Tag Archives: cat

Marmalade

I’ve been terribly neglectful of posting, or even shooting photographs lately.  Guess I’ve been in a photography funk, just haven’t been that inspired for the past few months.

A couple of weeks ago, we flew out to Mississippi to visit my family, and while there I got to meet my Mom’s new litter of kittens.  There’s nothing cuter than a kitten, and nothing more photogenic.  So I did manage to get a few shots that I liked, even though most of the time it was too shady and cloudy to be able to capture their quick movements with the slow shutter speeds I was getting through the telephoto lens.  I had to wait until they were asleep, and then I got this one that I loved:

Marmalade

I shot this one in raw NEF format using my Nikon D700 and the 28-300mm lens, and processed in Paintshop Photo Pro X3. Since I was having to use such a large aperture opening (small F-stop) to get enough light to the sensor, I wound up with a very shallow depth-of-field, but in this case I think it totally works. I intentionally desaturated the color to add that little bit of innocence and wistfulness to the scene. Such cuties!

If you like my work, please subscribe to this blog and feel free to offer comments. You can also find me on:
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Evidence of Cat

For tonight’s post, I’m pulled out some unprocessed raw files from our last trip to Jerome.

Here’s a shot of one of the old abandoned cars that they have on display at the Gold King Mine ghost town.  I wish I could tell you what model year this Studebaker is, but I’ve never really been that good at identifying automobile models.  I was more interested in the paw prints in the dust on the windshield.

Evidence of Cat
HDR created from five bracketed photos processed in Photomatix v4. Post-processing in Paintshop Photo Pro X3, using Topaz Adjust / DeNoise.

If you like my work, please subscribe to this blog and feel free to offer comments. You can also find me on:
Facebook at ZannWalker Photography
Twitter @suzanne_hight
My Official Website at http://zannwalker.com

Thirsty (in Macro)

This evening I was playing around with my macro filters, trying to get some decent shots to submit to the photography group that I just joined (more about that in a moment).  I set up my lightbox with my poor excuse for lighting and props, mounted the camera on the tripod and spent about an hour getting totally frustrated.  Macro photography is totally different from what I normally shoot.  Trying to manage the depth of field, adjusting the aperture and trying to balance DOF to shutter speed, was driving me nuts.  The plane of focus was so small!  Finally I just grabbed the camera and started wandering around the house looking for things to shoot hand-held.  I even resorted to using the pop-up flash.

The cat wound up in my path while he was trying to get a drink of water from the bathroom sink (his favorite place to drink).  I got right in his face with the camera and the flash, and wound up with this shot:

Thirsty
Photo taken with a Nikon D700, 50mm lens with 10X macro filter, processed in Paintshop Photo Pro X3.

Yeah, I know it’s a little (ok, a lot) blown out on the bottom right, but I still like the way the flash stopped the water droplets right on the tip of Macho’s tongue. It made me laugh, and sometimes that’s a good thing!

Now, back to the photography group. I attended my first meetup last night of the AZPhotographersGroup. The meeting was an open forum where you could ask any question you wanted about photography. I learned so much just from the discussions around each of the questions. Then Nick, the organizer of the group, presented some tips on how to photograph people, which is what I’m starting to concentrate on now, and once again I picked up some great information. The people were all friendly and willing to share information with newbies such as myself.

The group is very active, with several organized events and photowalks each month. They also do monthly photo challenges where they present a theme and members submit photos relative to that theme. This month, it’s macro photography…which explains why I was playing with the 10x filter this evening. If you’re in the Phoenix/Tempe area, I recommend that you check them out. I’ve already signed up for a workshop next month on how to use an off-camera flash. Now all I have to do is get my hands on a flash unit before then!

If you like my work, please subscribe to this blog and feel free to offer comments.  You can also find me on Facebook at ZannWalker Photography.