Category Archives: Nature

Rockport 2023

Should have posted these photos from Rockport months ago, but better late than never.

Two Alone on the Lanes Cove Wall Nighttime Houses on the Water Harvey Reservation Path

This photo is a panorama that would have been improved if I had taken a picture or two of the left of the wall and the ocean. Lesson learned.

Lanes Cove Harbor M

I took the daytime photos with my Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8. The nighttime photos I took with my manual focus Nikon Nikkor-S.C. 55mm f/1.8.

Cornflower (Centaurea cyanus)

The full album is:

2023 Rockport Vacation

Northern Mockingbird

A Northern Mockingbird visited our neighborhood. I was able to get several good photographs and one good video. Propping your lens on a car is a helpful technique for maintaining stability with a telephoto lens.

Northern Mockingbird Northern Mockingbird Northern Mockingbird Northern Mockingbird

A video of the bird singing. Did I mention that placing your lens on the top of a car really stabilizes the telephoto lenses. An external microphone would have helped here too, but I wanted to get the camera out of the house as quickly as possible and didn’t expect the mocking bird to stay as long as it did.

A crow also visited the area:

Crow Crow

NEOWISE

In July, my sons and I went to Danehy Park in Cambridge to see Comet NEOWISE. We got there before sunset to find a good position on the hill in the park.

Sunset from Danehy Park

It wasn’t the best location, even besides the mosquitos that came out after dusk, but it was a good opportunity to try time lapse/astro photography.

A night out with Comet NEOWISE

It wasn’t easy to find Comet NEOWISE with the naked eye, so I pointed my camera in the right direction, took a long exposure photograph, then checked if the comet was in the photograph. Whether it was there or not, I repositioned the camera to either find it or get a better picture of it.

A night out with Comet NEOWISE

It was an iterative process.

A night out with Comet NEOWISE

I played with the duration of the photographs experiencing that long durations at high focal lengths result in star trails. Some had a good balance.

A night out with Comet NEOWISE

The next day, clad in bug spray and long pants, my son and I tried photographing the comet from the top of the Alewife MBTA stop garage in Cambridge. The combination of the clouds and the bright garage lights hindered my efforts to get decent pictures. It was a good scouting opportunity. Unfortunately, the weather since hasn’t been great so it was good we went out the earlier night.

Flowers and a Spider

Photographed flowers in the yard recently. No use of focus peaking this time, but I used HeliconFocus to stitch the sharp part of images together. Click on the images to view them in more detail. You can then zoom into them further.

One among many Raspberry dewdrops Getting the day started The real raspberry creator Pretty weed

Also found this spider in our house. It was a mostly willing model, but eventually it had had enough.

Ready for my closeup Done with modeling

All images taken with my Sigma 105mm f/2.8 macro lens on my Nikon Z 50 via the Nikon FTZ adapter.

Rhododendron flower

With the warmer weather of Spring, our Rhododendron is blooming. I continued my adventure with macro photography and focus stacking by taking multiple images of some of the flowers. This one was the best:

Rhododendron flower

I zoomed in on my camera’s screen and manually focused the lens for each photograph. Next time I will try using focus peaking.