Landscape

In Central Park after the hurricane.

Prospect Park waterfall

A visit to Prospect Park in Brooklyn a month ago gave me an opportunity to take a close-up photograph of a waterfall at long last. Handheld for 1/3s was a bit of a challenge, but bracing myself carefully and choosing from the best of multiple exposures didn't turn out too badly.

Waterfall

The plant sticking into the frame at the lower left gives some variety, but since it didn't stay still in the breeze it came out blurred.

Leaves

A photo I took a while ago that I came across again recently. The white background is due to a combination of a foggy day and short depth of field. I had to overexpose by quite a bit to get the reds to come out really red instead of brown.

Red and white

Muir Woods

While in San Francisco we took a day trip out to Muir Woods to see the redwoods. Usually I photograph city scenes so this was quite a departure! For the first hour or two it was cloudy but eventually the sun came out, though it didn't make that much difference in taking photos down on the forest floor, where it was much darker than I was expecting.

To the sky

Small leaves and large trees

Giants

Blue and green

Forest stream

I had great hopes for this photo since the mixture of sunlight and shadow on the bed of the stream turned out very nicely, but it ended up coming out unfocused. The shadows are not bad, though. 

Crow

It wasn't really clear what this crow was doing at the entrance, other than waiting to be photographed, but it attracted a lot of attention.

New York Botanical Garden

On Independence Day we took a trip out to the New York Botanical Garden, next to the Bronx Zoo.

Conservatory

Reflections again, using a circular polariser to get a deep blue sky.

Getting the sky to be blue mystified me when I got a DSLR last year. With a point-and-shoot I had learned to be very careful not to shoot into the sun to avoid having the foreground in shadow. Metering on the DSLR took care of the shadow problem but left me with greenish, washed-out skies, and it was a while before I realised that it was because I had forgotten the perils of shooting into the sun. I've relearned that lesson, but a circular polariser mitigates it to an extent and gives bluer skies overall. Using a reflector to increase the light on a foreground subject relative to the background would help as well, but so far I've been put off by the inconvenience of carrying one (I'm a lazy photographer).

Stone Mill

An average shot of the Stone Mill on the Bronx River that runs through the garden, but the framing turned out nicely. Built in 1840!