Wet Leaves

Just because the sun goes away and it starts to rain is no reason to put your camera away. Instead, take advantage of the soft, even lighting to record some of the finer details that would otherwise be difficult to capture under the high contrast lighting of bright sunny days.

From the vantage point of my porch, I was able to set up my tripod and camera and zoom in on these sweetgum leaves while remaining dry. Sweetgum trees have leaves that are roughly star-shaped, although you can see in this photo at the lower left some leaves have three lobes, while the others have five. Usually, the sweetgum trees run the gamut of fall colors from deep yellow to orange, and from red to burgundy. This year, the sweetgum in our front yard decked itself out in yellow until last weekend’s wind blew them all away. This smaller tree in the backyard tended towards orange-red, although I have no idea why one tree would be any more or less yellow or red than the other. Perhaps different amounts of sunlight is the determining factor.

The photo was taken with a Nikon D70 digital camera, using a 210 mm setting on the lens, an f-stop of 5.0, and an 81B Cokin warming filter. I later opened the image in Photoshop and lightened it, without doing any color correction or sharpening. The white blur in the background is a neighbor’s garage. If you want to achieve a similar effect in your photos, use a small f-stop such as 2.8 or 4.0 and be sure your foreground subject is in sharp focus because at smaller f-stops you will have little leeway in your focusing. A tripod is excellent, but if you don’t have one you can rest your camera on a box or a railing for some added stability. Hand-holding your camera for exposure times slower than a 250th of a second is likely to add some blur to your photo. No matter how still you stand, your heartbeat can still cause minor camera shake that can be quite noticeable when you enlarge your images.

So, get out in the rainy weather for some very interesting nature photographs. Experiment with using your camera’s flash to bring out some highlights in water drops, and try using small apertures to blur the background and give you a nice, even color. The effect is almost one of a watercolor painting. If you don’t have a porch roof to stand under, use a raincoat or even a plastic bag to keep your camera equipment dry. Enjoy the rainy weather!

Diminishing Returns

I’m taking a public relations theory class which is an online format. Online classes can be as lively as face-to-face classes, or they can be nearly dead, with just the minimum number of posts to satisfy the professor’s class requirements. This class takes the form of the second.

It’s not that the subject matter is inherently boring; perhaps discussing theory in an introductory class is just too difficult to keep any kind of discussion going. Some students have tried, but oddly enough, the online Communications Club is also, well… noncommunicative. I guess people are busy doing communications rather than talking about the subject.

One item I brought up for discussion in the online classroom was whether or not anyone thought that there is a point of diminishing returns on advertising. That is, showing the same commercial(s) over and over and over… at what point do people simply tune out the message? And at some point further down the road, do they become antagonistic to the commercials? I’m specifically thinking about candidate commercials because I’m really sick of seeing them every commercial break. I have managed not to destroy my television, but it’s not for the want of handy bricks — I don’t want to have to clean up the mess, and the noise would scare my birds, who would then also make a mess. You see my dilemma.

The public relations textbook that my class is using refers to people as the “obstinate audience,” meaning those people who don’t immediately accept whatever message that is sent their way by public relations practitioners. “How dare you have your own opinion!” is what they are saying. But why shouldn’t people should still think for themselves?

In the spirit of the voting season, I present a poll to all you television watchers. And for those of you who like to think for yourselves, there is a write-in blank in the poll where you can enter your very own unique answer. Enjoy, but be polite!