First, the bright ones

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There is a grove of quaking aspen at the rear of the cottage by the driveway. I shot this picture pretty much straight up, and used a polarizing filter to enrich the hue of the sky.



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Winterberries are a hardy species of holly. They thrive in soggy acidic soil -- something that we have plenty of around the lake. This picture was taken using a close-up diopter on a 135mm lens. I'm pretty sure I used 100 ASA Fuji film. I had my tush comfortably seated upon my canoe seat at the time. I'm not really into slogging through swamps, though I'll do it for a good image.



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I took a few pictures of the winterberries, but not all were worth reproducing. That's just the way it goes with photography, and a very good reason to get a high-quality digital camera. More images means more keepers.

I like this one because of the strong compositional elements of the diagonal lines, and the juxtaposition of the bright red berries in front of the texture of the log.

Because of focus issues, this one would have come out much better if I could have used a tripod. A tripod would have allowed me to use a long exposure, which would allow me to close the aperture (f-stop) for more depth of field.



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This is another one where I pointed the camera up and used a polarizing filter to darken the sky a bit. I really like the contrasting colors.

And no, I didn't use a photo editing program to enrich the colors.



One of the minor challenges with using 35mm equipment is that it has a different aspect ratio than the standard TV/computer screen's 4:3 aspect ratio. That means that you always need to crop the picture. Generally, that isn't a problem. There are times, however, when I would really like to use the full frame. This is no problem for something that will be displayed on a web site, but is a big problem when you want to make wallpaper.

I wanted to keep the above image uncropped because I like the subtly different shade of red at the extreme right, and the brown at the left. They add to the picture and enrich it.

But the wallpaper version is cropped. It still works well, so I didn't try the trick that I ended up using in an image that I'll be sending later. (In other words, more to come)


To download the wallpaper versions of the images, right-click on the link, select [download link as] or [download link target as] (depending on your browser), and send it to the directory of your choice. I put my wallpaper right in the Windows directory to avoid active desktop issues, but you can put it anywhere you want.

Or, you can click on the link, wait for the image to load, then right-click on the image and select [save image as].