Jamaica - flora and fauna

The red-billed swallow-tail hummingbird is the national bird of Jamaica. I photographed this one with a Nikon D800 and 70-200mm f/4 zoom.  The ISO was set to 640, which allowed me to set a shutter speed of 1/2000 second -- enough to freeze the bird's wings.

A green gecko

Right after photographing this conch shell at sunset I was swamped by a wave and dropped the Nikon D800 in the surf. I picked it up, toweled it off, and kept on shooting.  Nothing like a Nikon Pro body for durability.

Jamaica at night




This night shot with stars was taken on a Fuji X-Pro1 and 14mm lens shot wide open at f/2.8. The exposure was 17 seconds at an ISO of 1600. I used a high ISO to keep the exposure time down because I find that 30 seconds is about the longest you can go before there is too much blurring in the stars as they move through the night sky.



Moonset over the ocean with a crescent moon.  The moon is much brighter than the rest of the scene so its exposuter washes out.  I took some exposures just for the moon and will substitute the coorect one when I return to my studio computer where I have better control than on the laptop I am using while I travel.

From Jamaica

Some random shots from my first day in Jamaica.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Two heart shells photographed this morning on a beach in Jamaica with the Nikon D600, 24mm focal length on the Nikon 24-120mm lens set to f/20 for maximum depth of field.

I found these oil slicks on a wet sidewalk at the entrance to a parking garage and photographed them with the Sony RX100.  Setting the camera to square format, I took three photos with the intention of creating a triptych of prints later.

I liked the way the colors flowed from one to the other with a sidewalk break centered in the middle image.

This larger version of the center image of the triptych gives a clearer idea of the sidewalk detail.  The color was enhanced later in Photoshop by moving the images into the LAB color profile and working with them there.  Once the color work was completed, the images were finalized by converting them back to the Adobe RBG color profile. LAB is a much more extensive color profile allowing far greater range in the color palette.

Another composite image.  This time of a healthcare professional with a hospital environment.

We had a model in the studio today and photographed her as a dental hygienist seen from the perspective of the patient.  Later this image was composited with the photo from the blog post of a few days ago.  Because I shot each image specifically to be composited I was able to prepare them in a way that made the job of putting them together easier.  The hygienist, for instance, was photographed back lit by a studio tungsten lamp placed behind her to simulate the same type of lighting from the dental light. Also I photographed her from the same position I was in when I took the background shot, and used a similar lens focal length and depth of field.  As a result of this preparation, the two images blended together naturally, and the whole composite took only 20 minutes to complete.