Dave Wilson Photography » Nature

Palm Teeth

Dave Wilson — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:14:24 +0000

A close-up of a section of the bark of a palm tree and a pruned leaf. This is my entry for the Austin World Wide Photo Walk competition this year. In the past I've entered HDRs but this monochrome image generated using focus stacking in Photoshop took my fancy this year.

Water Lily Abstract

Dave Wilson — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 11:19:56 +0000

This is the last of the World Wide Photo Walk images for now. I was feeling in a bit of creative rut that morning so, when we got to the Turtle Pond, I decided to try the usual cure and shoot a few weird and wonderful abstracts. The movement effect in this shot was achieved in camera by zooming during a long exposure.

Given how bright the sun was that morning, to achieve a long enough shutter speed, I added a polariser (slowing things down by a couple of stops), set the ISO to Lo-1 and stopped the lens all the way down to f/38.

Owl Butterfly, Houston Museum of Natural Science

Dave Wilson — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 13:49:55 +0000

If you follow me on Twitter or Google+ you may be aware that my laptop has been infected by a nasty little virus that's redirecting all my Google searches to a bogus site. I've no idea what else it's doing so, until I get rid of it (which is proving tricky since none of the tools I've tried so far can see it), photo production is going to be somewhat curtailed - sorry.

For today, therefore, here's an image I had queued up for "emergency use'. It shows an Owl Butterfly at the wonderful Cockerell Butterfly Exhibit in the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Lighting was courtesy of my Nikon R1C1 Macro flash.

Cypress Roots and Needles, Pedernales River

Dave Wilson — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 11:54:39 +0000

This is the last of the pictures from last weekend's trip to Pedernales Falls State Park. As I mentioned earlier, I love cypress trees and one of their most interesting features are their complex buttress root systems. In this shot, I was drawn to the differing textures of the roots and the needles lying amongst them.

Eager Explorers, Pedernales River

Dave Wilson — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 11:17:02 +0000

This is almost certainly my favourite image from last weekend's trip to Pedernales Falls State Park. It was taken fairly early in the morning when the sun was creeping down into the valley but had not yet reached the river. The reflections were gorgeous and I was fortunate enough to catch my son and his friend at exactly the right place (and at a time when neither one was making a silly face).

As with all my posts, I would greatly appreciate feedback, positive or negative, on this image. If you don't like it, please help me out by saying what could have been done to make it better.

Cave, Pedernales River

Dave Wilson — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 11:19:32 +0000

With the water level down by the falls being so low, whole new vistas of exploration opportunity opened up. You could, for example, easily climb down to this L-shaped cave which is usually partly or wholly submerged. The Cub Scouts who were hiking there that day reckoned wandering through this cave was the highlight of the camp.

Cypress and Reflection, Pedernales River

Dave Wilson — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 11:20:51 +0000

In addition to the large cypress trees lining the banks that I mentioned yesterday, the Pedernales River also hosts quite a few unfortunate little cypress that grow from rocks within the main river's channel. All of these are short, almost bonsai-like, and grow angling in the downstream direction due, presumably, to punishment inflicted by flash floods over the years.

This image shows one of these mid-river trees and a reflection of morning light off the river surface.

Morning Reflection, Pedernales River

Dave Wilson — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 11:21:19 +0000

We reached the Pedernales River before the sun did on Saturday morning and, as the kids raced around excitedly pointing out fish in the various pools, I spent some time catching reflections of the morning sunlight as it crept down the sides of the wooded banks.

This shot was taken with a longish lens from several feet up the bank so that I could position this particularly nice, golden section of reflected forest near a solitary rock to give a rather peaceful composition.

Dark Skies at Pedernales Falls

Dave Wilson — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 21:20:29 +0000

The attentive among you may have noticed that there was no photoblog posting yesterday. Sorry about that - I was off camping with my Cub Scout son and forgot to schedule something to post while I was away. Hopefully you'll forgive me one day.

Talking of camping, I took the camera along (as always) and managed to gather the required shots for the pack web site and Flickr account and also a bunch for myself too. As a result, this week's offerings all come from Pedernales Falls State Park which lies between Dripping Springs and Johnson City and is about a 30 minute drive from our home. It's a gorgeous place and, despite the fact that the river is currently merely a trickly, still spectacular thanks to some fabulous rock formations and many deep pools that have so far failed to dry up.

This shot here was taken last night in the camp site and shows just how beautifully clear the skies out there are. This was a 30 second exposure taken with tungsten white balance using the 15mm fisheye lens. All the foreground lighting is spill from the main camp which lay to my left. The biggest problem taking this shot was finding a 30 second window during which no small boys were running in front of me brandishing glow sticks and flashlights! :-)

Owl Butterfly, Houston Museum of Natural Sciences

Dave Wilson — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 12:07:42 +0000

This is the last of the holiday pictures for now (until I do a second-pass edit). On our way to pick up the ship in Galveston, we stopped for a day in Houston to visit the museums. One of my favourite is the Houston Museum of Natural Science which is home to a superb butterfly exhibit. I spent 90 minutes or so in the hot and sticky rain-forest-like dome that houses the butterflies and got to play with my new Nikon R1C1 Wireless Close-Up Flash kit.

This image shows an Owl Butterfly resting on a tree.