Mark Cassino Photography - Mark's Blog

Here are a few snowflake photos from earlier today. All taken with the Pentax K-3 and reverse mounted D-FA 50mm macro. Click on the images for larger files.

Last post for 2013!

We had a little freezing rain last night and this morning everything was decked out in an icy glaze. I first took a few photos around the house, using the Pentax K-3 and DFA 100mm macro. This first one is a bit of holiday cheer, as I put some outdoor Christmas lights in the background (click the images for larger files):

A barberry branch - the bright red berries were gone, but the thorny branches looked nice, glazed with ice:

I then decided to head out to the Allegan Forest, in hopes that I could find some greater expanse of trees glazed with ice so as to make a landscape photograph. As I drove the 35 miles into the forest I realized that the ice storm had been much milder here and there was little ice on the trees. Their branches were simply glazed, but did not have the flamboyant icicles that I had seen in Kalamazoo. I almost turned around and headed back to the east, where the storm had been more severe, but since I was there I decided to give it a try. Shortly after I entered the woods a light snow kicked up and it turned out that the thin glaze of ice on the trees made the perfect substrate for the snow to stick to. In a few minutes every branch of every tree in the forest was coated in fresh white snow and I spend a good bit of time there in the woods. I have a lot of exposures to work with and sift through, but here are a couple of first outtakes:

I’ll probably have a few more shots from the forest to share in the next week or so…

Here are a few new snow crystal images - the first for this season. These were taken with my usual setup with a few changes - the camera has been upgraded from a Pentax K-01 to a Pentax K-3, the lens has been upgraded to a Pentax SMC DFA 50mm f2.8 macro, and the flash has been downgraded from a full service DSLR unit to a simple manual flash with just one power, running through an Olympus Safe Synch adapter to avoid frying the K-3.

We’ve had at least a foot of snow this last week - rather early even for Michigan - so it looks like the season if off to a good start. Click on the images for a larger view:

I made a dumb mistake and accidentally set the shutter speed to 1 second for these next couple of shots (doh!) - fortunately the exposure is almost entirely from the flash, so the effect of motion blur was limited. I did lose quite a few other shots, though. The first of these is 4 images focus stacked, since the crystal was not flat on the glass plate:

I had a little time today and a weather front was moving in, so I popped over to the beach at South Haven to see if the high winds would be making some nice wave splashes on the lighthouse there. Waves were indeed crashing and I got a few good shots. I am still experimenting with Ricoh’s Pentax K-3, and it still impresses me. These shots were taken with the K-3, my old Sigma EX 70-200 f2.8 (the non-DG and non-macro version). Hand held in high winds at ISO 800.

The wind was driving clouds in from the west, but there were a few breaks in the cloud cover. As a result the light was highly variable - sometimes the light was in full sunlight, which made the background appear exceptionally dark, other times there was only gloomy overcast everywhere.

Click on the images for larger files.

Here’s one where the sun broke out - more or less just on the lighthouse:

The waves were coming in from the NNW and they didn’t wrap around the lighthouse as much as the would have if they had be coming more due west. But I managed to get a few shots of the lighthouse wrapped in the mist of a breaking wave. Here’s one:

And while I’m enamored by Ricoh’s Pentax K-3 and the great capabilities it offers - these shots reminded me of an old shot from a decade ago, taken with a Pentax Mz-S (a camera I still use), A* 400mm f2.8 and Kodak E-100S film.