Tamron Blog: Angle of View

Macro Madness – The Colorado Wildflower Bloom

By Rob Moody

It’s a very exciting time in Colorado. The wildflowers are starting to bloom all over Colorado and the neighboring states. Every year this slow and colorful parade starts low in elevation and progresses to higher altitudes as the spring turns to summer. It’s a dream macro playground for both macro enthusiasts and nature photographic professionals! If you don’t yet have a macro lens in your tool kit, this is the time of year to consider adding one. Whether it’s in your own garden or in my backyard, The Rocky Mountains, macro lenses offer you a great opportunity to adventure into a world within a world. In fact, you can find fascinating macro landscapes no matter where you live. They are all around us.

Below I have included wildflower images taken with the Tamron SP 60mm f/2.0 1:1 Macro lens. I love the way you can use very selective depth of field with this lens. Using F/stops like f/2.8 and f/2.0, I can bring unique focus to the subject while at the same time rendering the flowers in the background out of focus with less depth of field. I use f/stops like f/4 and higher if I desire greater depth of field or a more in focus background. I find photographing wildflowers to be incredibly relaxing and rewarding. You see great images of wildflowers all around you from the magazines you read to the websites and offices you visit. If you own your own DSLR, why not make this the year you create your own masterpiece to frame and put on the wall or post on the web? With a macro lens and a little practice, I know you could do it!

Please be careful when photographing wildflowers not to step on or damage the surrounding growth. A good quality tripod and the proper remote or cable release can make avoiding plant damage and macro photographing much easier. It’s likely that you will encounter wet areas as you look for freshly blooming wildflowers. Some form of pad(s) for your knees, elbows and hands comes in handy as you will find yourself resting on all four in back of the tripod for long periods. Practicing with your new macro lens and a tripod in the backyard can be very beneficial before that big vacation wildflower shoot. Whether it’s in your state or mine, I hope to see you along the trail.

On Vernal Pond

I call it my swamp, but it's really a vernal pond. A vernal pond is a body of water in a low area of the woods where the spring snow melts and the spring rains collect from higher ground. The ground is a hard compacted base, so the water doesn't seep into the earth, it has to evaporate for the pond to dry up. It will take months to dry up, and if we have a rainy summer it will stay wet all year.

I use knee high boots to navigate the perimeter of the pond.

I usually use my Tamron SP 180mm macro lens to give me a little reach for floating leaves and frogs, but today I decided I would try something different. I decided I would take my Tamron SP 70-300 VC lens and see how well it would work for this type of close-up photography. I'm not working close to the subjects or anywhere near the traditional macro ranges so this lens could be a good choice.

I was surprised how well the SP 70-300 worked and the minimum focusing distance never came into play as I was a good distance away from all my subjects. This lens with my crop sensor gave me a reach of 450mm, which is really nice for reaching out. This was really the first time I put the 70-300 to use, as I only concentrate on macro subjects, using my macro lenses. I was very impressed with the sharp images it produced. This looks like it will be my go to lens for the ponds shots.

Here I'm set up to shoot my first floating leaf.

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This morning there is a lot of tiny debris on the water which adds some nice textures around the leaves. Because the pond is right in the middle of the woods, and full of trees, I will get some nice reflections from the leaves overhead. The yellow color is the reflections from the leaves at the tops of the trees, that are being lit by the sun, turning them from green to a yellow.

Here is my first shot. f/stop set at f/32 for lots of depth field, as I want the whole leaf and all that nice texture in focus

The "Detail Extractor" in Nik Software is the perfect filter to pull out all the textures in the water and the leaf.

Here is the same leaf with a second leaf included in the frame. As I change angles the colors in the water also changes.

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I occasionally run across a leaf floating that has turned into a fall color, so many times I shoot these and people think they were shot in the fall. I decided to use this leaf in a set-up. When I walk through the pond it produces bubbles where I walk. I created some bubbles and placed this leaf in the bubbles. Moved back and set-up the shot.

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This leaf has a nice artistic design, and top it off with the textures and bright color in the water.

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Lots of ferns border the edge of the pond, so I thought it might be a unique shot if I place a fern on the colorful water.

That's all folks.

Kids in Kumasi

By André Costantini

Father Raphael now runs the basilica. It was not his first choice. Formerly, he had done more outreach and procurement of supplies for rural villages. But when the new archbishop was appointed, his grace decided it was time for the father to move into the city and run the cathedral. Though his work had changed, he still had involvement with many people who were dealing directly on the streets. Among them were three Nigerian nuns who had lived across from the basilica for the past eight years, and as long as there was funding, they didn't have plans to go anywhere. The former archbishop had started their program and had recruited the three Nigerian nuns. Their program had grown, now with several employees and with volunteers supplied mainly from the Netherlands. It was a small chain of events that lead to our meeting. The father had borrowed their van to pick us up and as I knew the father and we needed to return their van, it was at this point I learned of their program.

Every morning during the week, the nuns and volunteers would meet and decide who would go into the field and who would remain. They were not there to convert but to provide support. Their mission is to go visit communities of street children in and around Kumasi market and make them aware of their facilities including the opportunity to bathe, participate in activities and should they want, have the opportunity to return home. Kumasi market is the largest market in Ghana, with the promise of opportunity for work and draws hundreds of kids from broken homes or those from impoverished regions. Many of these children are under the age of 12. The work that they typically do is moving products from place to place in the typical Ghanaian way, with a large bowl on their heads.

One of the nuns offered to take me through the market and show me what they do and some of the places where the children congregate. Several days later when I had a free morning I spent the morning with them. When we returned back to their facility, many children had come. I offered to take portraits for those who wanted to. Some did, some didn't. 25 children decided to be photographed. It wasn't until that evening that I realized all 25 individual portraits were taken in 8 minutes. As I didn't recall feeling rushed, it is times like these I am reminded that photography has the ability to alter time as well as capture a slice of it. 7 of the 25 are depicted here. All images were taken with the New Tamron SP 24-70 f2.8 VC at various focal lengths mostly f4.0 1/400th.

Sometimes All It Takes Is A Look Back

 By Ken Hubbard

Whenever I go without shooting images for a week or two, I know it's time to commit myself to looking through images that I had taken a few years ago. I do this in order to take a fresh look at images from the past, and more often than not I find 1 or 2 images that I placed in a DNU (Do Not Use) folder that end up being pretty good. For all of us, our tastes and styles of what we like or dislike is constantly changing. So, going back to images every so often is a good habit to get into. For the photographer that is new to digital retouching this is even more important to do, since your abilities to color correct and retouch images will get better with time. You will be able to go back to images that may have been beyond your abilities in the beginning but may be much easier to deal with now, allowing you to make them look the way you want. So, don't just put your images in a folder on your desktop or external hard drive and forget about them, I can almost guarantee there are some great images just waiting for you to take a second look at them.

On my last look back at images from years past, I found this dramatic road image which was taken while driving to Zion National Park. For some reason I had completely ignored it and never gave it a second glance until now. At the time, I had been driving through some pretty good thunderstorms from the moment I left Las Vegas on highway 15. As I made my way closer to Zion, now on Route 9 somewhere between the towns of La Verkin & Virgin, UT  the rain stopped and the clouds started to break a little. All of a sudden there was a bright light in my rear view and side mirrors, and when I looked back this is what I saw. Of course I immediately pulled to the side of the road grabbed my camera (Nikon D700 with the Tamron 28-300mm VC lens) and started shooting. I can't tell you why I left it in a folder till now, but what I can say is don't forget to look back!