Wings Over South Texas Air Show 2025

I got only three hours of sleep the night before so I brought minimal equpment and conserved my energy. I still got 76G of data, 700+ images, and 70+ videos. The best 26 still images are in this gallery.
https://why-not-photography.smugmug.com/Wings-Over-South-Texas-Air-Show-2025

The videos will take me a while to process and post. I'm not a videographer and I left the weight of the tripod in the car to conserve my energy. So, it will take a while to post them.

Here are four of the best images to wet your appitite:

Antarctica 2007

A friend mentioned his favorite photograph he has seen from me and it was from my trip to Antarctica back in 2007. I discovered that I did not have a gallery on SmugMug for that trip. So here are a few shots as well as a link to a gallery of 60+ images from that trip.

Antarctica Image Gallery
https://why-not-photography.smugmug.com/Antarctica-2007

Black-crested titmouse at YMCA

I took the Canon EOS R1 out today. I had been considering selling it because the few features it had over the Canon EOS R5 Mark 2 like faster frame rate didn't seem worth the cost. But then I watched a couple of YouTube videos and thought I might should reconsider. The major attributes now to me are the low light performance, the huge electronic view finder, and it's aledged ability to focus better than the R5 Mark 2.

The only bird that was really out was a Black-crested titmouse which reminds me of something that is puzzling me. This year seems really weird. The wild flowers appear to be on a weird schedule and the YMCA has virtually no wildlife still and this is May 1st. Am I confused or is nature on a very late schedule this year?

In any case, here are a batch of images taken today.

New Lightroom features on an old 2003 Costa Rica trip

In 2003, my first photography trip that I took with a professional instructor was with Michael Reichmann and his Luminous Landscape web site. Canon has just introduced their first professional digital cameras. The Canon EOS 1D and the Canon EOS 1Ds. Michael had encouraged me to buy both so I did just before the trip in February.

We first went to the gulf coast for a few days, then the pacific coast for a few days, and then in the mountains which run down the middle of the country. It was while we were at the pacific coast that Michael wanted to teach us about exposure bracketing. This is where you take the same image at three different exposures trying to capture the full dynamic range of the scene. The early cameras in particular had a very small dynamic range so with a sunset for example, the sun would come out as a blown out white spot while the shadows of the foliage would come out pure untextured black. By taking three exposures, the first would be under exposed to capture the sun correctly, the second could capture the general scene, while the third would be over exposed to capture the details in the shadows.

This was back in 2003. Adobe Lightroom didn't even exist and Adobe Photoshop was very nice but, relative to today's Photoshop, was quite primitive. The three images were merged by using masks created by hand. It easily took most of a day to create the finished image from the three original images. But that was then...

Today, Adobe Lightroom can do this with a few clicks. That feature isn't new. It has been with us for quite some time. But I've never tried it with the images from Costa Rica so I thought I would try. In the process, I was reminded of the "tought times" of days gone by. When looking at the images, they are covered with dust spots. The first digital cameras did not have any features to remove dust from the sensor and so ugly blobs would be on the images. It was also before anyone had come out with a real method of cleaning the sensors. Today, that problem has been solved and rarely do I spot any dust spots on images. Again, fortunately, a fairly old feature in Lightroom makes it easy to retouch the images and remove the dust spots.

But I did get to use a new feature just introduced into Lightroom and that is the automatic masking of Landscape photos. Lightroom can automatically, and with pretty good accuracy, mask the various parts of a landscape image such as the sky, water, and foliage. I used that to adjust the foliage a bit. Start to finish, the editing I did on the image today was probably less than an hour; much less than the half day to full day of editing needed back in 2003.

Link to images: Costa Rica 2003

And the image:

Barn Swallows at the lake (second attempt)

I switched from 1/2000 of a second shutter speed to 1/5000 and I also switch from the RF 100-500mm f/4.5-7.1 to the RF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM Z lens. The photos are better but still not as chrisp and clear as I am hoping to eventually get. I posted a question on a forum asking for advice and got some. Also included are some other feathered friends.

Barn Swallows at the lake (first attempt)

We are back at the lake house near Malakoff. The boat docks have barn swallows. I'm trying to configure my camera after watching some videos. Thsi is an on going task. The cameras today have so many options that I am always learning new things about the cameras.

I thought I would try and capture the Barn Swallows. If you have seen them fly, you know they are very fast and agile. I eventually set the camera at 1/2000 of a second shutter speed and got some ok shots but if you zoom in, you can tell that there is motion blur. The highlight on the eye for example is three to five spots instead of just one. I plan to try again with a faster shutter.

Here are the results:

Baby Geese at Richland College

Hi Folks,

I go out and take photos and I feel like I don't have a good way to share them. I could blast large groups of photos via text to various people but that seems invasive to me. So I'm going to try to post a blog entry more consistently. I will then send a link to people who might be interested in the topic. I would encourage you to subscribe so that you get notified when I do an updates. It would also encourage me to be more consisten knowing that others are enjoying my content.

I'm visiting my brother up in Richardson. Richland College is close by. They have a dammed up stream flowing through it and it seems to be a gathering place fo Canadian Geese. I saw two broods of chicks and at least three females sitting on eggs. I've posted the best here and created a gallery of more if you are curious. Also in the group is a barn swallow, an egret, a scissortail flycatcher, among others.

I hope you enjoy:

Testing various techniques for photographing flowers

I am hoping to start making blog entries more often. Of course, I've made this decision at least twice before and didn't follow through. I would appreciate folks subscribing and adding comments. I think that would cause me to be more consistent. I believe you need to create a user id for this and since this is a Google product, using a Google ID should work. I am experimenting with different techniques taking pictures of flowers. This started from watching a YouTube video that suggested a longer lens, wide aperture, and shooting down low. I used my Canon RF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM Z lens and some sample shots are thus:

The problem I see is that the close and far edge of the flowers are not in focus. These were shot at 200mm, f/5.0, 1/640, ISO 100. The calculated depth of field is 1/32 of an inch with the subject distance at 20 inches (roughly the closest this lens can focus). To address this issue, I tried focus bracketing and stacking. A few samples using this technique are here:

If you look very closely, you can see stacking artifacts. The wind was blowing slightly when I captured the images. So, the challenge would be to either wait until the wind behaves or spend more time in the software that stacks the images and remove the artifacts. From experience I know that even with stacking the depth of field has issues when two surfaces overlap in the image that have a large difference in depth. The close surface will create a fuzzy band when the far surface comes into focus creating a halo edge around the close surface. Kodak calls this "subject failure". Only hand editing using area cloning can resolve this tyep of issue and with the details of the flowers, that's not going to work. So... how about ignoring the YouTube video, go with a wide angle lens, stop down, and get a depth of field that is the depth of the flower? The DOF calculator in PhotoPills says a 35mm at first/8.0 has a depth of field of three inches if the subject distance is 20 inches. Great!! Well... No. For a 35mm lens, the subject distance is closer to eight inches. At that subject distance, the depth of field drops back down to 17/32 of an inch. But... here are a few samples anyway:

The problems here are multiple. The far back edge of the flower still isn't in focus and the soft defuse background is gone. The background could be faked by post processing but that defeats the purpose of all this experimentation. So... I think strategic use of focus bracketing will be what I will do if the conditions are right. Otherwise, I'm going with the single shot at 200mm perhaps stopping down as much as possible but the DOF is still not going to cover the entire depth of most flowers. The other challenge is most flowers point up so to get a good shot of the open flower, the camera is more verticle than recommended.