A Scenic World

…before I started seriously shooting macro

1. Whatever pants you wear out in the field can never be worn in public again.
2. Dragonflies are generally much uglier than one would think.
3. Huge palm fronds make for ugly bokeh.
4. The background of the shot is almost more important that the subject itself.
5. For every one shot that’s in focus, there will be at least ten that are out-of-focus.
6. Auto-focus is useless.
7. If you can handhold a 100mm lens at 1/50th of a second under ideal conditions, that does not mean you can handhold it at 1/50th of a second when that once-in-a-lifetime shot appears.
8. f/8 is more useful than f/2.8
9. Regardless of how hot it is, you will curse the slightest breeze.
10. No matter how many times you’ve shot the same leaf, there is always a new way to shoot it.

Want a film-like sepia look from Lightroom? These these presets.

“Old Sepia”

“High Contrast Sepia”

For your listening enjoyment, Grizzly Bear’s “While You Wait for the Others”

The setup for mirror shots:

The important thing is that if you can see the lens, the lens can see your eyes!

Lightroom Settings:

VERY custom white balance (from 4650 temp. as shot to 12750 and tint from +32 to -7)

Exposure: +1.24
Recovery: 0
Fill Light: 17
Blacks: 87

Brightness: +129
Contrast: +43

Clarity: 0
Vibrance: +21
Saturation: -50

Highlights: -2
Lights: +7
Darks: +2
Shadows: +69

All colors set to -100 saturation and luminance

Split-Toning:
Highlights: Hue 64, Saturation 26
No Shadows

Maximum vignetting

Camera Calibration:
Shadow Tint: +8
Red: Hue -100, Saturation  -100
Green: Hue -10, Saturation -100 (not a typo)
Blue: Hue +93, Saturation -62

All other values set to default.

Ben Gibbard - Brand New Colony

I get inspiration from what I read, what I hear, what I see, what I think.

Yesterday, inspiration abounded.

First, I read Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Hidden within it are snippets from the revered Book of Bokonon, like this one:

Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,
And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.
And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,
Why go right ahead and scold Him. He’ll just smile and nod.

The I ran across this website (via yewknee) called “Before I Die, I Want to…” The idea was simple; photograph people and let them write what they want to do before they die on the bottom of the photo. Some of them were downright haunting…

Heady stuff, to say the least.

Then I read another book (I’m still in the “recovery” stage of my recent surgery). My book-swap friend had recommended The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst, and as he has nearly impeccable taste in literature, I dove right in and read the entire thing last night.

It was haunting and sad and deep and sad. It was the story of a man, a linguist, and his attempt to understand his beautiful, passionate, troubled wife. She was a maker of masks, and the idea that we never really know what’s behind a person’s mask - the face they present to the outside world, even to the people they love - ran through the novel, right up to its crushingly bittersweet end.

And so I gathered my inspiration up today, and I made this: