Spring Tulips and the photographers old addage......"Shoot the Vertical right after you shoot the Horizontal."

This weekend I helped on a volunteer basis,  The Baltimore Camera Club with their annual Camera School. I teach composition in the classroom on Saturday and then assist with the field lessons on Sunday. Its a busy weekend but fun! Today we were in Sherwood Gardens and making images of the tulips. I got a chance to do a little personal shooting with the D4, and my 200 mm macro lens fitted with a 52mm extension tube for the first time. The 52 mm extension tube did not seem to fit as well to the body mount but I made the connection anyway and it worked fine. The one really great thing is the ISO capability of the D4. The increased ISO capability for macro is so sweet! At times I was using ISO 1000, that I never before was able to use doing macro work and still get a useable  image. I was able to achieve shutter speeds at 1/125 sec with the extension tube connected, a real plus for me, especially since we had a little breeze today.

In my composition class I drive home the idea of making lots of shots when you have great subjects..and always make vertical and horizontal images of the same subject, then decide when you get home which one you might like best! I also cover color theory and this purple pink tulip with a background of out of focus purple azalea shrubs really resonated with the idea of working with analogous colors....but when you pop in the green stem and find the one tulip with the yellow it adds a whole color spectrum including color opposites of green and magenta...and the triad color of yellow!

In Camera Swipe 200mm macro lens f-16 ISO 400 1/15 sec Processed in Photoshop CS5

I always work in horizontal and vertical orientations when making images.

ISO 1000 Shutter Speed 1/1000 f-stop not recorded 200mm macro 52 mm extension tube Processed with Photodhop CS5 and Nik Color Efex Pro Classic Soft Focus filter

Two image blend in camera swipe. Blended in Photoshop CS5