[Curious]

Are “natural” monuments acceptable? You know, like “Such and Such National Monument”?

I have a great idea, but I can save it for another contest if no.

sorry but the arch fell last year

[Curious]

if you go to my flickr page i just upload a couple of headstone shots that are one of the many reason i love cemeteries.

as you wander in a cemetery you can see the lives of folks played out in their headstones.

and if you hadn’t figured it out one of my all time favorite books is spoon river anthology

[Curious]

while i live in LA now i grew up in southern California and lived for 8 years in Austin so i don’t share the fear/awe/whatever of cemeteries that many do down here.

one of the things i do like about this area is occasionally you will stumble upon a small family cemetery. often neglected but not always. there is a four or five grave plot right on the edge of the public right of way on MS607 a little below I10. it gets overrun then someone will clean it and then it gets overrun again and cleaned again, etc. if memory serves it dates back to at least the turn of the century.

no not ten years ago 🙂

there are two small cemeteries on Hwy 190 and a family cemetery on HWY 90 a mile or so above fort pike. and two Crawford family cemeteries, one in Pearl River and down the road in Hickory.

the small cemetery finds were pretty good around Austin too once you got a few miles out of town.

[Curious]

orionid i sent a link to this page to my sister since i thought she might enjoy your POV. this is what she had to say:

Well, those words of orionid are wonderful! Nice image and great message. I am, of course, reminded of the Buddhist truth that there is only this present moment. It’s that Sanskrit poem: “Yesterday is but a dream and tomorrow is only a vision, but today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well therefore to this day. Such is the salutation of the dawn.” Same message at the heart of the Lord’s prayer: “Give us this day our daily bread.” Present moment, present moment. So often easier said than done, but it is also true that if we take good care of the people close to us, the goodness we do with them is legacy enough.

hope you don’t mind my sharing outside the group.

[Curious]

i have umpteen gigabytes of gravestones but may shot some more for this. you just can’t have enough gravestones !!

plus a photo session is a good excuse for a trip to the coast.

[Curious]

never mind i have three anyway.

[Curious]

what about headstones with DOB/DOD? or other historical markers?

[Curious]

Also, orionid: You weren’t the only one caught up in the “swapped image” thing…Procedural Texture lost some images too. Dunno what’s up with that, but hopefully neither of you lost too many votes in the process

don’t know about swapped images but i’m sure i lost at least 50 votes while my images were down. and that’s per image 🙂

[Curious]

this set shows my bellows and focusing rail in action on my Minolta XD-11. the bellows won’t fit my knoica/minolta maxxum 7D and i haven’t tried the focusing rail. the problem with using the focusing rail at mid travel on the bellows is that the rail itself will sometimes hit the subject. this may also occur with the smaller extension tubes. we shall see later today.

[Curious]

but could not focus on my subjects easily;

with living subjects it’s a real crap shoot especially things perched on leaves or twigs. the slightest breeze and goodbye focus.

with the focus all the way in and me wobbling back and forth till I liked the focus

that’s pretty much SOP for macro unless you get lucky.

my camera will auto focus with the extension tubes but it hunts far too much and i resort to manual and wobbling 🙂

[Curious]

your dragon fly is better than mine and mine was shot using a 26mm extension tube.

and while i liked my fly having dinner it wasn’t as sharp as it should have been. hand holding with manual focus and using extension tubes can be really iffy.

and my jumping spider is a classic example of shallow DOF.

the big plus to the not really macro macro lenses is better DOF and more usable shots.

[Curious]

I would have a hard time holding a ruler up to that wasp but I am guessing it was around 2 centimeters or so. The google tells me my camera has a 22.2 x 14.8mm sensor. I did not crop that picture at all just sharpened it. So does that mean thats a macro picture?

you mean this one? marked 3/3
http://www.fark.com/cgi/comments.pl?IDLink=5363952#c60871414

if so then no. the wasp would have to fill the frame edge to edge right to left and yours doesn’t fill the frame top to bottom.

but yeah given my record tonight perhaps sleeping will check it and give us a ruling.

/ha ha, i said ruling

[Curious]

god know how you check. or for that matter what you check 🙂

Photograph a ruler with a MM scale with the setup you want to know the magnification of. Compare that to your sensor size, which should be available online somewhere for most cameras 🙂

i think i hate you 🙂

i’ve done that with a ruler and my 35mm camera and it should have occurred to me. i have a 6″/153mm pocket ruler at work and will have to remember to bring it home.

thanks.

[Curious]

All three pictures I posted were taken with the macro, but I don’t think I could get the magnification I saw in some of the posts (what I think you mean by “true macros”). To achieve that, would I need extension tubes? Longer focal length macro lenses?

here’s an interesting article on extension tubes

http://www.shutterfreaks.com/Tips/ExtensionTube.htm

and here’s a good wiki article on marco lenses and other ways to get close.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_photography

[Curious]

I would also like to know where my pictures fit into the true, faux ,or not macro definition. I only have my 18-55 and my 55-250 lens’s and I don’t think either one is a true macro lens but they do say macro on the lens some where. Well it has the little flower that is supposed to mean macro. on the 18-55 it says .8ft for the min. focus point. on the 55-250 it’s more like 3.4 ft.

i’ll defer to sleeping on strict definitions but IMHO your “macro” lenses, like mine, are more a marketing gimmick than true macro.

i have to use extension tubes to get “true macro”. that said i have no idea how sensor size/crop factor figures into all this. in the (good) old days you could actually measure the subject and compare it to the image size on the negative. with digital — god know how you check. or for that matter what you check 🙂

[Author]

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