After completing my long theater photography project today, I needed a bit of air. I set outside in the backyard, and I noticed that my cucumber plants started developing baby cucumbers! I grabbed my camera with the Lensbaby Velvet 56 and the +10 macro filter, and took these few images to share you with.

And I found a tiny garden helper on the dill as well:

I mentioned yesterday that I have been busy with some kind of a project. Here is the big reveal: my daughter is one of 190 students at her high school who take dance lessons. Once a year, in the spring, their dance teacher directs a dance show which is performed by all the dance students. The show is tonight and tomorrow night. I photographed the dancers during the two dance rehearsals with the purpose of sharing the pictures with the parents. Here is a miniature slideshow out of the thousands of pictures I took (the music is obviously not from the show):

 

I was supposed to post this yesterday (to keep up with my daily posts), but it was a very busy day for me. I’ll tell you about that in a different post later.

I chose this project for three different reasons. One is that I have been learning a tiny bit about food photography, and I wanted to try out some of what I had learned. Secondly, I haven’t done a comparison between lenses experiment for a while, and I want to find the best lens(es) for what I want to start now – which would be the third reason for the project. But I’d like to share that with you at another time.

This is what I tried yesterday:

I set up a plate of yummy strawberries on my dining room table, since I get the most natural light there. I used two white reflectors to bounce some of the light back on the fruit. I then used the following lenses with or without macro attachments and at various apertures: Nikon 50mm, Lensbaby Velvet 56, Single Glass, Double Glass, Twist 60 and Sol 45. I am going to show you the images that I liked the most – for different reasons. Some, because they somewhat resembled an image I would see in a magazine (with more props or better composition perhaps), others because of their very unusual looks and feelings. I’d be happy to know which images you appreciate the most.

  1. Nikon 50mm with 12mm macro extension tube

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This post is the continuation of yesterday’s post about our Bommer Canyon hike.

The hike we took was about 3-mile long loop on East Fork and Ridge Route paths. The panoramas will give you an idea of what the scenery looked like from different spots of the hike. (Click on images to open them larger in a new window.)

This next image was taken from Ridgeline Trail. In the background it covers (from left to right) West Irvine, Tustin and East Irvine (where we live).

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