Get down

Yes, even lower, lay flat on your belly, yes like that!
Now take a look around, do you see that half rotten leaf letting the light pass through these holes? That tiny mushroom? The dewdrop on the flower?
There is a whole new world to discover in your backyard, the city park or right beside the country road once you get on your belly. Don't mind your neighbours, they already know that you are strange! ;-)

You don't need much of equipment, one of those cheap aluminium coated trekking mats to keep dry and clean, a table tripod, some reflectors, silver, gold, white ( I made them myself by glueing cut out pieces of a survival blanket on a A4 cardboard for the silver and gold reflector and using high gloss photo paper for the white reflector). A unbreakable mirror can come handy when you need even more light.

So why those reflectors?
I am not a big fan of flashes, especially when you use a smartphone or compact camera. Either the lightning in the photo looks always the same or it does not show at all because you are too close to the object to have it in the beam. If you need an artificial light source go out shooting with a friend, wife, hubby ... who can hold a flashlight or fix a flashlight to a tripod.

Now let's get back to our shooting. You have found a spot which caught your interest, flowers, mushrooms, stones or a puddle, turn around it to get a feeling of how the light flows, to find the most dramatic angle, the most intriguing shadow play. Set up your camera and take a photo, check it out on the screen and adjust the angle if necessary, bring in the reflectors if need is or if you think that it will enhance the image. Do whatever crosses your mind and shoot (storage is cheap today, far cheaper than film in my beginning days).

As long as you are inspired keep on shooting, stop only when you feel that you have squeezed the spot dry or filled your storage.

Wildflowers

And after the lillies, the wildflowers and bees of the same park.

Arround the lilly pond

And my early photo hunt arround the lilly pond of the Jardin botanique!

Grey sunday

Kind of "blah" weather, not bad enough or not good enough to get really interesting images, a soft and even light shining through the rain clouds. Later in the Jardin Botanique there was almost something like sunshine.

So here are the results of my sunday morning walk:

And another Macro shot, detail of my Seagull 6x6.

Macro DIY

So I wanted to do some macro shots, but without a macro lens what to do?
I taped an old lens frontside back on my 55-200, built a remote controller and cut a begonia in the garden;

Here is the set up!

First thing, you get vignetting, the lower your zoom settings, the stronger the effect and the the zone of focal is, well small, not to say microscopic! Forget your auto-focus, it want work, you have to set the focus by moving the camera in tiny steps to the back or to the front (see my set up). But otherwise, it works!

Here are some examples:

Next on the wishlist

Next on my wishlist is a real macro lens, I do love getting down and close. There is so much to see when you get close to a flower, a tree or a stone.
The big problem is, they are hard to find second hand and new they are way out of my financial possibilities, so I have to wait to find THE occasion.

Well till then, either macro front lenses or as close as possible with my kit lenses.

And next on my to-do list a light table to photograph objects at home under controlled conditions (I don't dare to call it "studio").

At the market

Every sunday there is this market near the Garonne here in Bordeaux.

Sunday morning stroll

(Early) Sunday morning photo stroll

Tango dans les rues

Tango dans les rues

A group of tango dancers is showing off at the Place Pey Berland in Bordeaux.

A "Studio shot"

This is my first "controled" shot:

A rose and a lilly of the valley on a table in my bureau, the background is a simple bed sheet, the light comes from a window to the right and is reflected by a glossy white photo paper low to the left.
The lens is the 18-55 kit lens, ISO 100, f 5.6, shutter 1/3sec, focal 55mm and overexposed by 1.33 ev. Cropped in Paintshop Pro.

Almost 15 years

Almost 15 years without a SLR, and now I have a "new" Canon EOS 600D with two lenses, the 18-55 and the 55-200 kit lenses. Bought in a pawn shop!

And I am back into photography, almost unbelievable to take the camera to the eye and hear the sound of the shutter!

Some reflexes are still there, but other have to be re-learned or learned, since it is a digital camera, in some ways different from the "old" analog models I used before.

Here are some of the first shots I took: