Lightning

 

This was taken on April 10th from my apartment in Alpharetta, sirens for a thunderstorm warning were going off and I was standing in the patio trying to take that perfect lightning picture that we always see.. 

This is as close as I came to getting it. 

Manual mode with 5s exposure and f/8.0 aperture. White Balance was set to Cloudy. 

Post processing: Cropped and sharpened. 

Early Spring

Images taken at Grand View Drive Peoria,IL.  Attempt was to catch spring flowers, but not much I found there.  So combincation of leaves and flowers.  All comments expected :).  Shoot in manual mode with mostly 55-200mm Nikon VR lens. 

I used an external flash to backlight the fern. And placed a black board as background. The white rim around the leaves and the sparkle in the drops are due to the light from the flash.

The star shapes in the drops are due to usage of higher f number (f/22 - smaller aperture). Other settings - ISO 200 and Shutter speed 1/320s.