One of our Christmas presents to each other with Christmas money we received from family was this beauty a 65mm macro lens. I had yet to play with it so I took it out in the backyard one day at lunch and shot some seedlings, garlic, and dill. It is pretty freakin’ amazing! I love using the reverse macro mounting technique and use it quite extensively, but this lens is crazy! The depth of field has a similar feeling to the reverse mounting, but it seems sometimes I can get more in focus in the whole frame with the macro lens.

It will definitely be a working experiment!

Last weekend I had the privilege to do a maternity session with one of my best friends. Stephanie and I met while sailing on the U.S.T.S. Texas Clipper II during the summer of 1998, between our senior year of high school and freshman year of college. I don’t recall how we got introduced but she, paired with our friends Michelle and Rosemarie and my friend from high school Erika, all became good friends in college. So, that summer we sailed through the Panama Canal and down through the southern Pacific Ocean and to the Galapagos Islands and here we are in 2011 when she is expecting her first child in February! Time flies!

I love this photo a lot because of these tiny little Aggie shoes. Her husband is an avid Longhorn, errrr…t-sip, and of course she bleeds maroon. She’s not the only one to be in a divided household, I know several others! Of course this might all be moot after November 24th and perhaps the final Aggie v. t.u. game.

We shot photos inside the nursery and then went to downtown McKinney to take the rest. We weren’t the only ones out there doing portraits, there were at least two other photographers out there. McKinney offers up a lot of unique backgrounds for shooting portraits and I’m glad to have asked Steph about going there. The only downside was the wind had kicked up that day so we had some hair-in-the-face issues.

It was definitely a learning experience for my first official gig as a portrait photographer and it gave me a bit of a buzz to keep doing it. I would love to do this a few times a month; coming up with creative ways to take portraits is exciting. After I started processing them at home I thought about all the shots that I wished I had gotten and just filed them away to remember later.

Can’t wait to meet the wee one in February!

A couple of weeks ago Chris and I had one overlapping day as he went to PA to work and I was heading back to Texas. Part of our day together was at Penn’s Cave and the first half of the day was spent at Leonard Harrison State Park and hiking down the Turkey Path to the bottom of Pine Creek Gorge. It was a beautiful hike down as is evident in the photos below. I highly recommend hitting this park up if you are in the area. The trail itself is switchbacked well and maintained nicely. Though I am out of mountain hiking shape and was still huffing and puffing, Chris and I still went up the hills quicker than the majority of folks on the trail. Take your time if you aren’t used to climbing mountains!

Down into the gorge….

Pine Creek, at the bottom of the Turkey Path.

We did not see any snakes out—a bit too chilly but if they were going to be out, that would have been the day—the sun was perfect.

Having been on steep, narrow trail, I wouldn’t say this was that at all. But to cover all the bases….

Looking up at the trail…

This one is an HDR, as are the three above, however I’m not sure I like the heavy contrast and color. I will probably rework this one eventually.

If we’d had more time I know we would have explored more and found other photographic adventures. Processing these photos has me itching to get out and take some more shots, but now that the time has changed my daylight will be limited in the evenings!

Since Chris and I hadn’t seen each other for two weeks we were able to get a day off together this last weekend in Pennsylvania. I was being sent home and he was going to be there for a few more weeks. We took off to sight-see around Pennsylvania and ended up at the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania. We snaked our way down the trail to see several water falls and then finally to Pine Creek itself.

The photo above is just a teaser to the rest I am going to process later this week. I had a bit of fun with this one, it was my first HDR image. I only merged two instead of the normal three, but I have some others I am going to try. I didn’t rely on a tripod, just holding my breath and resting the camera on rocks or railings to keep it in the same spot. I am not the biggest fan of HDR, some folks are really great at it while others can make it look cartoony and fake. I’m not sure if I completely like this one or not but it’s pretty good for my first time. I tried a few months ago but could never get it to look how I wanted it to look so I gave up. I suppose not all photos are supposed to be ‘the one’.

Chris’ tripod took this one for us.

Hope I can share some more waterfall photos soon!

Photo by Chris, click photo to see more details

We’ve been decorating our house with some of our work. It is nice to see our work off of the computer and on the wall! Not only that, but it reaffirms that we are doing something right!

Chris ordered canvas prints from Pixel 2 Canvas because they had a discount sale on particular canvas sizes. He opted for a 40×60 print of this shot taken in Fakahatchee Strand. The flowers up close are clamshell orchids, Encyclia cochleata. I was hesitant about the shot on the computer but I really love it printed. You can almost feel like you are walking through the swamp!

I went back and forth on what I wanted to print. What I liked, Chris didn’t. Not to say he didn’t like them, just not for our decor. We ended up settling on this macro shot of butterfly orchids Encyclia tampensis taken at Myakka River State Park several years ago in Florida. I’m very happy with this shot and I know that I have some others of the butterfly orchids that I want to have printed one day.

We had small prints done as well. This one and the next are mine.

Shot at an angle to keep the flash from bouncing. Just quick shots done for the blog.

Chris’ ghost orchid

And a nocturnum orchid

I can’t remember where Chris ordered this canvas from but it was different than Pixel 2 Canvas. This is the panther he saw last July in Fakahatchee.

Drop by Wildscape Photo and look at our galleries. Some of these photos are not on our galleries yet but are available for print if desired. Print Pricing. And if you want you can ‘like’ us on Facebook on the top left of the blog here. If you see something you like feel free to email me and we can discuss what you may be interested in and the sizes you would like! oceanicwilderness at gmail dot com

The weekend we moved to the Houston area we went out to Brazos Bend State Park to check out the Perseids in the night sky. We set up on a short boardwalk to a large pond not too long before sunset. This time I bought my tripod because we were aiming for star and moon shots. We ended up not seeing but a tiny handful of meteors due to the very bright moon. I ended up converting most of my photos to black and white because I liked the feeling of them better. I even tried an HDR image, something I haven’t done before. I’ve mostly avoided it because I can’t stand poorly done HDR imagery, the fake-cartoony images that that it sometimes creates. Chris has done some great HDR and other photographers I know have too, even RJ has done HDR with portrait photography. I tried to work with the photos I did but couldn’t get anything that I liked that didn’t look too cartoony or too undone. I’ll try another time.

Below are the three regular shots I liked best:

I had a couple of moon shots with an alligator in the front but I just couldn’t get it to work for me. I may work on a few more and see what I can come up with, but I liked the very simplistic black and white night shots.

What do you think?

There’s a pretty unique area where we are working called the Royal Fern Bog. It is a cypress and tupelo swamp covered in lizard’s tail (the white flowers in the photos) and royal ferns, Osmunda regalis. I shot these several weeks ago and I’m really happy with the very first one. It will probably make it to the Wildscape site.

Enjoy the bog!

I’m not looking forward to these spiders getting larger, they seem to get bigger by the day. We keep walking into their webs on an hourly basis, thankfully Chris is the web walker most days. Took me a bit to figure out which spider this was because it was a juvenile but I found a great resource here.

I love spiders from a distance and always see very cool ones in the mud and even walking on the water and floating plants in the Thicket. Wish I had my camera for those shots but when you are waste deep in mud and water, and carrying equipment and such, it isn’t a good idea.