macro | little home by hand

Okay, I vaguely remember promising sunset photos 😉 So here comes the third installment of Ameland photos.
First of all, some wildlife: there are thousands of birds on the island, mostly sea-gulls. Large areas of the island serve as nature reserve and are pretty much left alone.

While the days were sunny, the dew in the morning made for some nice photos too (this one was taken with my Macro Snap-on lens Raynox DCR-250):

The island was so deserted that we hardly met any people at all. It is amazing how fast you get used to this quiet. When we even went to a beach cafe where there were people and especially on the way home on the highway it was a total culture shock!

This buddy lived at the place where we were staying (highly recommendable by the way) and made it very clear he was used to coming inside and treated like a Prince. This is his ‘Are you thick? Go on open the door’ look.

Ok, here’s the sunset photos at last! I took so many and it was hard to narrow them down. I still cannot decide which of these two would be better for the shop? I’d love to hear your suggestions on that!
number 1

or number 2?

The technical data for these are: Canon 450d, 50mm 1.4, f22, ISO100, manual metering, shutter speed between 1.3 and 2 seconds and I used a tripod (obviously).
After the sunset we hurried up to the dunes to photograph the lighthouse. It actually gets dark very quickly once the sun has set and when you’re standing on an empty beach all alone and the lights on your bike don’t work it’s kinda creepy. We pretty much hurried home after a few shots.

And here’s the last one, another sunset on a different day and a different beach. We almost stayed home because it was cloudy and we were tired and it was freezing…but boy, was it worth it!

You can’t see it in this photo but there was a seal swimming and hunting mere meters away from us in the water! We’d see his head popping up now and then, he was probably wondering what the two girls were doing, just standing there for 45mins in the cold on a deserted beach 😉

I am working like crazy to finish that d*** thesis and because I have nothing else to talk about I thought I’d to a very ‘technical’ photography post for once. I hope I’m not boring y’all too much, but I will put some pretty pictures in here for compensation 🙂

I just love shallow depth-of-field and bokeh. It’s not easy to achieve without a DSLR though.
Before I got my 50mm 1.4 lens I used to always shoot wide open, that is, opening up the aperture to its biggest opening/smallest number. With my Canon 450D that depended on the lens I was using (f4.5 on the kit lens 18-55mm and the 70-300mm and I think f3.5 on my dad’s 28-135mm). Before I got my DSLR however, I had a Fuji S5600 (a bridge camera) and even though the smallest f-stop was 2.8 it wasn’t easy getting that lovely bokeh.

There are a couple of tricks of course but for those great macro shots of flowers and such I opted to buy a snap-on macro lens, the Raynox DCR-250. Wow, that opened up a whole new world!
This shot was taken on my balcony, it shows raindrops in a spider web:

Those macro lenses reduce your area in focus to nearly a pinpoint so they take a LOT of practice. Your first 100 or so images will be blurry, trust me. But when you get to know that lens a little, boy, will you have fun!
This one was taken on the same rainy day, on the bamboo which since has not survived my gardening skills (seriously who manages to kill bamboo? they’re like the most undemanding plants ever):

I have a lovely close-up of ladybugs somewhere on another harddrive but since I am too ~~lazy~~ busy to search for it (and dying to get back to my thesis…kidding here) I will safe that for another day and leave you with a picture of my sweet kitty’s nose…it kind of sparkles in the sun…vampire kitty anyone??