I love macro photography! I love the WPA Rock Garden in Land Park, Sacramento! But, do I love making mistakes? Not really, but I love learning from them.
The Rock Garden is an excellent place for macro photography so I brought my D7100 and macro lens. I also wanted to see how well the Fujifilm XT3 and its 55 – 200 mm lens would do close ups. My Nikon and 18 – 200 lens does close up photography beautifully.
First, I found out that my Fuji, like my Nikon, puts itself in various modes without telling me. It put itself in a different focus mode, making it difficult to focus. One mistake solved and learned from. Watch those fingers!
I saw macro opportunities and started shooting with my D7100 and macro lens. Best to do it while the breeze is down. Here’s the result:
Still wanting to use the Fuji, I wandered over to the small Land Park lake and saw lotus buds and leaves in the water. Yes! we would soon have flowers to capture in our cameras. Here’s where the second mistake occurred. I was having a difficult time shooting on manual with the Fuji and didn’t realize until I got home, loaded my pictures into the computer, and saw them on my monitor, that the images were super noisy. Looking at the data, I saw that some of them were shot at 12,000 ISO in sunlight! Did I mistake the ISO ring for the shutter ring? What did I do wrong? This was to be solved during my next Fuji outing! Here are some images shot with the Fuji:
Yesterday, I took pictures of a couple, Carol and Paul, I wrote about in for our community newsletter. I photographed them with the Fuji and the 18 -55 mm lens. They were beautiful. The shots and the couple!
So, lessons were learned. And, practice makes perfect as you’ll see in my next post.
Slow Shutter Speed 
I like this series. The contrast between the Nikon and XT3 are obvious I think – different quality of image – but both are great. I like your macros – flower macros are some of my faves – and the challenges you set yourself. The couple is also fun – they look like they have a good time wherever they go. Nice work altogether! (PS Did you change your domain? No longer slowshutterspeed.com but annegeephoto.com??)
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Thanks -N! My domain has always been annegeephoto.com, the name of the blog is Slow Shutter Speed. The name came from how I felt I was learning photography in the beginning! Not much has changed!! I think the Fuji has better, sharper color. After the learning curve is over, I think the Fuji will be a better camera for me.
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Interesting about the domain – I can usually click on things and get to an author’s blog. Yours shows up as http://www.slowshutterspeed.com,, and when I click on it, the URL cannot be found. As far as cameras go, I was surprised to see the difference between the Nikons and Fuji after I looked at the images from my X100V. I’m invested in Nikon and Nikon glass, so not likely to make the change. And I do a lot of film, so . . . .
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Love those macro shots, specially the chubby bumblebee!!! And I’m impress with the colors from the Fuji!
I’m sure you’ll master the new camera in no time! 🙂
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Thanks Mercedes! All I need is patience, which I’m short of!!
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-N, I’ll never give up my Nikon. I love the way it does macros. The only reason for my change is that the D7100 is not good in low light. The manager at Action Camera said the newest version was better in low light or I could go full frame. I didn’t want a heavier camera. So far so good with the Fuji as a walk around camera. We’ll see if it turns into more.
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