Category Archives: Nature

Photographer’s Choice – Kim Hadley

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Capturing the Beauty of Coastal NC

Kim Hadley - Hazy Morning in Stacy NC

Kim Hadley – Hazy Morning in Stacy NC

Descending from her mountain top home in Creston to the lowlands of coastal NC, Kim spent a week vacationing in the small township of Stacy, located just south of the lower Outer Banks. “I was waiting for the sun to rise above the tree line hoping for some nice warm morning colors to shoot…in the end, I liked this pre-sun shot better. I love the lime green in the marsh grass contrasted with the dark areas….and of course I made sure there was a ‘leading line’ for Kosinski to enjoy.”
This image is a great example of using High Dynamic Range to bring out the richness of the colors in the grass, the shimmering boardwalk and the contrasting blue of the roof without pushing the envelope too far and losing the softness of the morning light. Kim bracketed three shots at a difference of about 1-1/2 f/stops each, using shutter speeds of 1/20, 1/60 and 1/200/sec, then combined the three for the final photograph. The lens focal length was 41mm, the aperture f/7.1 and the ISO 100.

Montage-Nancy Bowers

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When Three May Be Better Than One

Nancy Bowers - Butterfly Montage

Nancy Bowers – Butterfly Montage

There were no submissions this week for “Photographer’s Choice” so rather than let a week go by with no new posting, I’ve looked through some of the many excellent member submissions and selected the above to share. It is of course a montage of images captured on an active summer day when butterflies were busy visiting the colorful thistle. Each of these could stand on its own but sometime judicious cropping and arranging can create a more compelling image. This may be the case here. The colors are vibrant, the creatures are captured at different angles and the backgrounds are so similar that arranging the three in an attractive layout works extremely well. Allowing one image to extend beyond its “boundary” creates a different look and perhaps adds interest.