Redwoods NP and Experimentation Images

I did some experimentation today. My daughter-in-law got me a Lensball for Christmas to use on this trip. It is a clear glass ball that when you focus your camera on the ball the scene on the other side looks like a fisheye lens but upside down. I have tried a few times to use it in the past. My first attempt was in St. Augustine, FL before I left on this trip and I wasn’t really happy with my results and knew that it would take some more practice. I think that it only works well with certain types of scenes. But with more practice that might expand. I used it one other time on this trip and it was OK. My son gave a suggestion to step back from the ball and allow the scene around the ball to be slightly out of focus, but you can still see what the whole scene looks like. Well I tried it today at the beach and on a cliff above the ocean and was really happy with my results. I feel certain that with more practice and imagination I can get some stunning special effects images. Now that I am figuring it out, I must really thank my daughter-in-law for her foresight. To get the images using the Lensball I set my camera settings to a shutter speed of 1/125 and a f-stop of f/22. Also, today on that same cliff overlooking the ocean there were a lot of flowers. I took some pictures with the ocean in focus and the flowers out of focus. This is done by opening my f-stop up so that the near objects are out of focus and the ocean is in focus. Then I switched and focused on the flowers and let the ocean be out of focus. I couldn’t go too open on my f-stop because of how bright the sunlight was today. I had the aperture set to f/11 and a shutter speed of 1/800. For the flowers in focus and the ocean out of focus I had the focal length of lens set to 90mm and to have the flowers out of focus I had a focal length of 112mm. for all the images I used my Nikon 28-300mm lens.