Rice Paddy July 22, 2011

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/26798685 w=515&h=290]

Click here to view this video on YouTube

The last time I visited the rice paddy was June 17th, and the plants were still very young then.  My goal for this year rice planting was to update it weekly but with vacationing and having to work long hours I finally had a chance to visit the paddy again yesterday evening.  It was extremely hot and humid.  My camera lens fog up as soon as it hits the hot air, it took about 5 minutes before it starts to warm up and I could see through the viewfinder again. This is going into the ninth week of rice planting.

Canon T2i, EF 17-40mm f/4L USM lens, Manual, f/13, 1/320sec, ISO 400, focal length 17mm, evaluative metering

Canon T2i, EF 17-40mm f/4L USM lens, Manual, f/13, 1/200sec, ISO 400, focal length 17mm, evaluative metering

The aroma of the rice plants smell so nice, I wish I could load the smell in my video to share and maybe it would be something that we could do in the future.  Lee saw a 4-D movie commercial recently on TV and she asked if you could smell it too.  I thought that’s too funny, imagine sitting in a movie theater and you could smell everything in the movie.  She thought that would be so cool, and I bet it would.

Canon T2i, EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens, Manual, f/13, 1/200sec, ISO 400, focal length 200mm, evaluative metering

Canon T2i, EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens, Manual, f/22, 1/30sec, ISO 400, focal length 70mm, evaluative metering

The dragonflies are hovering over the paddy and amazingly there were no mosquitoes in sight. In the environment such as the rice paddy where there are many dragonflies, the mosquitoes don’t have a chance to survive. The dragonflies make a feast out of them.

Canon T2i, EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens, Manual, f/4, 1/500sec, ISO 400, focal length 168mm, closeup cropped, evaluative metering

I didn’t see the damselfly in this image while I was shooting until I got home.  It’s so tiny, and not an easy task to focus on them, this one came out okay but I was actually focusing on the rice pods.

Canon T2i, EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens, Manual, f/6.3, 1/320sec, ISO 400, focal length 154mm, evaluative metering

The purple sticky rice.

Canon T2i, EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens, Manual, f/6.3, 1/320sec, ISO 400, focal length 200mm, evaluative metering

Canon T2i, EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens, Manual, f/6.3, 1/320sec, ISO 400, focal length 154mm, evaluative metering

The grasshopper.

Canon T2i, EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens, Manual, f/6.3, 1/80sec, ISO 400, focal length 200mm, evaluative metering

Rice Paddy August 6, 2010

This is going into the tenth week of rice planting and see how fast these rice pods mature in the hot and humid weather of North Carolina. I do have to say that I take the heat well for being out there, these were taken mid day and some of the storm clouds started to roll in. I didn’t want to take my chance and wait till after work so I went early today.

Some of these rice pods are ready to harvest but I’m sure they will wait for at least another 2 weeks or so before harvesting. These are the white short grain sticky rice.

 

These rice pods are dark, but they are not the purple sticky rice and they won’t get any darker than this.  These are the normal white rice.

Now this is a purple sticky rice pods, they are extremely pretty in rows.  I can’t wait for them to start turning purple.

There are not many mosquitoes at the paddy, the dragonflies patrol the area well.

There are many grasshoppers, normally they won’t stick around for me to photograph but this one actually posed for my camera.

I think this is a famous hangout spot for the dragonflies. I wonder if it’s the same one as the last time I saw, perhaps the king of the stick.

Rice Paddy July 23, 2010

I stopped by the rice paddy after work, it was extremely hot and my camera lens kept fogging up in the first 5 to 10 minutes that I got there. The temperature was around 95 degree Fahrenheit (35 degree Celsius) but it felt more like 100 degree.

I’ve been using the auto setting on my camera to shoot in the past and decided to step away from that. Please bear with me if my photos look kind of odd as I am learning the new settings on my camera.

Since I’m not relying on the auto focus anymore, it is a must to have a good eyesight.  And a good thing that I have a 20/20 vision and can manually focus the image as sharp as I can.

Click to see a closeup image

Click to see closeup image.

Back to the rice paddy, it has been eight weeks of rice planting and most of the rice pods are out now. The paddy has a nice aroma of the new rice plants and pods.  I think I can hang out here all day, but there’s only one problem…the heat is scorching hot.  It doesn’t look like it in this image below, but don’t let it fool you.