Backyard Macros

On April 22nd, 2017, I took some macro photos in my backyard of flowers, dandelions, and other things. With the San Francisco Bay Area mega storms the past few months, the wild flowers has been blooming like crazy. My backyard is no different. Here are the photos I took that day. The photos are shot using my Canon EOS 5D Mark III with my Kenko Extension Tubes and Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens. I will be splitting the photos into 2 parts.

Full Resolution Photos: If you want to see full resolution photos of any of the photos you see here, use the following links. If you wish to purchase prints of any of the photos, please contact me here. To see my best macro photos, use this link. To see all of my photos shot at home, use this link.

In this blog post, I have the macro photos of flowers, and other things. My dandelion macros can be viewed here.

Wild Flower Macro 

Wild Flower Macro 

Wild Flower Macro 

Black and white process of the photo above. 

 Clover Macro

Lima Bean Flowers 

Black and white process of the photo above. 

Lima Bean Flowers 

 Black and white process of the photo above.

Rose Macro 

Sweet Alyssum (Lobularia maritima) Macro

Sweet Alyssum (Lobularia maritima) Macro

 Black and white process of the photo above.

Flower Macro 

Black and white process of the photo above. 

Snail Macro

This is all the photos for today! I hope you have enjoyed the photos! Again, my dandelion macros can be viewed here. Please don't forget to share the blog post with your friends and family members! Also, if you want to get notifications when I post up more photos, "Like" us on Facebook or follow me on Twitter and Instagram. These links can also be found on the top of the right sidebar.

Dandelion Macros

On April 22nd, 2017, I took some macro photos in my backyard of flowers, dandelions, and other things. With the San Francisco Bay Area mega storms the past few months, the wild flowers has been blooming like crazy. My backyard is no different. Here are the photos I took that day. The photos are shot using my Canon EOS 5D Mark III with my Kenko Extension Tubes and Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens. I will be splitting the photos into 2 parts.

Full Resolution Photos: If you want to see full resolution photos of any of the photos you see here, use the following links. If you wish to purchase prints of any of the photos, please contact me here. To see my best macro photos, use this link. To see all of my photos shot at home, use this link.

In this blog post, I have the macro photos of dandelions. The rest of my macros can be viewed here.

A dandelion that didn't fully bloom yet.

Black and white process of the photo above.

Dandelion Flower

Black and white process of the photo above.

Abstract shot of a dandelion after it has been blown.

Black and white process of the photo above. I think the black and white actually turned out better than the colored one. In my opinion, one of the best photos I've taken and processed.

Dandelion Macro

Black and white process of the photo above.

Dandelion Macro

Black and white process of the photo above.

Dandelion Macro

Black and white process of the photo above.

This is all the photos for today! I hope you have enjoyed the photos! The rest of my macros can be viewed here. Please don't forget to share the blog post with your friends and family members! Also, if you want to get notifications when I post up more photos, "Like" us on Facebook or follow me on Twitter and Instagram. These links can also be found on the top of the right sidebar.

San Francisco Street Photography

Three days ago, I had some things to do in San Francisco. I thought I might as well take along my camera and use the opportunity for some photos. Here are the photos I took. :) This blog post is on the street photography I did while in San Francisco. I have color photos and black and white, and a few special process black and whites.

Full Resolution Photos and Prints: If you want to see full resolution photos or buy prints of any of the photos you see, they are up on my portfolio for viewing. To view my best day time shots of San Francisco, use this link. To view all of my photos from that photowalk, use this link.

Parts: Treasure Island Sunset | San Francisco Street Photography | The Embarcadero | 

I am going to start off with the photos of bricks I shot.

These were bricks on the side of the San Francisco General Hospital. I thought the bricks would make a nice pattern so I took a few shots.

Here is a different pattern of bricks on the wall.

Black and white processes I did on the bricks. This one is for the 2nd brick photo.

The other black and white process. This one is for the 3rd brick photo.

I then took the black and white photos and added color to them. Here are the results. This above one is of the 1st black and white photo. 

A rainbow process of the 2nd black and white photo. 

Photography Tip: The colorized black and whites were all post processed in Photoshop. I won't go into too much detail, but first you want to create several  new layers that will cover the original photograph. Then I used mostly gradients, with some layer masking on the "checkerboard" design below. You may want to turn down the opacity during the gradient making so that the original photo shows through and you can get a rough idea how it will look. After that, you want to take all those color layers and blend it in using "Soft Light". If you want to see the original PSD file for personal educational use, I'd be happy to give it to you. If you want to, just email me via the email on my "About the Photographer" page. 

I did a few more processes on that image. Here is a red and yellow one, but it did end up looking a bit orange. 

I thought the above results looked cool so I also did a blue and green one.

I also went to Chinatown for this San Francisco trip. I saw a fire hydrant, and took a photo. 

Here is a black and white process of the above image. 

These are all the photos for today, I hope you have enjoyed them. Please don't forget to share the blog post with your friends and family members! Also, if you want to get notifications when I post up more photos, "Like" us on Facebook or follow me on Twitter and Google+. These links can also be found on the top of the right sidebar.

Parts: Treasure Island Sunset | San Francisco Street Photography | The Embarcadero | 

64MB Compact Flash

While I was digging through my old stuff, I came across this. This is a 64MB SanDisk CompactFlash card. Apparently this was my dads, and when I plugged it into my computer, there was still computer map software our family used at least a decade back! This sure is a piece of history here.

It is weird how fast technology has advanced. A memory card like this would have lasted a whole vacation a decade back, but now, I would, at most, get 3 RAW files out of this. This would be junk to most people, but sure makes a great image for a photographer.

Full Resolution Photos and Prints: If you want to see full resolution photos or buy prints of any of the photos you see, they are up on my portfolio for viewing. See my best product photography here. See all of my product photography photos here.

These are all the photos for today. I hope you have enjoyed this "travel back in time". Please don't forget to share the blog post with your friends and family members! Also, if you want to get notifications when I post up more photos, "Like" us on Facebook or follow me on Twitter and Google+. These links can also be found on the top of the right sidebar.

Message from the Photographer: I hate just making short blog posts like this. I love showing you guys more photos, but I am currently on holiday right now. What I did was "finish" the blog post the day before I left, and saved it as a draft. When I want to post it, I just need to click "Publish". I hope you understand. I know very well I'll be very tired by the end of the day but I didn't want to leave you guys with no new photos so this is what I thought up. 😀

Close Up Lego Photography

Remember those Legos that you used to play with as a kid? You can still put those to pretty good use! Here are a few photos I shot with my Legos which I dug out of my closet somewhere along with an old Burger King toy I had. Those old toys you have make great close up subjects, and a great idea if you are stuck at home on a rainy day. :) I hope you enjoy viewing these shots.

Full Resolution Photos and Prints: If you want to see full resolution photos of any of the photos you see, they are up on my portfolio for viewing. See my best product photography here. See all of my product photography photos here.

Message from the Photographer: Summer classes have started for me, which will take quite a lot of my time. If I don't post for a day, this is probably why. I hope you all understand. :) I will try to keep up doing one every other day.

On the left I have this Homer (The Simpsons) as Godzilla toy I got from Burger King years ago. On the right I have 2 Lego mini figures (no clue which set they came from).  

 Another photo of the same set up. While background achieved using a piece of paper. 

Now a photo of just the Lego mini figures.  

A photo of Homer (The Simpsons) as Godzilla. Got this at Burger King years ago. 

These are all the photos for today. I hope you have enjoyed viewing them. Please don't forget to share the blog post with your friends and family members! Also, if you want to get notifications when I post up more photos, "Like" us on Facebook or follow me on Twitter and Google+. These links can also be found on the top of the right sidebar.

Fruit Picking in Brentwood, CA

Brentwood, CA has many self pick farms. When the time is right, and the fruits are ripe, many farms open up for you to go in and pick the fruits yourself. A while back, I did just that out in the country side. While I didn't really pick much fruit (my friends and family did most of that), I did take some photos. Here are the photos I took on the trip out in the country side. Most of these photos are from Brentwood or from surrounding cities. I forgot my Canon GP-E2 GPS that day so I don't have exact locations for these shots.

Full Resolution Photos and Prints: If you want to see full resolution photos or buy prints of any of the photos you see, they are up on my portfolio for viewing. View my best Brentwood photos here. To see all the photos of my trip, use this link.

The first farm I was at was a cherry farm called "Nunn Better Farms". Here is a shot of some cherries on the tree.

A few portrait shot of trees at Nunn Better Farms.

In the parking lot of Nunn Better Farms, I spotted a nice shot of an adjacent field. I thought the lines in the field made really great lead-in lines, so I took a few shots from different perspectives.

After picking cherries my family and friends decided to go to a peach farm to go picking peaches. Not sure what the name is for this farm, but there were some run down buildings there that I thought would make a great shot. Above is a regular shot of one of the buildings. 

I then proceeded to take an HDR composition of the building from a different perspective. 

Photography Tip: HDR compositions are very useful with buildings like this. See how the "dark shadows" in the building are also lit up? You can do this without driving the noise up in the photo when doing this with a multiple exposure HDR composition. Just exposure bracket your shots in camera and then combine them into HDR using Photoshop in post. I enjoy processing them via the 32-bit process because the colors look more natural.

A few photos of the peaches on the farm. 

A shot of the peach field. I thought the gap between the trees made a great lead in line. Sadly the sky was not very good that day and it started to rain a little bit when I was about to leave. Pretty sure the shot would have been much better on a sunny day.

A shot of the road and a field adjacent to the farm. A drop of rain actually got on my lens and you can see it on the left. 

This is a shot I took on my way home. This is in Byron, CA of a river. Approximate location of this image was at 37.812242,-121.57854. Thanks Google Maps and Street View! The reason I was able to find the location of this one is because the river is very easy to spot on the map, plus I remembered what street it was. 

These are all the photos for today. I hope you have enjoyed viewing them. Please don't forget to share the blog post with your friends and family members! Also, if you want to get notifications when I post up more photos, "Like" us on Facebook or follow me on Twitter and Google+. These links can also be found on the top of the right sidebar.