Edwards Gardens Texture Challenge

The challenge this week for the Toronto Photography Meetup meetup was to try to capture texture. The location was Edwards Gardens, a semi-formal garden, wedding picture paradise. Texture, love nature and textures in nature equals fractals up close or far away should be easy.

The rest of the pictures are here.

I don't own a macro lens, The closest lens I have is the Canon kit lens 18-55mm from 0.9 feet to infinity. Adequate but a bit slow in focusing and needs a fair amount of light. My first problem was getting in close enough, the focus motor kept hunting. I had to change to manual focus and set the lens at minimum focus distance. To focus I moved in or out till the image in the Canon's tiny view screen seemed to be with my poor eyesight in focus. The next problem was the slight wind, with a depth of field of about 1/4" any swaying will put the object out of focus.

This shot was easy, but had to watch for saturation in the red. I like the way the last of the raindrops from the days rain beads up on the pedals.

Any way add a close up lens or a lens extension or a macro lens to my ever growing shopping list.

I brought my first Tripod for my pinhole camera experiments. I don't count my dirt cheap terrible to use mini-table top tripod as a real tripod. I brought a Velbon Sherpa 250.




Pluses are:

• it is mostly metal
  
• sturdy 3 - section legs
• camera quick release
  
• really like the smoothness of the head
• The head can be mounted on the bottom of the tripod allowing some low angle to the ground shots
  
• locking lever locks both rotational axis at the same time
• aprox. $100 cdn

Neutral:

• weight 2kg
• closed length 60 cm
• it dosn't have a handle or a carrying bag (The carrying bag from one of my cheap walmart folding chairs works perfectly)
  

As this my first tripod I am not the person to go for camera equipment reccomendations. But one of the photographers tryed it out, liked it and wrote down the part number.

Anyway back to the shoot. I used the tripod to take my first long exposure shot of moving water. As my lens only stops down to f22 it wasn't that long of a time. I find out that I need another filter, a neutral density filter ND for short. While I am at it I should add a polarizing filter or two to the shopping list.

At the prerequisite preshoot 2 hour lunch. I thought it would be interesting to make a salt and pepper, zen garden texture shot, to get a headstart on the challenge. After labouriously designing and building the garden using a fork and a swizzle stick as a rake the picture were less the then interesting. That is until a radio remote fired flash was but onto the table. So add a remote firing flash to the list.

Shopping wish list as a result of this outing:

• close up lens or a lens extension or a macro lens
• neutral density and polarising filters (for how many lenses as each Canon lense seems to need a different size
• radio remote fired flash