It was a slow day along the Susquhanna River in Maryland on Saturday. The Eagles weren’t really flying much so I turned my attention to this grasshopper that was sitting on the fence.

Nikon D300, hand held, Aperture Priority mode. F13 @ 1/160th second shutter speed and ISO 200. Sigma 105mm F2.8 EX DG Macro lens. Even at F13, that lens has a horrifyingly short depth of field.

Walter likes to sit at the top of the waterfall that empties into my Parent’s backyard pond. He sits up there for hours and then you’ll see him leap high into air and land in the butterfly bush that sits next to the top of the waterfall. Sometimes he gets himself lunch that way and sometimes he gets hung up in the bush and will sit there looking at you with an expression that seems to say “..a little help ?”. I’ve only ever had to shake him out of the bush one time. Most other times he succumbs to gravity’s wishes and lands back in the waterfall.

For more information on Green Frogs, visit this page.

Shot in the backyard pond at my parent’s house with my new Sigma 105mm EX DG Macro lens from about eight feet away. Manual focus using liveview and the Zacuto Z-Finder Pro 3X,

A Monarch Butterfly attends to a flower in the Hershey Gardens Butterfly House on Sunday 6-19-2011. For more information on Monarch’s, visit this page.

I had a chance to try some more macro photography over at my Parent’s place today. My parents were being visited by some of our relatives from Long Island and they had brought a flower with them for my Grandmother as a way of remembering my Aunt who died of Cancer back in May. I think it may have been from my Aunt’s garden. I’m not sure what specific kind of flower it is but I decided to take a few shots of it for my Grandmother. Luckily I had my camera gear with me so I was able to take the shots for her.

A shot showing the setup I used for this one is available by clicking here.

I tried my hand at some macro photography today. I went over to my Parent’s house and spent some time photographing the various flowers around their pond and waterfall and got lucky with this Ladybug. We were just remarking the other day that its been a long time since any of us had seen a Ladybug in the area. For more information on Ladybugs, see www.ladybuglady.com/LadybugsFAQ.htm. For more information on Daylilies visit this page on Wikipedia.

D7000 Single shot, Aperture Priority at F14, ISO 100 with SB-900 flash and ring flash adapter shot in TTL flash mode. I used a cheap set of close-up filters that I had bought for my Tamron 28-75mm lens a few years ago. This one was done with the 4X filter from that set. I had planned on spending more time shooting macro in their back yard but, true to form, the wind started picking up making macro shooting nearly impossible.

They say when you try something new in photography you only get good at it by making 10,000 mistakes first. Here is my mistake # 1. I’ve never tried to set anything up in a pseduo-studio setting before so I “built” a mini studio setup and mounted a suitable background on a wall, purchased a flower from the local supermarket on the way home from work and tried to take my first flower macro shot. I bought a Canon 500D 77mm closeup diopter filter that screws to the front of my Nikon 70-200mm F2.8 AFS-VRG lens and effectively turns it into a cheap macro alternative lens setup and that’s what I used on this one.

As the weather gets colder and my photography yearnings tend to be for indoor projects, I’m going to try and improve my mini-studio setup and purchase a softbox and some other goodies and try to get this looking a little better with each shot.