Southern Magnolia

Southern Magnolia

Southern Magnolias (Magnolia grandiflora) are not only beautiful flowers that smell magnificent, but they are also very interesting. Their stamen are like little flowers in themselves. Unfortunately, Magnolias only bloom for one day, leaving brown, dry petals, which are not quite as pretty as the petals were the day before.

However, the stamen stay to become beautiful soft, red cones which last a very long time. I've never picked up one to see if they are fragrant which makes me wonder why I've never thought to do that before.

Eastern Tent Caterpillar Moth

The Eastern Tent Caterpillar Moth is in the Lasiocampidae family and it's Scientific name is: Malacosoma americanum.

This moth was on the window that leads to the deck at my daughter's house in Brooklyn, CT. It was great because I was able to photograph him from the back, then the front, and then a macro of his face. How lucky is that? You just don't get this lucky when photographing nature--especially bugs and butterflies.

I love photographing bugs, butterflies, and moths. Their faces are so interesting. Just check out the closeup here. He reminds me of ZZ Top with the dark eyes that look like he's wearing sunglasses and the long beard. What do you all think?

Yellow-crowned Night Heron

At my regular Monday Night Meetup in Safety Harbor, I decided instead of sitting around shooting the breeze with my friends, I'd shoot a few things with my camera instead of my mouth for a change.

The crowd has been dwindling over the last few months. I think it's partially because there are so many other Meetups going on that we're spread too thin. So, in order to try to get some of our regular members as well as some of our new members to participate a little more, I'm adding a theme or challenge for shooting on Monday nights. I've done it for two weeks now, and it seems to be working so far. Time will tell if it's going to work out on the long haul.

The theme for this week was macro photography, so I brought my macro gear, and some of the members who have macro gear did likewise. Those who didn't have gear brought things to photograph. It worked out pretty well. We even experimented with macro photography using a magnifying glass and I had some DIY macro lights set up, so everyone was able to try something different.

I shot a Gardenia with and without lights and it made a beautiful difference. I still haven't seen some of the other posts, so I'm pretty anxious to see what they came up with. Here is a shot of my Gardenia using the DIY light setup. It was a lot of fun experimenting.

We were also joined (sort of) by a Yellow-Crowned Night Heron. He stayed out there on the water's edge for the longest time and had no problem with some of us that were shooting him. I swear he was posing for us most of the time.

Lemon Macro

During our regular Monday Night Meetup a couple weeks ago, we were all fooling around with macro photography at the Safety Harbor Grille after dinner.

One of our members, Lyman, made a macro using the bottom of a glass. That started the ball rolling. We were photographing everything left on the table. I got out my Tamron 90mm macro lens and joined in on the fun.

This lemon is one of my favorite shots from the evening. It was garnishing a glass of water, so I had to be careful not to include the glass.

This shot was made hand held inside the restaurant patio at ISO 800, because of the low light and the lack of a tripod to steady the camera, 1/250 at F8 for better depth of field in aperture priority mode with partial metering on the lemon and used the on-camera flash at -1 stop so it wouldn't wash out. I'm thrilled at how well it came out considering the circumstances.

The great thing about digital is that it costs nothing to experiment. This is one shot, I'd have probably passed up because of the low lighting conditions and the lack of tripod.