Sitting on the Ile de la Cite in the center of Paris, Notre Dame is an iconic part of the city. In the Summer the Paris days are long and it doesn’t begin to get dark until close to 11pm. I waited for the late dusk night to settle in before taking the images below. I scouted a few places that I wanted to try and photograph from during the day and found an area with several different views that I wanted to explore. At dusk the sky usually turns blue and this day, although there were some light clouds the blue light came through in the final images. The Gothic architecture of the building is quite stunning, it reminds me of Canterbury Cathedral where I went to school, with its amazing flying buttresses and gorgeous stained glass windows.

I found this colorful mixture of rocks and peblles while strolling around Pt Lobos State park after a storm. The pebbles had been thrown over the rocks and caught in some of the ledges and nooks worn into the sandstone and composite rocks. Within a few days enough folks will have wandered around and displaced these stones but right after a storm you can find some interesting still lifes.

Taken with a Nikon D200, Nikon 105 Macro. f2.8, Processed with Photoshop CS5.
© Jon Bertsch

Here are a couple of images of a blue ring octopus taken on a dive at Dumaguete, in the Philippines in April. My wife and I were cruising over a somewhat unlikely area of sand and small rocks, with very few areas of life. She spotted this guy peeking out from a small rock and we followed it around for 10 minutes or so. This is possibly the greater blue-ringed octopus, Hapalochlaena lunulata, but it’s hard to be certain. It’s always wonderful to see these critters and we were lucky to run it on the dive. They live on small crustaceans and paralyze their prey with a toxin that is injected, they are also extremely poisonous to humans so watch but do not touch them.

Another underwater gem is the Pegasus sea moth. These are found in the Indian Ocean around Indonesia and the Philippines, usually in fairly shallow waters. You tend to find them most often at night but they are regularly seen during the day in Lembeh and this one was taken during the day in the Philippines. They tend to travel in pairs, so look out for the second one once you find one, and try to put your hand on it or even worse crush it. The hardest thing is to get a decent portrait of them because they tend to shy away (understandably) from the huge photographer, camera system and bright flashes of the strobes. Nonetheless, with some pre-focusing and a little patience it’s possible. Hope you enjoy another mystery from the oceans.

© Jon Bertsch
Taken with a Nikon D200, Nikon 105mm, f14, 1/60th.
Ikelite housing, macro port, with DS-125 strobes. Processed with Photoshop CS5.

I was up visiting Lassen National Park a while ago and while on a hike I noticed this old weathered fallen tree. As I was walking around it, looking at the patterns of the growth rings, I noticed this area of interesting whorls. The tree was a white-blue-grey color, and sitting in the heavy shade it had a slight bluish tint to it. I set up a shot with my tripod and tried a few different angles. This was my favorite shot of the series.

I started a series of botanical studies in black and white (BW) for a new project. I take lot of plant and flower images from our garden and at the local botanical gardens but I don’t tend to post them very often. I started looking at creating some BW styles from them and decided to focus on making small set out of them. These are all processed in photoshop with the silver Efex Pro plugin.

These stairs and shadows caught my eye as I was driving past a storage container. The late afternoon sun was casting a soft yellow onto the metal walls and lighting up the stairs in a striking way. I liked the contrast of the light and shadows and grabbed a quick set of shots.

© Jon Bertsch
Taken with a Nikon D200, Nikon 70-200mm, f8, 1/125th.
Processed with Photoshop CS5.

A view across the Seine shortly after dusk with a +3 stop neutral density filter. I wanted to emphasize the lights along the river and capture the Eiffel Tower as it was illuminated. I timed the image so that I would be able to balance the sky and foreground, no HDR this time.

© Jon Bertsch
Taken with a Nikon D200, Nikon 55mm macro, 3s, f8 +3 stop neutral density filter.
Processed with Photoshop CS5 and Viveza2.