Spring Time and oddities

Springtime is one of those times of the year I love in all its detail! From the different flowers that bloom, to everything turning a nice shade of green.

I certainly can't miss all the flowers, that is for sure.

The sea of yellow daffodills have been plentiful this year

I have caught all the daffodills quite early this year, and I did miss some oppurtunites with other blooms, like the snowdrops. I wanted to have a good set of both rainy pictures of all the blooms, reflecting the typical british weather that can't quite make its mind up at this time of year.

I still have some that I can get but others I have missed unitl next year sadly.

That does bring me onto my next few thoughts however.

Some Frolicking Oddities

With a good portion of my recent photos, I have been trialling the new mirrored lens i've got for a later shoot (more on that later) but most of my actual shots have been done with a macro lens as of late.

This has been fun to work with as typically before I would have worked with automatic settings, and since I have had a small bit of free time on my hands, I've been learning more about how exactly apeture, shutter speed and ISO work together.

I plan on perhaps writing some more later about those technical bits when I can back my knowledge up with some perhaps crudely drawn pictures.

But with this learning a large part of it has been learning where to place my focus with shallow field of depth shots and sometimes where my camera actually focuses on and places the plane of focus. I won't lie in that I have very likely thrown out just as many photos as I have kept, easily more because I haven't had the subject in focus.

This here is a great example, I've drawn a line on the plane of foucs and you can see it is just short of being on the rabbit. This looked fine on my camera until I looked at it on my computer.

Getting to the bottom of it wasn't exactly easy i'll be honest. It has been plaguing me since I got the camera and while I am now pretty comfortable handling it, I was continuing to have these issues ruin some very good photos.

I did some trialling and I worked out that the camera seems to focus on the bottom part of my guide box in the viewfinder. I wouldn't be able to really chalk this up to anything other than it's a second hand camera and sometimes I end up pointing down just with how I am sitting.

The wide appature did exaggerate these issues as it give me a very small focus plane to work with. This was an unintened side effect but I think I was able to work through it with my last outing and now that I am aware of it, I'll be ready to catch it when i'm next out.

But onto better Headings

As I was previously talking about the artemis rocket launch in my last post, I thought I'd go into a bit more details about how I think I might be able to see it.

So I have a planned outting to get some nice clear photos of the "pink moon" at the beginning of April, and while I was checking the dates and times of the moonrise and moonset, I did check to see what the timings for Artemis II launching were.

As it turns out, on April 2nd here in the UK at 10pm ish, Artemis II will launch (hopefully; as it could still be called off) and the flight path for the rocket looks promising. It's set to launch out over the Eastern American coast, and will likely cross a good portion of the Atlantic Ocean before it would be able to be seen from here. I'm betting on that even if I can't see the rocket directly, I'd be able to see some of the interesting phonomenon that occur with the rocket launches and are typically associated with Space X rocket launches.

With some luck, I hope that I can basically turn around and be in the prime spot to see some of this stuff!

..Lastly, Social Media shennagins!

With all this going on, I plan on putting up photos (not many at one time) on to Instagram and Threads. This is mostly to increase my confidence with posting and hashtags. I also plan on perhaps staying more intune with trends and current events with respect to photographs and hopefully through that I can at least gain some followers.

I'll close this post out here, but I would like to say I always welcome feedback and interesting ideas.

Other perspectives are always the most interesting in my eyes since i'm typically not exposed to them.

I'll leave you with what I consider to be my favourite image this year and I hope to see you all next time!

-Your Local, mildly moon obsessed photo chaser

Working Title: Close-up of a Faraway Land