VIRMOND PARK POTPOURRI

Virmond Park is situated on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan in Mequon, Wisconsin, where I live.  It includes a small woods, playground areas, open fields, and a prairie preserve area.  Nothing special, but it is convenient and close to where I live.  Here are a few photos of my last couple of visits to the park, all handheld.

The first couple are effectively nature macro shots that I converted to black & whites.

Queen Anne's Lace is a difficult subject photographically.  It is relatively flat when viewed from directly above the blossom, and that means that from that point of view depth of field is not a serious issue.  However, that is generally not a particularly interesting perspective, although the above flower does exhibit an interesting spiral structure.  But trying to photograph the flower from the side creates a significant depth of field problem, one that I have not been good at solving.  One more thing: Queen Anne's Lace is a relatively tall and spindly plant with a large flower at the top.  The problem with that is wind.  Even a zephyr can lead to the flower's swaying, making crisp focus especially difficult.

And below is an indifferent leaf arrangement.  I was able to blur out the background by shooting this at f/4.  But there is just not enough contrast to make this interesting.

Below is another shallow depth of field shot that is a bit more interesting, I think.

This was shot at f/6.3.  This allowed the white flowers (actually Queen Anne's Lace) in the background to add some interest to the shot.

And here is another one of my vertical pan shots.

As I've said before, it seems like these shots are most effective when there is strong contrast in the direction of the panning.  In this case there was a building on the left, that is essentially unidentifiable, that I kept in the shot.  For the record this was shot at a shutter speed of 1/20th second.  Here aperture is not particularly important.

Finally, I caught this candid shot of a couple sitting on a bench at the edge of the bluff above the lake.  Because of the contrast between the sky, on the one hand, and the people, bench and trees, on the other, it was easy to convert this into a black & white silhouette.  The figure pointing and the tree were what made this shot work.

John