A whale of a time

Quote

"Only after the last tree has been cut down.Only after the last river has been poisoned.Only after the last fish has been caught.Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten."- Cree Indian Prophecy

Photo Tip: Macro Photography Tools

What is Macro Photography?
"Macro photography" is simply another name for "close-up photography." The closer you can focus on your subject the larger it will appear in the frame, which is the point to macro photography -- to magnify small objects. Some purists insist that the term macro be reserved for images that are at least life-sized in the film -- an object 1" long must record an image 1" long or longer in the film to count as macro to these folks.
I prefer to speak more loosely of macro photography as being anything that uses some sort of technique that yields an image more magnified than would be possible with just an ordinary lens on the camera. For me, macro photography can have relatively small magnification factors -- just as long as there is more magnification than with a conventional lens by itself.
By the way, some people use the term "micro photography" instead of macro photography, but it's the same thing.

What is it good for?
Macro photography lets you fill the frame with small subjects. A picture of a caterpillar taken with a 50 mm lens from 10 feet away is likely to be uninteresting because the subject is a tiny speck in the photo. Make that same caterpillar fill the frame of film, however, and you've got an exciting photograph.
But you can do more than simply enlarge small subjects to fill the frame. You can use enough magnification to overfill the frame with the subject, abstracting out one part of the subject to stand for the whole. With enough magnification, you can make the photo an interesting abstraction where the viewer can't even tell what the original subject was. The possibilities of macro photography are limited only by your imagination.

Read further: http://www.edbergphoto.com/pages/Tip-macro-tools.html

At the right moment

Action on the water

Just before the stone hits the water...........

Taken in a shady area - but give the water a nice dark coulor

Photos: G. Beetge

Peruvian Andes/Machu Picchu

In 1912 Yale University professor and explorer Hiram Bingham was searching in the Peruvian Andes for the ancient Inca capital of Vilcabamba when he and his guide stumbled onto one of the greatest archaeological finds in history. Thanks to his photographs of the lost city of Machu Picchu, Bingham and National Geographic helped bring archaeology out of the field and into people’s homes.
Photograph by Hiram Bingham

North pole?

In April 1909, Admiral Robert Peary and his team (pictured here), including Inuits Ooqeah, Ooatah, Egingwah, and Seeglo and fellow American Matthew Henson, became the first explorers to reach what they believed to be the North Pole. Later studies found that Peary was actually 30 to 60 miles (50 to 100 kilometers) short of the Pole.
Photograph by Admiral Robert E. Peary

Flashlight photograph

This flashlight photograph of a white-tailed doe with her fawns was among the world’s first nighttime photographs of animals, shot by photographer and wildlife enthusiast George Shiras. A pioneer in flashlight and trip-wire photography, Shiras captured this shot in Whitefish River, Michigan, around 1906 using a remote-control flashlight camera triggered when an animal stepped on the trip wire.

Aerial photography

Some of the world’s first aerial photographs were taken not by humans but by birds. In 1903, German engineer Julius Neubronner combined an analog camera and timer, which he attached to a pigeon’s neck. The German military took notice of Neubronner’s innovative approach to aerial photography, and by World War II pigeons were collecting secret aerial photography for both Allied and Axis forces.

Horse

The settling of a debate—whether, during its trot, all four of a horse’s hooves are off the ground at the same time—led English photographer Eadweard Muybridge to develop the first photographs to capture the sequence of movement. In 1878, Muybridge arranged 24 trip-wire cameras along a racetrack. The resulting photos, The Horse in Motion, proved all four hooves leave the ground during a trot and set the stage for the first motion pictures.

The world’s first photograph

Centuries of advances in chemistry and optics, including the invention of the camera obscura, set the stage for the world’s first photograph. In 1826, French scientist Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, took that photograph, titled View from the Window at Le Gras at his family’s country home. Niépce produced his photo—a view of a courtyard and outbuildings seen from the house’s upstairs window—by exposing a bitumen-coated plate in a camera obscura for several hours on his windowsill.