Flowers Under Glass

A friend told me about a cool way to create an artsy photo.  When taking a flower picture, put a piece of art glass between the camera lens and the flower.

Here is a columbine naturally.

Here it is behind the artglass.

Here are a group of daylilies.

You have more distortion when the glass is farther from the flowers. And it is a little more realistic when the glass is closer to the flowers.

June 15 - Nature Photography Day

What does a nature photographer do on Nature Photography Day...why she goes out and takes pictures.  It was a beautiful day and my husband and I planned a bike ride at the Chicago Botanic Gardens and southward through some of the Cook County forest preserves.  Some things we saw on the way were .....the Japanese Gardens

and a pair of swans with cygnets.

We came back and had lunch at the garden's cafe, took a tour of a nice photo exhibit by the Garden Photographic Society and took in part of the gardens including these lily pads

The gardens were advertising their new exhibit Butterflies and Blooms where they have about 600 butterflies.  We decided to check it out and I had fun photographing these pretty flitters.

It was a great day over all.  Happy summer photographing to you.





Fireworks

    


     Summer is here and that means one of my favorite things....fireworks!  Winthrop Harbor had their annual summer faire this weekend and with that they had fireworks tonight.  I had to experiment taking a lot of pictures to get a few nice images captured.  These are some of my favorites.  They look like exotic flowers.
     To take these pictures, I set my camera at ISO 100, f8 and put my camera on a tripod.  I experimented with taking pictures at 3 sec., 6 sec., 8 sec. and 10 sec.  This way I could get just one burst or a few bursts in the same picture.