Greg Molyneux Photography

Tag: macro

  • Adornment

    Adornment

    Black and white hemlock pine cone macro photo in square format.
    Adornment — 100mm | f/3.5 | ISO 100 | EXP 1/320

    You know the grind. You feel it. It weighs heavy as you mire through life’s ebbs and flows. You cherish the highs and bury the lows. It’s in the space between you grind for purpose. Two steps forward. Two steps back. Captured in inescapable reality, caught in the throes of a fated cosmic dance.

    You adorn your triumph and bury your loss. Unobserved to others the loss is still as real. No less massive, no less an equal equal force in the intwined gravitational balance. Only buried, left to rot and consume. Of course this is life. An impartial duality to remind you of inherent vitality sprinkled with uncertainty. The fearsome dive to the depths releases you to relish the inevitable rise to new heights. Actions need balance. Yet the weight of it all will pull you back to the grind. Working. Churning. Struggling. Steadfast to best understand what it all means. You’re tired. It is in these moments where you are best to open up; to show your full self warts and all. Let the world see you as you are, adorned with hope, fear, and the grinding middle ground we all feel.

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  • Look Inside

    Look Inside

    Pink peony macro photo of petals and stamen.
    Look Inside — 100mm | f/3.5 | ISO 100 | EXP 1/320

    May 2017 brought the rain. With it came puddles of mud and big blooms of flowers. Currently on display are the peonies. I have four peony plants about my front and back yards, each a slight variation of the species. I’m no botanist and cannot label the differences. Two of the peonies are of the pom-pom variety. Bulbous fluffy flower petals with plenty of fluff. The two others are more sparse of petal and unfurl to reveal a large bundle of pollen rich yellow stamen. The pink version is the one you see above. Its purple counterpart will not be in bloom this year thanks to an overgrown spirea.

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  • Identify Yourself

    Identify Yourself

    Macro photo of a carpenter bee collecting wisteria pollen.
    Identify Yourself — 100mm | f/3.5 | ISO 100 | EXP 1/640

    My brain gets the best of me. Often I wrap myself sideways in details that stand meaningless to most. Mired in Minutia: A Greg Molyneux Memoir. Case in point, I present this photograph. I’ve been scrutinizing Google images for days, sweating over proper bee identification. Is it a bumblebee? A carpenter bee? A rusty patched bumblebee? Which until yesterday I knew nothing about; bombus affinis is one cool species name, though. Or is it some other bee I don’t even know about? Ah yes, the endless fretting of a runaway mind.

    Taxed and unable to commit I sent a photo of my photo to Ben Wurst today. South Jersey’s Captain Planet, Ben’s the clear choice for local wildlife identification. Almost immediately Ben confirmed my suspicion. Declaring this here bee of the carpenter kind. Whew! Are you tired from this tedium, too?

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  • Speak Softly

    Speak Softly

    Wisteria blossom macro photo with soft focus and bokeh.
    Speak Softly — 100mm | f/3.5 | ISO 100 | EXP 1/80

    Speak softly and carry a macro lens. And that’s enough Teddy Roosevelt for this post. Besides, I’m quite a loud talker. Despite being sans computer for the better part of the past month I was still out in my yard making photos. I’m sure my Mid-Atlantic flower peeps noticed the stellar wisteria bloom that manifest this spring. It was something else. When these little beauties go they create one of my favorite flowering spectacles. Tentacles of blossoms unfurl with columns of flowers serving as would be suction cups upon chlorophyll tentacles.

    Centered in my backyard sits a small wisteria. It annoys me to know end come late spring; stretching without mercy to attach itself to most anything. These bad boys grow at an alarming rate. The only way to greet it is head on—trimming shears in hand—and on a regular basis. But during the years they bloom en masse, all the invasive conquest that comes later is worth it.

    As for the photograph above we’ve got a few things working here. Some good and some accidental. The good? The light play. Rich afternoon light set up ideal conditions to capture the petite blossoms. The accidental? I was shooting handheld with my 100mm lens and not paying enough attention I dropped a 1/80 second exposure. As a general rule I like my exposure to be greater than or equal to the focal length of the lens. In this case an exposure greater than (re: faster than) or equal to 1/100 second. Holding to this formula helps keep your handheld shots sharp. Yet in this case the accidental soft focus builds on the photo. It drops a layer of whimsy onto the frame; a warm glow calming the soul. Sometimes our mistakes work in our favor.

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  • Pastel Pop

    Pastel Pop

    Macro photo depicting a reticulated pastel sedum bloom
    Pastel Pop — 100mm | f/3.5 | ISO 400 | EXP 1/400

    In taking a top-down approach we can process the world around us differently. This may be one of the most basic photographs I have posted to this site, and yet I find it endlessly captivating. It has a real watchability if you’ll allow me to use words that read like they don’t belong in a dictionary. Seriously, I fully anticipated the red-dotted line to appear under watchability—I would have lost any and all bets on that being a word. Anyway. I find myself mesmerized as I look down and into this image, losing myself for minutes at a time. Its tight reticulated pattern reminds of an autostereogram—those mind-melding 2-D images that are supposed to reveal a 3-D scene within its otherwise non-specific pattern. These drove me nuts as a kid. I can remember numerous class trips to several museums where we’d inevitably find ourselves in the obligatory gift shop where we’d one-by-one try our hand at discerning the image. My friends would undoubtedly make it work within a few minutes, and there’d I sit, dejected and unable to make out any kind of scene. My brain couldn’t get past the replicant TV snow presented in technicolor splatter. It always bummed me out as I feared my eyes and brain were somehow broken—somehow a failure of intelligent design. While I still can’t find any kind of image waiting to burst forth from this photograph, nor do I think there’s anything specific hiding in there, it sure is fun to look upon. Far less stressful than classmates bleating out, “there’s the horse! Can you see it, Greg? It’s right there!”

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  • Time Draws Near

    Time Draws Near

    Macro photograph of silver-spotted skipper butterfly feeding on sedum.
    Time Draws Near — 100mm | f/3.5 | ISO 100 | EXP 1/320

    Still under the influence of a post Makers Fest malaise I missed two great sunsets earlier this week. I must be slipping because it somehow didn’t bother me in the slightest. I was happily caught up in day job things and basking in last weekend’s festival success. However, a week sans camera has left me photo-less this weekend. As I sit inside on a drizzly Saturday morning waiting for a front to come, my ears listen to The Legend of Zelda remixes as my eyes fix their gaze on Lightroom—to a dozen or so macro shots I made on September 8. Nothing crazy, just some pictures of my front yard sedum bloomed and in its prime. Serendipitously a sliver-spotted skipper butterfly happened to drop on by for an afternoon snack. While not long for the flower tops I did manage to steal one suitable photograph of this fleeting creature; fall is coming and so too its time will end.

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  • Hosta Bloom

    Hosta Bloom

    Macro photograph of a single hosta blossom and its petals fading into smooth bokeh.
    Hosta Bloom — 100mm | f/3.5 | ISO 100 | EXP 1/160

    During my five minute photo jaunt at my parents’ house this past Fourth of July—just before I made this black and white hibiscus macro—I set my 100mm lens upon a plant I had known for years but to which I had not the pleasure of knowing its name. How rude? After quick a conversation with one in the know, my Mom, my ignorance was shed. Enter the hosta, legitimized by name. A wonderful broad leaf flowering plant wont to grow in close proximity to the ground while fanning out quite wide relative to its modest height. When the time comes it extends its blossom skyward from the center of its leafy body. This season my Mom’s hosta plants are blooming with gusto, and I’m most pleased with the delicate mood this macro photograph evokes. By design, selective focus keeps the sharpness limited the blossom’s apex, while its petals spread out and fade away into smooth, buttery bokeh.

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  • Darkest Light

    Darkest Light

    Low key black and white macro photograph of a hibiscus flower framed in vertical orientation.
    Darkest Light — 100mm | f/3.5 | ISO 100 | EXP 1/800

    It’s been a good long while since I’ve made a black and white photograph. A quick look at the archive reveals other than a onetime blip back in April, it had been since August of 2015 that I had made a proper black and white. Too long!

    Interestingly enough this photograph was yesterday’s output of no more than a five minute photo detour I took along my parents’ side yard before transitioning to camera-less Fourth of July activities. It’d be wrong to categorize the 16 exposures as throw-away shots, but I’d be lying if I said I knew I was going to walk away with at least three keepers from the brief session. The lighting seemed unremarkable and the wind was blowing just enough to frustrate any handheld macro shooter; and yet the results populating my Lightroom catalog run entirely to the contrary. (A good reminder that I still have plenty to learn.)

    I really like black and white, and I really like this shot. It’s sporting all the key ingredients required for a well executed black and white photograph—macro or otherwise. The composition is strong, moving the eye from the deep darkness of the bottom left corner up and through the stamen and pistils of the hibiscus flower. The selective focus adds moodiness and depth to the photograph, enhancing the sharpness of the pollen resting atop its anthers. But what really kicks this into black and white overdrive is the contrast; the dramatic shifts from near total black to the intensity and brightness of near total white. The image runs the grayscale gamut and locks away the final dimension necessary for a fine low key finished product.

    Oh, and check out this post if you’d like to learn more about the anatomy of a hibiscus flower. This will help clear up some of the flower parts I referenced in the paragraph above if you’d like to further your learning. The post features some solid macro photos, too! Related: I can’t believe this is the first hibiscus photograph I’ve posted in the now two and a half year history of this website. I would have definitely lost that bet…

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  • Stage Left

    Stage Left

    Macro photograph of a blue bottle fly atop a daisy petal.
    Stage Left — 100mm | f/3.5 | ISO 100 | EXP 1/640

    Time is weird, man. While I feel mired in quicksand, struggling to move in chronic slow motion I am juxtaposed by the fast moving reality that it’s July. In 2016. Or so I’m told. Somehow, somewhere, I’m still stuck in April 2006, but hey? Any Multiverse theorists want to take this on? So here I sit watching Nintendo Voice Chat pounding out a post on my computer one evening removed from the Fourth of July—my favorite holiday by the way. Even though overcast skies and incoming rain may put a damper on tomorrow’s firework festivities, I’ll embrace the fact the calendar is turned to the month added in honor of Julius Caesar. We’ve reached high summer—the Saturday of summer—as much as it doesn’t feel like it.

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