Walnut Tree Blossom...
I'm now seeing 'digital' for what it is...
There was a misty fog enshrouding the landscape this morning... from past experiences of not being able to shoot fast enough and move to a sufficient number of different locations to achieve a complete coverage of the idea in mind before the weather changed from worse to better (why do we tend to run around like a "blue-arsed fly" when trying to be creative?) I knew that the warmth of the rising sun[base ']s rays would quickly disperse the arty-diffusion effect... so I grabbed the prepared equipment combo propped-up next to the door...
...which further experience has drummed into me to be a Nikon D200 fitted with a 300mm Nikkor telephoto lens under which (the lens not the camera) is screwed a Gitzo Basalt monopod with leg fully extended. It's always there for taking outside... always ready for action (just flick the 'On' switch on). I always fit a freshly charged battery and a reformatted CF card the night before... and set the camera at ISO 200 (for early morning shots) and to shoot RAW + Fine JPEGs. I use the JPEGs for web-use only... the RAW files and edited and filed for potential publishing work.
Anyway, I digress... the walk this morning was only twenty meters/yards at most! Thinking to aim in the general direction of "down the lane and look for subjects across some of the fields... visually isolated and graphically compressed by the telephoto lens", I stopped just outside the back door instead. The walnut trees in the garden, which had been completely bare over winter, had sprung into life with a myriad of catkins and new leaves bursting out from the tip of every branch. Here was my first subject of the day... virtually on my doorstep!
The rising sun, whose increasing warmth was starting to evaporate the mist, bathed the delicate, fresh leaves in its glow... and I immediately started to look, compose, make exposures, change exposure settings to compensate for the leaves and catkins above my head being photographed against the brighter, misty sky (I wanted details and colours to be revealed in the subject... not silhouette shapes)... and after about thirty exposures I felt I had done enough.
Whilst the images were downloading onto my Mac I made coffee... again experience tells me I have the time to do that because the Nikon D200 is painfully slow (like, ten times slower) with a USB1 connection compared to my Olympus E-1 which has a Firewire port (I almost had time to eat some breakfast too!) but the wait was worth it. My "keepers" were about 75% of the total take... and I've chosen three to use here assuming the (Radio Cloud) system doesn't redirect one or more back to the misty ether where I first saw them.
10:37:20 PM 
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