Oh, so it turns out I’m a few days late in posting my thoughts on the whole 52 Frames photography challenge thing. Drats!

Here I was busily thinking of what I’d do for June’s first theme (music), due mere hours before I am reunited with my collections of albums and musical instruments. Alas!

Well, what did I accomplish over the last month? In short, I accomplished at least one very good photograph that I’m immensely proud of, as well as one that is as tossed off as it could possibly be. Well, let’s get to it, shall we?

18. Fabric

This is the tossed off one, thrown together moments before I planned to leave for the Pinchot Trail in what wound up being an aborted trip with a neat porcupine sighting.

Lessons learned:

1. Do, do, do, please make sure that you have image stabilization switched on when you’re holding your camera away from your body like that! (Of course, I would have done this if I noticed.)
2. High ISO to compensate for low light of the room and short shutter speed of the stabilization leads to lots of grain. (We already knew this though.)
3. Do mirror selfies in rooms with less stuff in the background, or at least with a lens with a larger aperture to get a blurred background. (We already knew this too.)
4. No, removing most of the colors doesn’t help.
5. That unicorn shirt is awesome, and it is definitely something one should wear to one’s sibling’s wedding.

Okay, so my take away is that I learned nothing.

No effort in, no learnings out.

19. ISO 100

Jokes on 52 Frames, the fools! They didn’t realize my camera’s base ISO is 200, and thus that’s what I used for this photo. I like the rendering, but there’s nothing spectacular about this shot in particular of a flower in the backyard.

Manual focus. Probably should have stopped it down a touch more, but I still think it’s a cool image.

20. Red

What is actually red in the nature of Southeast Pennsylvania? Literally nothing, and that’s why I cheated and went with magenta instead. I made it slightly more reddish in post, but not enough to make it unnatural. So, please don’t tell anyone!

As for bee photography, it can be difficult. It was near this particular bunch of flowers, that happened to be near a robin’s nest, where I accidentally disturbed a feeding. I didn’t notice the nest at all and felt super, super bad about it.

21. Portrait

This is what I’m gonna call a portrait of a cow with egret, which it absolutely is. No model could have stood so perfectly. I took exactly one shot from this angle, and I think it is pretty much perfect, though I want to work on the edit more – there’s some nasty artifacts from oversharpening + compression.

This was shot in Hana, HI.

22. Wide Angle

I like wide and ultra-wide angle photography. Sometimes, I even love it, but sometimes I find it difficult. It’s challenging to frame a shot when your perspective is going to encompass… everything.

This is a photograph of Pi’ilanihale Heiau, the biggest extant temple from the ancient Hawaiians. You can’t really get closer to it than this, but the wide angle makes it look even farther away than it is, while the plants seem relatively big.

Speaking of that, what’s technically wrong with this photo and niggling me?

Simple: The plants in the very foreground of the foreground are a bit blurry. I stopped down for depth of field, but should have made sure I used a higher shutter speed. I think they blew in the wind, and that motion was captured.

That’s what I get for using f/11, and 1/160 of a second.

I considered cropping it more, but then I said, “nah. Let’s leave everything in.”

So, that’s May done. Onto June!