Ants

Ants, An Experiment in Macro Photography

Some folk get all bent out of shape whenever they see ants crawling about. Me, I think they are real helpful, cleaning up crumbs and such.

I had some crackers the other day, and left a crumb or two down there on the floor. If you look carefully, you can see it near the center of the picture, between the chair leg and table leg.

A bit closer and you can at least see the black spot. That’s a cluster of ants.

Even closer, you might be able to make out an ant or two. They are very small, some may say “tiny”, scientifically .33 mm long and .2 mm wide.

Now we are beginning to see something.

The ants will continue to chow down until this whole crumb is gone. I won’t bother them, and by nightfall, there will be nothing there. Ants are our friends.

To actually see the ants at work click on the YouTube video from the sidebar link. Ants clean up

HDR or High Dynamic Range

This is a photograph of my neighborhood in HDR or High Dynamic Range. This picture is actually 3 exposures merged into one image. Do you think this fad is a keeper?

Images using HDR (High Dynamic Range) seem to be popping up everywhere. An HDR image consists of 3 or more exposures, usually one or two f-stops above and below the average exposure setting. This gives both the highlights and the shadows a chance to be shown at their best. Using either software and in some cases the camera itself, the multiple exposures are combined into one, giving the final image a pretty wide (dynamic) range of exposure. What place do they have in modern photography?

If you look carefully at my example, you will see three birds near the center of the image. There was actually only one bird in flight, but the time delay between exposures caught the bird at three different places. The three pictures were merged using a free HDR program called Qtpfsqui (http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net/) but there are others. Some of the image editing programs have HDR merge built right in and Photoshop plugins also exist.

So what do you think of the whole process? A lot of Flickr images are HDR. It is a fad that certainly was not around before digital photography. Some of the most recent digital cameras have HDR and its variations built in. These cameras actually claim to be able to produce a better images by exposing for shadows and highlights in the same scene. This would be very useful for nighttime photography and landscapes with dark shadows and bright skies. I look forward to seeing some very creative work done with HDR photography.

Another HDR image emphasizing the drama of color.

The Ole Church in Winter

This is an experiment, using the new trial version of Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3. Looks kind of old. The product has its good points, but that name is a little lengthy.