My photo career began in the seventies when I bought Canon photo gear to make images of wildflowers, frogs, and insects. Close-up photography has always been great fun for me since I can find so many interesting subjects without traveling much. Over the decades, I have enjoying making many hundreds of thousands of close-up images, and I continue to add new close-up experiences today. A Yellowstone Checkerspot butterfly posed nicely for my Canon 180mm macro lens. Being early in the morning, it held still enough for me to make several images of it. I enjoy teaching close-up photo techniques to others, and love to see their world open in unexpected ways. Close-up photography is easy to do o
Sunrise at Muscatatuck National Wildlife Refuge by John Gerlach Canada geese are a blessing when they hold still, but they do make waves when feeding! Muscatatuck NWR is a few miles east of Seymour, IN. It contains many marshes and small lakes that attract lots of birds and is a major breeding ground for wood ducks. And it is a well-known place for river otters, though, I have yet to meet one (I continue to hope). Since the lakes are small and surrounded by dense forests, and it seems to be a less windy area anyway, the lakes have been perfectly calm every time I visit at dawn. Outside of one morning when twenty unruly visitors created waves in the lake, it has been easy to capture mirro
Processing Focus Stacks with Canon DPP 4.8.30 for windows and Helicon Focus 6.7.1 It has been a long and painful process, but slowly I am improving my skills at computers. I can now predict I will be super at it should I live to 150! I can even teach a little bit about how I process the images. I don’t spend a lot of time working on each image, so I hope that doesn’t show too much. But, for others out there who are brutalized by computers from time to time, there is hope for you. If I can do this at all, anybody can do it. This is the processed image and stacked with Helicon Focus! Notice how the flash lit up the rocks in the middle and right side of the foreground to simulate the dawn
