Author: Friedhelm

Photography under water has it’s own challenge. Either you have a a camera that you can use under water or you have to photograph through glass which can create reflections and distorions. This week I challenge you to create at least five images where you photograph mlife under water.

I drove to Monterey, CA to visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium to photograph. I took my heavy tripod with me which I was not allowed to use. I had to use higher ISO settings to photograph. Thanks to image stbilization and moise reduction I got some decent images. Camera setting: 28mm focal length, f4, 1/25sec., ISO 800.

Enjoy and happy photographing!

Again I used my 100-400mm lens to create this image. I used just natural light and picked a dark background.

Enjoy and happy photographing!

I photographed this Succulent plat at Gamble Garden also. I used different f stops to get just enough depth of field to recognize the plant. A totally wide open lens blurred pretty much the entire background. I finally settled at f8.

Enjoy and happy photographing!

I photographed these mountain flowers in the high Sierra mountains yesterday. I used an aperture of f8 on a 70-200 lens to get a small group of flowers into focus and use the out of focus plants as a background.

Enjoy and happy photographing!

Long lenses compress background and foreground and giving you a much more shallow depth of field than wide angle lenses. I photographed this group of flowers using a 100-400 mm lens at 400mm. I used a diffuser to soften the light and some bushes and trees served as a wonderful background.

Enjoy and happy photographing!

Last week I visited Gamble Garden in Palo Alto, CA. This is a beautiful garden to photograph flowers. for this week I challenge you to continue to work on flower photography and create some great images!

I photographed theses Sweat Peas in bright sunlight. I used a round diffuser to soften the light and block out the sun on the flowers.

Enjoy and happy photographing!

Here is my final image for the this week. I created three different layers of the same image and combined them using layer mask. The masks were hand-painted to create just the effect I wanted.

Enjoy and happy Friday!

Black and White images have their own special appeal. Many times I convert an image to see how it looks like and to discover the structure of an image.

Enjoy and keep on thinking about the potential of a single image!

I changed the daytime photograph into a nighttime image. There are different ways to do that. I used the Topaz Photoshop plug-in which has several presets for this actions. I used two of them and used them as layers in Photoshop.

Enjoy and happy photographing!

I saw this “picture in a picture” in my original image. It looks like two giant rocks in the rain forest.

Enjoy and keep discovering the “image in the image!”