Should have posted these photos from Rockport months ago, but better late than never.
This photo is a panorama that would have been improved if I had taken a picture or two of the left of the wall and the ocean. Lesson learned.
I took the daytime photos with my Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8. The nighttime photos I took with my manual focus Nikon Nikkor-S.C. 55mm f/1.8.
The full album is:
A Northern Mockingbird visited our neighborhood. I was able to get several good photographs and one good video. Propping your lens on a car is a helpful technique for maintaining stability with a telephoto lens.
A video of the bird singing. Did I mention that placing your lens on the top of a car really stabilizes the telephoto lenses. An external microphone would have helped here too, but I wanted to get the camera out of the house as quickly as possible and didn’t expect the mocking bird to stay as long as it did.
A crow also visited the area:
I recorded a brief video of a robin singing in my backyard.
I have a bunch of photo edits to post. Hopefully soon.
I had the Sigma 150-600mm Sport lens so I found other uses for it. It was probably excessive to use it photographing birds in the backyard …
… but I got many good photographs of the moon that I hope to try focus stacking. In retrospect, since I used a tripod, I should have used a slower shutter speed. One unfocus stacked image:
Finally got around to posting some new photos I took during the summer.
I was particularly fond of the following photograph, though a flash would have helped.
Whether the patient fly stuck around with a flash going off repeatedly is an open question.
A few flowers and such from the neighborhood.
To see a higher resolution version of the one above:
In July, my sons and I went to Danehy Park in Cambridge to see Comet NEOWISE. We got there before sunset to find a good position on the hill in the park.
It wasn’t the best location, even besides the mosquitos that came out after dusk, but it was a good opportunity to try time lapse/astro photography.
It wasn’t easy to find Comet NEOWISE with the naked eye, so I pointed my camera in the right direction, took a long exposure photograph, then checked if the comet was in the photograph. Whether it was there or not, I repositioned the camera to either find it or get a better picture of it.
It was an iterative process.
I played with the duration of the photographs experiencing that long durations at high focal lengths result in star trails. Some had a good balance.
The next day, clad in bug spray and long pants, my son and I tried photographing the comet from the top of the Alewife MBTA stop garage in Cambridge. The combination of the clouds and the bright garage lights hindered my efforts to get decent pictures. It was a good scouting opportunity. Unfortunately, the weather since hasn’t been great so it was good we went out the earlier night.
Photographed flowers in the yard recently. No use of focus peaking this time, but I used HeliconFocus to stitch the sharp part of images together. Click on the images to view them in more detail. You can then zoom into them further.
Also found this spider in our house. It was a mostly willing model, but eventually it had had enough.
All images taken with my Sigma 105mm f/2.8 macro lens on my Nikon Z 50 via the Nikon FTZ adapter.
With the warmer weather of Spring, our Rhododendron is blooming. I continued my adventure with macro photography and focus stacking by taking multiple images of some of the flowers. This one was the best:
I zoomed in on my camera’s screen and manually focused the lens for each photograph. Next time I will try using focus peaking.
Another local picture of a bird in our neighborhood.
