Straw and Dew

Another of my photos taken on my morning walk in the countryside. As I’ve mentioned previously, the sun is very soft and gives a warm golden light at sunrise and dew glistens in the sunlight.

This was taken with a Rebel XTi and a 70-300mm 4.5 telephoto lens while stopped at a stop sign on my way into work. I spotted the grass, rolled down the passenger window, pulled out the telephoto, zoomed out the passenger window and snapped the picture. As you can see, the grass leans in from the lower right corner with stalks criss-crossing at random intervals creating geometric shapes to add contrast to the dew and spider silk.

There’s a few foreground stalks as well that aren’t apparent at this resolution.

Purple Clover at Sunrise

I took another walk at sunrise recently and took my backup camera, a Canon Rebel XTi and my 70-300 f4.5.   I stepped out of the car, took three steps, crouched down and shot this.  The clover was still covered in morning dew fog drifted over the ground and the sun was warm and golden.

The early morning and evening hours around sunrise and sunset are best for taking warm, gold-tinted pictures. The sun is less direct and softer, being diffused by the atmosphere, giving a warm honeyed glow to your subject. That’s why experienced photographers refer to the hour after sunrise and before sunset the ‘honeylight’. When shooting pictures like this, it helps to have the sun shining  not quite directly behind you.

The sharp foreground and blurry background are created by shooting with the camera lens set to its largest F-stop (in this case 4.5) and a longer exposure which lets in more light and results in what you see here.  The clumps of clover in the foreground and background aren’t really as close as they appear in this image. Using a longer lens in this case resulted in creating an image that this was a large field of clover, when in fact it was just a patch of tall grass and weeds.

I got a few more that morning and I’ll post those images when they are ready.