More shots from Wisonsins' Northwoods country

[jrice12]

Taken with Canon 550D and EF 100mm/f2.8 Macro USM lens. Natural, diffused lighting (threatening to rain all day) - all at ISO 400 due to lack of light. Comments welcome.

#1 Green tree frog. This one let me take all kinds of pictures of it! Settled on a manual focus stack of four shots at f5.6 - composing from bottom to just past the eyes. Don't like the way the focus cuts out at the bottom just below the nose - however, in fairness, the area from nose to bottom is a single shot, that is how the focus cuts off on that shot. Focus doesn't cut out abruptly at the middle of back where I ended the stacking. Lighting was diffused and from the right giving a pretty nice shadowing.

#2 Lone Acorn. Sitting on a bed of moss. Manual focus stack of six at f2.8 where only the acorn got the stacking. Very bottom out of focus may be objectionable, though I think the eye gets fixed onto the acorn anyway. You can see where I did a sloppy job of stacking right along the very top of the acorn - I will need to go back and feather that out. Background is almost surreal.

#3 Wild flower. About the last of the flowers for the season. Lighting was a bit flat, but it was the best angle I could find. It cries out for a little spotlighting of the crown.

#4 Mushroom Globes. Liked the texture and variety here. Set it up to have the globes "surround" the little mushroom and leaf at lower left. DOF is too low I think, I don't get all the texture of the globe in front (one with damage).

#5 Tee'ed up golf ball or mushroom? Again, loved the texture. Taking into consideration the background at upper right, I went with f8 on this one and this left the bass a bit out of focus - I don't like to see that "almost in-focus" look on any part of a main subject, but f8 just worked well everywhere else. Left edge of shroom has slight greenish tint due to reflection lighting from all that green foilage.

#6 Ok, I added the fern as an after thought (I should really stop doing that!). I wanted one of the wood grain with relatively low DOF (f4) but felt it needed something. So I picked a bit of fern and stuck it into the shot. Might have worked if the upper left wasnt' so out of focus. Dropped the luminace channel down pretty far in PP to enhance the green color of the fern - a lot of the left half is in cut-off, but somehow your eye doesn't notice (due to bright fern?). Maybe some PP to darken the upper left corner?

 

[Markw]

I wish I could find some mushroom globes!!

Anywho, I don't have time to give a full C&C right now, so this will reserve myspot for tomorrow.

Mark