Janet Brien's photos with the keyword: peapod

I found this pea pod glowing warmly, the sun shining through and illuminating the seeds inside. The texture and tones are amazing to me--it's very hard to see this unless the sun is shining through the pod! I was very happy with the bokeh too! That's another thing about macro photography that you may not know: unless you take the time to study every picture just after you take it, the bokeh is largely an unknown. After literally over 100,000 pictures, I'm finally getting an small idea of what I might expect, but it takes forever to translate crisp surroundings into bokeh in your mind. Two years in and I'm finally beginning to learn this "language." I think the myriad facets of macro photography are endlessly fascinating and I love that there will always be a neverending world of education waiting for me!

1 picture above in a note! :) You see these two interesting looking things? They are both halves of a single pea pod after it's split open and released its seeds! For a better understanding, roll your mouse over this picture to see the previous picture I posted. That is a dried pea pod just about to burst open and spray its seeds everywhere! After the seed are released, the edges of each half will naturally begin to curl into this interesting shape! Isn't that cool?!! The background of this image was desaturated a bit so that the pea pod would stand out better. One of the problems of taking picture in a meadow of dried grass and weeds is that the subjects tend to have the same tonal range. By selecting the focal object and placing on its own layer in Photoshop, the background can then be manipulated separately. Having the subject on its own layer also allows me to apply sharpening filters or whatever I like to enhance the object in subtle ways, further separating it from the background.