Today's walk report: 051913

Okay, back to merely pointing the camera and pushing the button?
Maybe... with an exception or two.

Like this... I was sitting having a $1.75, 20 oz. vending machine ripoff bottle of Aquafina water when I took this. Sun's out, it was only 5:51 PM but I did an Auto Tone in Photoshop on the image and this is what I got. I kind of liked it so...

This guy practically flew right in my face before landing here.

I realized I almost never do normal, this is where I was snapshots. So here are a few pictures of the botanical garden I'm always visiting. The sun's coming down and hitting stuff rather sharply but it's what it is.

Right at the entrance.

The opposite side of the entrance. My shortcut to where the "action" is.

Straight ahead to the pond.

There's another side beyond this and in front of that distant building (classrooms) the section up there being the Australian natives area of the garden. Lots of eucalyptus. Did you know there are over  700 species of eucalyptus in Australia? Good thing the Koalas like them so much.

I tried two more focus stacked images since I had different lenses today. This 1st one of the yellow flower (Australian native section) is 14 images using a Canon 70-300mm, backed down to about 170mm with a Canon 500D close-up attachment. I tried this two ways. One manually adjusting the focus ring and two, leaning into the background to focus with finger on the shutter button. This was the leaning thing. The DOF is so narrow that we're only talking about moving 2 or 3" and since I was moving straight in it worked OK. By the time the background leaves come into focus the flower is grossly out of focus. Photo Blend has some trouble with that and I had some additional clean up to do once I cropped and flattened the stacked image.

This was a 6 shot stack at 300mm manually focused. I thought this came out pretty nice.

Passiflora edulis, space bar for bees.