Syrphid fly and cherry blossoms by the river

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Thu Mar 29, 2007 6:20 pm

I thought I'd break with tradition and do some unstacked wideangle stuff with a point-and-shoot.

These are Canon SD700 IS, auto-everything. The EXIF data reports FL 5.8 mm, f/5.6, 1/640 and 1/1600 second.

--Rik

MacroLuv · Post by **MacroLuv** » Thu Mar 29, 2007 6:38 pm

Hey, it looks like a my style!

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Thu Mar 29, 2007 8:14 pm

MacroLuv wrote:Hey, it looks like a my style!

Thank you, Nikola! That was exactly my intent!

I knew I had gotten awfully fond of your work, but I didn't realize just how fond, until you got a DSLR and slacked off on posting the other stuff.

I missed it... (sniff

)...and figured I had to shoot some of my own to tide me over until you got back in the wideangle swing of things.

--Rik

Bruce Williams · Post by **Bruce Williams** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 6:28 am

I really like the compositional balance of form and colour in pic2.

Isolating that single, off-centre flower works perfectly to give focus and an overall cohesion to the work. IMO, everything about the picture (form, colour, light and shade) contributes something towards that feeling of artistic "rightness".

I even like the choice of a "near-square" format in this instance.

Very well done!

Bruce

Cyclops · Post by **Cyclops** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 9:57 am

Wow superb close ups! Great subjects too, a reminder of spring!

beetleman · Post by **beetleman** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 4:03 pm

These photos came out very nice Rik. Excellent work. Everything looks so nice and clean, the backgrounds are not cluttered and the lighting

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Sat Mar 31, 2007 10:56 pm

Thanks, guys.

I was pleased with these also. I could do with a bit less noise in the OOF areas, but on the other hand I didn't apply any noise reduction.

The uncluttered backgrounds are mostly from 30 feet to a few hundred yards away.

I'll take credit for moving the camera around to get things lined up as best I could.

But really, the distinctive appearance of these pictures is due to the use of a short lens that's also wideangle for the sensor size. In theory, there's no problem taking these pictures with a larger sensor. But it's not easy to find a lens that's wideangle and will also focus short enough but not too short. Even with all the stuff I own, I don't think I have the components to shoot these pictures with my DSLR.

Bruce, thanks for the compliments about composition. Some of that was done by moving the camera around until the image on the viewscreen looked good. The choice of near-square format was driven by a "subtractive" process -- I took the best image I had, and kept cropping away stuff I didn't like until it was (almost) all gone. When I was done cropping, there was one annoying bit of leaf left, slightly visible but distracting at one margin -- so I deleted it by cloning. That bit of editing didn't seem worth mentioning until now.

--Rik