Sunday, March 21, 2010

March 20: DBG in Spring

Owen and I took a trip to the Desert Botanical Garden yesterday. It was a beautiful day, I wanted to get Owen (and myself) out of the house for a while, get some exercise, and I wanted to see the butterfly display they had before it got too hot. We had a great time! Owen wasn't visibly excited to see the butterflies, but I can tell he was intrigued and enjoyed the trip as a whole. The Garden sets up a tent (kind of like a green house) with lots of flowers and they release (or hatch maybe?) a bunch of butterflies. You get to walk around in the tent with the butterflies, so you get to see them up close, and occasionally they'll even land on you. It was interesting how many people were out with some fancy camera equipment.

You can see the rest of my pictures from the trip on my Picasa site.


From Desert Botanical Garden March 20th, 2010



155mm, f/4.0, 1/125s, ISO 100, no post-processing

  • I picked this photo because there were 3 butterflies and I liked the colors.
  • I think this is a bit bright. I used aperture priority mode and didn't play around with the settings on the camera because I mainly wanted to make sure that Owen had a good time. I didn't want to ignore him too long playing with the camera.

From Desert Botanical Garden March 20th, 2010

200mm, f/4.0, 1/250s, ISO 100, no post-processing

  • The Garden also has some Alan Houser statues exhibited throughout the walkways. This one struck my eye before we got close to it on the trail. I've heard a few different people say that you need to be creative when photographing other people's art, otherwise it's just their art, not yours.
  • I like the perspective of seeing her from afar, mixed in with the vegetation.
  • This may be improved if I cropped it to use the rule of thirds (instead of having her right in the middle of the frame).
Posted by joanneaspinall at 12:26 PM

2 comments:

  1. AnonymousMarch 21, 2010 at 4:27 PM

    The first one is fantastic! And I've learned that because I shoot in manual 99% of the time, I've gotten pretty quick on the controls with adjustments. If you notice the picture is brighter than you want it when the lightmeter says it's "correct," it's pretty easy to click the shutter speed up 1/3 or 2/3 of a stop and shoot again. Usually you don't even need to take the eyepiece away from your face.

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  2. AnonymousMarch 22, 2010 at 2:24 PM

    We released butterflies in the aviary at the zoo once. They are shipped in a box packed in a cooler inside little parchment envelopes to induce a state of hibernation. You had to slide them out and onto your hand in the sun to warm up and "wake up." They sit for about 5 minutes before they fly off. I had about 20 on my shoulders and arms while I opened others. :) Such a neat experience!

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