Hello all!
As some of you may or may not know, I am 16 and starting my junior year in high school in two months. Right now I'm in Tampa, Florida, where I am visiting my sister and her husband with my father and stepmother. Tomorrow, we will meet the husband of the breeder who sold us a beautiful Maine Coon Kitten....though it won't be small very long...It could end up weighing up to 25 pounds! the carrier we bought is meant for a small dog.
Today, however, my father, stepmom, and sister took me for the drive to Gainesville to see the University of Florida. I was not very optimistic coming in, but now I'm fairly convinced that it would be great to follow the family tradition.....my grandfather, father, both sisters, and numerous cousins have all gone there.
The campus was beautiful. I didn't have much of a chance to take pictures, as we were moving fairly briskly in the car for most of the way, and the windows were full of droplets from the heavy rains caused by the storms that passed nearby.
One of our first stops along the way was at the museum on the campus. They had a spectacular exhibit on butterflies. Dozens and dozens of cases of specimens lined the entrance, and a giant butterfly house, over two stories tall and quite lush and serene contained the real specimens...the living, flying, captivating butterflies. There were many spectacular ones, and unfortunately they had an aversion to staying in one place for long enough for me to focus and shoot
There were waterfalls, plants, trees, and a nice boardwalk with benches along the way. My stepmother now wants to have a butterfly garden.
I didn't know about the exhibit, so I shot only with the lens I brought, my 18-70. I wish I had known, my 70-200 VR would have been useful for stopping motion and camera shake. I had to shoot around f/8-f/11 most of the time to ensure optimum sharpness, and I could have used the extra zoom and more precise focus.
My stepmother, who calls herself a fertility goddess, proved to be right.....two little butterflies chose her hand as a mating location. After about 5-10 minutes, she moved them carefully to a leaf after the staff warned her they take 70 minutes to do that......
I also managed to snap a shot of a poor unsuspecting photographer, with a prosumer-looking camera, who was composing a shot when I caught sight of the butterfly that landed on the back of his shirt, near the neck. He took his picture, and the flash scared it away, but not before I grabbed a shot of the event.
When we went inside again, there was a viewing area for the lab where the new butterflies were emerging from their metamorphosis. We saw an Atlas moth, absolutely huge, and many beautiful butterflies and caterpillars. at the end of that hallway, there was a glass wall looking in on the collection....think Raiders of the Lost Ark, final scene........
Rows and rows of archive-style racks full of drawers of butterfly specimen display cases.......thousands of drawers! There was also a desk with the stuff they use to pin them in....too bad they weren't working then. We also passed by the windows into butterfly labs, with UV analyzers and the like. Very neat.
There were a few other exhibits, including the jaws of some sharks....the smallest or next to smallest was the great white......there were several bigger than me......I'm 5'6.5" tall. I wanted to stop growing at a full f-stop, but oh well....I'm never making it to 8, or even to a third stop at 6'3. I will get to those pics later.....
At the end of the exhibit a little poster had pictures of the photographers who were responsible for the photos throughout......Being obsessive compulsive, I looked really closely, and discovered that one, a man, used film at the time of the picture and I couldn't identify his camera from the back of it...The young lady photographer, though, had a nikon strap hanging on her camera. Closer inspection showed that the lens mounted was an 18-70 DX....I looked realllllly closely at the lens markings, comparing them to my own. I think she had a D70, if not it was a D100. I took a picture of that too :roll:
I took almost all my pics there because when we got out at the student union, I didn't want to have the camera get wet in case of rain.
I really could have used a faster lens in that range, so I'm going to hurry up and get one!
I've edited 1/3-1/2 of the pics that I chose to post on my personal gallery on Nikonians. Here's the link to the ones I've done so far.
Shot the first few I did in JPEG, then switched to RAW. Main changes were RAW autoexposure with slight manual adjustments, WB adjustments, and a bit of noise reduction in a few pics, and resizing and JPEG conversion to quality 7 or 8, all done in PS CS2.
Hope you enjoy my not-so-good pics....but its fun to try
Best Regards,
Harrison Diamond.
http://www.nikonians-images.com/galleries/showgallery.php?cat=500&ppuser=24761
As some of you may or may not know, I am 16 and starting my junior year in high school in two months. Right now I'm in Tampa, Florida, where I am visiting my sister and her husband with my father and stepmother. Tomorrow, we will meet the husband of the breeder who sold us a beautiful Maine Coon Kitten....though it won't be small very long...It could end up weighing up to 25 pounds! the carrier we bought is meant for a small dog.
Today, however, my father, stepmom, and sister took me for the drive to Gainesville to see the University of Florida. I was not very optimistic coming in, but now I'm fairly convinced that it would be great to follow the family tradition.....my grandfather, father, both sisters, and numerous cousins have all gone there.
The campus was beautiful. I didn't have much of a chance to take pictures, as we were moving fairly briskly in the car for most of the way, and the windows were full of droplets from the heavy rains caused by the storms that passed nearby.
One of our first stops along the way was at the museum on the campus. They had a spectacular exhibit on butterflies. Dozens and dozens of cases of specimens lined the entrance, and a giant butterfly house, over two stories tall and quite lush and serene contained the real specimens...the living, flying, captivating butterflies. There were many spectacular ones, and unfortunately they had an aversion to staying in one place for long enough for me to focus and shoot
There were waterfalls, plants, trees, and a nice boardwalk with benches along the way. My stepmother now wants to have a butterfly garden.
I didn't know about the exhibit, so I shot only with the lens I brought, my 18-70. I wish I had known, my 70-200 VR would have been useful for stopping motion and camera shake. I had to shoot around f/8-f/11 most of the time to ensure optimum sharpness, and I could have used the extra zoom and more precise focus.
My stepmother, who calls herself a fertility goddess, proved to be right.....two little butterflies chose her hand as a mating location. After about 5-10 minutes, she moved them carefully to a leaf after the staff warned her they take 70 minutes to do that......
I also managed to snap a shot of a poor unsuspecting photographer, with a prosumer-looking camera, who was composing a shot when I caught sight of the butterfly that landed on the back of his shirt, near the neck. He took his picture, and the flash scared it away, but not before I grabbed a shot of the event.
When we went inside again, there was a viewing area for the lab where the new butterflies were emerging from their metamorphosis. We saw an Atlas moth, absolutely huge, and many beautiful butterflies and caterpillars. at the end of that hallway, there was a glass wall looking in on the collection....think Raiders of the Lost Ark, final scene........
Rows and rows of archive-style racks full of drawers of butterfly specimen display cases.......thousands of drawers! There was also a desk with the stuff they use to pin them in....too bad they weren't working then. We also passed by the windows into butterfly labs, with UV analyzers and the like. Very neat.
There were a few other exhibits, including the jaws of some sharks....the smallest or next to smallest was the great white......there were several bigger than me......I'm 5'6.5" tall. I wanted to stop growing at a full f-stop, but oh well....I'm never making it to 8, or even to a third stop at 6'3. I will get to those pics later.....
At the end of the exhibit a little poster had pictures of the photographers who were responsible for the photos throughout......Being obsessive compulsive, I looked really closely, and discovered that one, a man, used film at the time of the picture and I couldn't identify his camera from the back of it
...The young lady photographer, though, had a nikon strap hanging on her camera. Closer inspection showed that the lens mounted was an 18-70 DX....I looked realllllly closely at the lens markings, comparing them to my own. I think she had a D70, if not it was a D100. I took a picture of that too :roll:I took almost all my pics there because when we got out at the student union, I didn't want to have the camera get wet in case of rain.
I really could have used a faster lens in that range, so I'm going to hurry up and get one!
I've edited 1/3-1/2 of the pics that I chose to post on my personal gallery on Nikonians. Here's the link to the ones I've done so far.
Shot the first few I did in JPEG, then switched to RAW. Main changes were RAW autoexposure with slight manual adjustments, WB adjustments, and a bit of noise reduction in a few pics, and resizing and JPEG conversion to quality 7 or 8, all done in PS CS2.
Hope you enjoy my not-so-good pics....but its fun to try
Best Regards,
Harrison Diamond.
http://www.nikonians-images.com/galleries/showgallery.php?cat=500&ppuser=24761
