Live Edge Burl Coffee Tables for Sale
The following small to medium sized bespoke live edge coffee or side tables are available as at March 2023.
The legs are elegant modern black hairpins or square black metal types
Prices range from $650 to $1100 for the unique Coolibah burl.
Other burls are also available.
Framed Pictures of Southern Highlands
The following framed photos are available.
The glass in the frame measures 18x24 inches (460 x 610 mm) and the frames are 20mm wide - black with a silver trim.
Some were featured at Montoria (great clothes for ladies and girls, now closed 2023) in Bundanoon.
Rhododenrums - a Close up Look
One of the tricky problems with taking pictures of flowers is whether to use a dedicated "macro" lens such as the Nikon 105mmf2.8 macro.
I think this is a very good lens. But, if using a wide apperture - say f2.8 -5.6 - it may be difficult to achieve a desired depth of field.
There are techniques for overcoming this - namely taking of several pictures with a different focus distance and then focus stacking the set of images in Photoshop or other software.
Multiple images tends to force you into the use of a tripod. This may not be great as there is the setup time to get a good composition. Some cameras can take multiple pictures by varying the focus distance from the closest object to the furthermost that you require for a flower. There are other devices such as Arsenal that might control the camera to do this. My initial experience with Arsenal is that it wants to do multiple images way out to infinity.
So, for this exercise I wanted to try using different lenses - in the telephoto range - to see if I could achieve a suitable depth of field. I would try to bump up the ISO values and use a range of f stops. With high ISO I was expecting more noise to be part of the images but several software packages now include the ability to "denoise" as well as "sharpen"
The Rhododenrums were flowering, the day was bright but somewhat windy for most of the shots. Of interest was the multple mini-flowers and the numerous stamen, filaments and petals coming out towards the camera.
In the following cropped images, the camera used was a Nikon D500 (crop sensor) using a 28-300mm full frame lens. The apertures ranged from f18 to f36, the ISO ranged from 2800 to 14400 and the speeds from 1/100 to 1/160 sec. Most of the pictures were at a focal length of 300mm or 450mm as a 35mm equivalent. All were handheld.
On the post-processing side, the images were "denoised" in Adobe Camera Raw and then "sharpened" with Topaz. The original image was cropped to be square so that the colourful part of the flower occupied the vast majority of the image. The denoising took quite some computing time with Camera Raw so next time I will be more selective in the images to process. I did not do any local adjustments but even so the post-processing time far outweighed the time capturing the images in the field!
I am encouraged that many "macro" images of flowers is possible without carrying around a dedicated macro lens.
Heavy Swell at Bombo - April 2022
April Fools Day 2022 saw the build up of a large swell over several days following some deep low pressure systems that also produced heavy rainfall all along the east coast of NSW. A high tide added to the drama.
All images shown here were hand-held and taken with a Nikon D500 with a 28-300mm Full Frame lens.