Mother Duck

Lastly, for this White Rock Lake series, I found this duck family swimming near the banks of the lake, looking for food. I positioned my camera as low to the water as I could and took pictures of them as they swam by. I achieve the focus on the mother duck, I used my wide-angle lens, and it's f2.8 aperture. This made only the mother duck in focus, and the rest of the picture blurry.

Water's Edge

Next, I moved to another part of the lake, where I found this pier jutting out into the lake. The main reason why I took this picture as a long exposure was that birds were flying around, and I wanted to capture their movements. They ended up being too fast to be captured in a long exposure, but the picture still turned out pretty decent.

Fisherman's Walk

I soon found a puddle, but it didn't create any interesting reflections. But, it was on the walking path and could create reflections of those who walked by. I decided to position myself near this puddle with my neutral density filter (the filter that makes the image darker to allow for the shutter to be open longer) and tripod to capture a long-exposure. I waited for some people to walk by, then these two fishermen walked by.

Fish

I then walked a few steps to my right, where I found this family of three fishing. I hoped to find a collection of water that I could use as a mirror to create a reflection of the family, but all the water had already been absorbed into the ground. I decided to position myself in line with the center line and capture the guardrails of the bridge.

Lone Stick

After taking many pictures of the flowers, I walked over to the lake's edge. That is where I found this bird resting on the one log sticking out of the water. I have taken many pictures that are very similar to this one. What makes this picture different is how I edited it. I added some blue and green tones to make the overall picture have an interesting color. I also made it such that the bird was almost completely black. I wanted to create an interesting contrast between the bird and the water.

Nature Walk

As I said a few posts ago, the path was surrounded by flowers that were a few feet tall. I wanted to capture this scene in a picture. I had to wait before someone came walking on the path, but once they came, I tried to capture them from a decent ways away. I moved the focus from the center of the picture to where the person was and lowered the angle of the camera from pointing directly at the walker to lower on the path.

Standing Tall

Most of the flowers were a few feet tall, but this bunch was as tall as I am. I kept my macro lens but took a few steps back to create a background of flowers surrounding this one. Then, using the f2.8 of the lens, I took the picture with these flowers as the main object. I really like how this picture turned out. I love how there is just a sea of flowers and the focus is on just one of them. Overall, I feel the sharp focus makes the picture. If the focus was weaker or not on this bunch, the picture wouldn't be the same.

Sea of Green

Most of the flowers were either white or pink with green stems, but this flower had bright red and yellow colors on it. For most flower pictures, I like to capture the flower from as close as possible with the macro lens. But for this picture, I wanted to include the surrounding flowers with it. These flowers help show the depth of field. They show that the red flower is not the only flower there and that it is a bright light in a sea of green.

Miniature World

I found these flowers right below the scene of the last picture. Some of the buds had bloomed into white and pink flowers, while some others had died. On these dead flowers, the rain formed little water droplets. Then, using my macro lens, I focussed on the single water droplet that was just barely hanging onto the flower. I was trying to capture the miniature reflecting world formed inside the droplet, but it was just too small for my camera to capture it.

Little Reflectors

Next, I moved over a few flowers to this one. I liked the flower for two reasons. First, the flowers that are on it were incredibly small, which allows you to look at more than one flower in a single picture. Second, there were many water droplets were hanging onto the flowers. The droplets reflect the objects around them (which was the flowers), but in a  morphed and different way.

Little Yellow

After taking some wide-angle pictures of the flowers, I decided to focus on individual flowers. So, I took out my macro lens and took some close-ups. For this flower, I centered the picture around the middle of the flower. I wanted to capture the flower while also having some of the rain droplets in focus.

Rain Walk

Between the flowers was a path to walk/run/bike on. My goal for this picture was to create a reflection of the walker as they moved on the path. While the reflection was not as great as I would have liked, I feel the way the path looks makes it up. I like how the flowers surround the path, and the gray sky highlights the walker.

Summer Flowers

A few weeks after taking pictures of the moon, I adventured to White Rock Lake. It had rained that morning and afternoon, and I hoped to capture some macro flower/water droplet pictures and reflections from the water. When I first arrived, I was shocked by the number of wildflowers. Not only were the flowers as far as the eye could see, but some flowers were five feet tall.

Moon Light

I think this is my best picture for a long time. I first started taking pictures of the moon, then thought of adding a lightbulb. This final picture is two pictures that I Photoshopped together. The first was a picture of the moon. The second was a picture of the lightbulb with a strong flashlight lighting up the lightbulb from the top. I then merged these two pictures and made blended the moon so that it didn't look too Photoshopped.

Supermoon

As I was looking online, I saw something that stated that the last supermoon of 2020 would be on May 7. I then looked at the weather forecast and saw that May 7 would be rainy, but May 6, it would be clear. So on May 6, I went outside to take pictures of the supermoon. This picture was okay, but I had a great idea to take a picture of the moon inside a light bulb.

Stillness

These butterflies constantly move from flower to flower and flower patch to flower patch. For a few seconds, they stay on a flower drinking the nectar and reenergizing themselves. Maybe you can see it, maybe you can't, but I took this picture with my telephoto lens. Can you tell a difference between this picture and the last few? I like the others better because the focus is sharper and due to this sharp focus, I feel the picture looks better.

Flying In

Eventually, I was able to partly achieve this goal of freezing a bee in the air. Unfortunately, I believe my shutter speed wasn't fast enough to completely stop the bee's wings. I took this picture with a shutter speed of 1/2,500, which is the second-fastest shutter speed for my Nikon D5500. And after a quick Google, most cameras stop at a shutter speed of 1/4,000 (my camera does), but some can achieve speeds of 1/8,000 and the fastest is 1/32,000.

Honey

For all of these pictures, there was a lot of hope. Yes, you could set yourself up for success by choosing the correct camera settings and lenses, but you cannot tell the bee what to do and when. Taking pictures of bees is very much a waiting game. I had the camera constantly taking pictures because I didn't know when the perfect shot would line up. That perfect shot would be the wings of a bee frozen in the air as it flew to or from a flower.

Glistening

After the short bluebonnet session, I turned to face the bees again. I took pictures of bees before and wanted to make sure that these pictures were different than the older ones. To achieve this, I used a combination of the telephoto and macro lenses. The telephoto lens is good for taking pictures of bees because of its zoom. But, it struggles in keeping a crisp focus with the lowest aperture of f5.6 at 300mm. The macro lens is good because it allows for a constant f2.8, but it's set 90mm zoom means I have to be closer to the bees.

Tall

As I said in the class post, this flower patch featured some bluebonnets. Between taking pictures of bees, I decided to snag this shot. What I like about this picture is the out of focus bluebonnets you can see in the background. When I take pictures of flowers, most of the time, I keep a sharp focus on one part. For this picture, I also wanted to capture other bluebonnets in the background.