note the dreamy background, which is the woods behind the flower.  If I want sharper pictures, I'll need to stop it down to at least f/2.0.

Despite this newer, easy-to-use lens, I'm going to find it difficult to part with my Konica 50mm manual lens. I'd love to compare the image quality side-by-side with these two lenses.  Perhaps another day.

Downy Rattlesnake Plantain

On Friday before Labor Day and again on Labor Day, I took a hike down the trail to the Henry Clay iron furnace at Coopers Rock.

These days, it's pretty rare for me to come across a new plant.   And this one is doubly notable, because it's also an orchid.   Meet the Downy Rattlesnake Plantain (Goodyera pubescens):

This shot composed of two different shots that were combined in PhotoShop is not very good, but I wanted to be able to show the entire plant.

Most of my shots showing the leaves were blurry.  I need to stop farting around and use my tripod!  This is the best of the lot:

I wanted to show the leaves because of their reticulated pattern.  Oddly, when I tried to find the origin of the orchid's name, the emphasis is on their resemblance to the plantain.

Sadly, I missed catching this orchid in bloom.  Here's the inflorescence as I found it:

I was surprised to read that Goodyera pubescens is considered to be the most common orchids native to eastern North America.  How is it that I've only now stumbled across it?

More from the "new" old lens

Back on March 29, I raved about the Konica Hexanon AR 50mm f/1.4 lens that I won on a ShopGoodwill.com auction. 

I've been using this lens a lot more than I thought I would, getting better at snapping pictures by manually adjusting the ISO, aperture and film speed.

Here's a little gallery of some of my favorite shots:

As you can see, this lens has been performing quite well with close-ups, rendering some pleasing bokeh.

My next challenge is to get better at shooting this lens wide open at f/1.4.

Pink Ladyslippers

I was looking forward to this time of year (mid-May) because it's when Pink Lady's Slippers orchids (Cypripedium acaule) first make their appearance in our forests.

According to their Wikipedia article, they are widespread in Canada and the eastern third of the United States.  Even so, I'd never encountered one until moving to West Virginia.

The following shots were all taken last weekend at Cooper's Rock state forest.  All were taken with a Canon 77D and a vintage Canon FD 50mm f/3.5 Macro lens.  In other words, manual settings and manual focusing.

Lady's slippers usually appear in colonies.  They are said to prefer pine forests, but I have only seen them in deciduous woods. Lady's slippers have a symbiotic association with a particular fungus.  It was thought that the fungus was necessary to provide the plant with nutrients, but recent research indicates that the fungus is only necessary for seed germination.

Camera control via WiFi

My newest DSLR is a Canon 77D that I got for my birthday.  Among its many awesome features it has built in WiFi with NFC to allow connection to a mobile device.

The other day, I tried a new technique where I used the Canon EOS Utility to make a wireless tether connection between a laptop and the camera.  With the EOS Utility, I was able to set the camera on a tripod at ground level and take a series of shots at different focal lengths.  Here's the result of my first attempt:

This was created from a 9-shot focus stack.

I used to be able to do this sort of thing using MagicLantern on my EOS T2i, but there's no current support for it on the 77D.  With the EOS Utility, I can control the focus from my laptop in increments.  While not automatic like MagicLantern, I do get to see what the camera is seeing on the screen of my laptop.  The software even allows for 5X zoom to make fine focus even easier.

I had been able to do some of this previously using the Canon Camera Connect app on my iPhone or iPad but the focus control wasn't as easy for me.  Maybe I'll play around with that some more and report on the results later.

Trillium signs the likes of which even god has not seen

I had seen this stand of white trilliums (Trillium grandiflorum) from along the highway for a couple of years now.  Yesterday, I decided to brave the traffic and hauled my camera and tripod out to capture these.

Granted, the landscape leaves a lot to be desired, but I tried to convey the sheer number of these flowers.  Here's a more up-close shot:

According to one web site, Trilliums spread very slowly by underground root stocks, and the seed produced creates new plants even more slowly. From a planted seed, it takes approximately five to nine years for a Trillium grandiflorum plant to bloom. So when you see a massive drift of these in spring, you know you're looking at a bunch of plants that are at least a decade old, probably much older.

Obviously, this stand has been lumbered (at the least), but it's nice to see that such a large growth of Trilliums have escaped the bulldozer.

Canon FD 50mm f/3.5 MACRO

Some months ago, I purchased a Canon FD 50mm f/3.5 Macro lens from the ShopGoodwill.com auction site.  It was part of a package, which also contained an old FD telephoto lens and a set of three macro adapters in a nice case.

Everything that I'd read about this lens indicated that you got a lot of bang for your buck with it.  This is a typical blurb that you see for it on auction sites:

"Optically excellent Canon Macro lens. This lens is believed by many enthusiasts to be among the sharpest macro lenses ever made for the Canon camera."

Here are a couple of shots that I took last evening:

The hardest thing with this lens is having to manually focus.  As you can see above, however, it can be done.

I'm keeping the 1x macro adapter on this lens to protect it and keep it clean, so these two shots aren't simply with the "pure" lens.  It's weird as far as lenses I've had.  The front has a deeply recessed cavity, so protecting the lens itself really shouldn't be an issue.

I've been thinking of selling this lens and the adapters on eBay, but I think that I want to play with it for a while longer.

Say "Ahhh-ris"

Quaker Ladies - Nothing is better for thee

One of my favorite spring flowers to photograph is the Bluet flower (Hustonia caerulea).

Another name for them is Quaker ladies, apparently so named because the shape of the flower is similar to the white bonnets once worn by women of the Quaker faith.   I tried googling for an image of such a hat, and I think that's quite a stretch.  A better explanation is that they're named for the shade of fabric used in making dresses worn by Quaker ladies.

Here is a macro of an individual flower, which is a pretty little thing:

Fleur du Jour

Meet the Asiatic dayflower (Commelina communis), which gets its name because the blooms last only one day. It is classified as a noxious weed in North America, but it is used as a medicinal herb in China, its native habitat. 

According to Chinese folk medicine, it has febrifugal, antipyretic, anti-inflammatory, and diuretic effects. It is also used for treating sore throats and tonsillitis.

In Japan the flowers were used to produce a pigment in many world-renowned woodcuts from the 18th and early 19th centuries.

My Pictures Stink

Earlier this year, I bought the book Your Photos Stink!: David Busch's Lessons in Elevating Your Photography from Awful to Awesome.  Sorry to say that I haven't gone all the way through this book, but I learned enough to be dangerous.

Here's a lesson that I applied:

This picture is of a Fuller's Teasel (Dipsacus fullonum) that I shot near Wally World.  Granted, it's nothing special, but to me it has a certain je ne sais quoi.  I even tried to go artsy-fartsy with it and render it in black & white.  It was then that I noted the "stink" factor:  the ant on the top-right of teasel is distracting.  I mean, it's a nice ant and all, but she wasn't meant to be the subject of my picture.  She had to go.

Here is the artsy-fartsy black & white teasel but without the ant:

You probably think I'm talking about putting lipstick on a pig, if you want to call my teasel a pig. Truth be told, I'm thinking that the color shot is more aesthetically pleasing.  But you have to admit that the shot is much better without the little photo bomber.

Using PhotoShop Stack Mode to minimize high ISO graininess

Meet the Butterflyweed (Asclepias tuberosa), a species of milkweed native to eastern North America.  This seems to be a particularly good year for them.  I see prominent patches of their orange blooms off the side of the road as I drive around lately.

I took a series of focus-stack shots in the evening yesterday and ended up using 19 of them to make this picture.  Lately, I've been using the Auto ISO setting on my camera, so because of the time of day and the f/16 stop I was using, the Auto ISO ended up going all the way to 3200.

The first step in my process is to align all of the shots to each other.  Although I was using a tripod, a slight breeze was causing noticeable movement.  It wasn't so bad that the alignment process couldn't deal with it.

A bigger problem arose when I tried to do the Auto-blend step in PhotoShop to create the focus stack.  I had a very pesky photo bomber waltzing through my picture.  That's her, below, dancing from flower to flower.

Normally, like in the case of a fly, I'll just eliminate the shots that have the photo bomber.  In this case, however, the bomber was in quite a few of them.

I decided to invoke a technique that I have rarely used.  After I restacked the images, I used the PhotoShop command Layer --> Smart Objects --> Stack Mode --> Median, which analyzed the picture and removed anything that wasn't in all of the shots, i.e., the ant.

Try as I might, however, I couldn't find a way to Auto-blend the layers without bringing back the photo bomber.  As luck would have it, though, the f/16 aperture I had used already gave me a fairly decent depth of field.  While researching the other Stack Mode commands in the hope of finding something that would help me, I discovered that the Mean command was particularly good for removing graininess from high-ISO stacked images.  And it did it quite well.

If you look closely at the image with the photo bomber and compare it to the first image, you'll see the reduction in graininess that I'm talking about.  

Giving You a Laurel

Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia) blossom.

Factoid:  Kalmia latifolia is notable for its unusual method of dispensing its pollen. As the flower grows, the filaments of its stamens are bent and brought into tension. When an insect lands on the flower, the tension is released, catapulting the pollen forcefully onto the insect. Experiments have shown the flower capable of flinging its pollen up to 15 cm. (from Wikipedia).

Too much of a pink thing

Rhododendron blooms in the natural light of this morning's "golden hour."  Composed from a 15-shot focus stack.  

I normally like to process with LAB color (picture #1), but this time I thought that a straight RGB image (picture #2) was easier on the eyes.

Late bloomers

The backyard flower garden held a surprise yesterday.  Despite the hard frost on Monday morning, a fair number of Marsh Gentians (Gentiana pneumonanthe) were blooming their collective hearts out on Tuesday afternoon.

These are both focus stacks, courtesy of Magic Lantern.  The flower in the upper image was much closer to the ground, so it wasn't affected by the occasional breeze.  The bottom flower was much more exposed, and I had to go through the stack several times to eliminate probably half of the layers where the flower had been blown to one side or the other. 

Swamp thing

Meet the Swamp smartweed (Polygonum hydropiperoides) growing in a hollow stump at Valley Falls park:

Late season blooms

The same evening that I captured the fern bottom, I shot a less ambitious focus stack of what I think might be a delphinium.  I didn't have any direct sun hitting this at six, p.m., but the lighting is decent.

The delphinium  required a bit of post-processing by hand to correct for some areas that PhotoShop's focus stacking algorithm couldn't seem to handle.  In addition, there were several ants traipsing about the flower.  The moved haltingly enough to leave ghosts here and there about the bloom.  I left one (at about 8 o'clock).

Knock-kneed goats and bow-legged sheep

Meet the White Snakeroot (Ageratina altissima), which is native to eastern North America. Snakeroot contains the toxin tremetol.

According to Wikipedia, when cattle eat the plant "the meat and milk become contaminated with the toxin. When milk or meat containing the toxin is consumed, the poison is passed on to humans. If consumed in large enough quantities, it can cause tremetol poisoning (milk sickness) in humans." During the early 19th century, large numbers of European immigrants were killed by milk sickness.

The plants are also poisonous to horses, goats, and sheep. Signs of poisoning in these animals include depression and lethargy, placement of hind feet close together (horses, goats, cattle) or held far apart (sheep), nasal discharge, excessive salivation, arched body posture, and rapid or difficult breathing.

So, if you're a farmer,watch out for knock-kneed goats and bow-legged sheep.  It could be a sign.