Posts in Category: spring
Trout Lily
Trout Lily, Laudholm Farm, Wells ME
I went for a walk at Laudholm Farm (Wells National Estuarine Research Center) yesterday, more for the form of the thing than with any real hope of photo ops…but I was pleasantly surprised. Both the Skunk Cabbage and Trout Lily were in bloom along the boardwalk through the maple swamp, I caught a Garter Snake crossing under, and got good shots of an early Blue Jay. The Eastern Towhees were also tuning up. There were drying vernal pools with masses of frog eggs, some clouds came up over the farm buildings, interesting winter weathered reeds. a Kestrel hunting the farm fields…lots, really, to look at and enjoy. Glad I went.
The Trout Lily is one of the earliest blooming forest flowers in Maine…kind of the Crocus of the woods…budding out shortly after the last of the snow leaves the ground. Many years I miss it altogether, because it has passed by the time I start paying attention. I remember finding beds of the distinctive green and brown leaves one year, and watching them for a month waiting for the bloom, when, in fact, they had bloomed weeks before I first noticed them. Generally I find them when I am not expecting anything to be blooming…like this year.
They “nod” on their stems…generally the flower faces the forest floor when fully open, presenting its backside to the sun, but I did find one more or less horizontal and near enough to the boardwalk so that by getting down on my side I could frame it from slightly below and catch the full effect of the flower. Thank you, Nikon, for the articulated LCD on the P900. 🙂 The flower is about 1.5 inches across.
Nikon P900 in Close Up Mode and 105mm equivalent field of view. 1/800th @ ISO 100 @ f4. Processed in Lightroom.
First Chipper of Spring
Chipmunk. Kennebunk Bridle Path
I went back to the Kennebunk Bridle Path yesterday, since I had had a good time there the day before, and walked upriver to the first bridge. It was hard going, with 2 feet of condensed snow on the path. Others who hand come before me when the snow was softer had churned it up into a very uneven surface, which is now hard, and hard walking. And there were no birds. I did hear what was most likely a Pileated Woodpecker drumming in the woods beyond the bridge. However on the ocean side of Route 9, where the birds were the day before, there were again birds. There was a large flock of Goldfinches, a few Song Sparrows, and, again, a few Eastern Bluebirds. But the real treat was my first Chipmunk of the spring. Where the cover is heaviest in the small pines along the trail, the snow was thin enough so it has melted off to bare ground now, and this Chipmunk was out and about exploring its little patch. I caught it posed out on a limb, and it sat long enough for me to work my way around so there were no twigs between. I have a series of shots testing the limits of the Nikon’s 2000mm plus zoom. The chipper was slightly backlighted, and I love the light through the ears! And the reflection of the Bridle Path in the critter’s eye.
Nikon P900 at 2000mm equivalent field of view (hand held). 1/320th @ ISO 400 @ f6.5. I am experimenting with Topaz Dejpeg. On this ISO 400 shot it provided a slight improvement, especially in background noise and texture. Final processing in Lightroom.
Song Sparrow Rampant
Song Sparrow. Kennebunk Bridle Path
We have a few Song Sparrows back early…so early that they are not yet singing. It might be that only males or only females have come in this early, but for whatever reason, they are not thinking about establishing territories or nesting yet. They are uncharacteristically skulky…staying low in the brush and mostly out of sight. In another few weeks I expect to see them singing from every exposed branch and fence post top. The birds that are in are particularly vivid as well, with very high contrast between the brown and lighter parts. This bird was along the Kennebunk Bridle Path parallel with the lower Mousam River on the ocean side of Route 9 in Kennebunk.
Nikon P900. 2000mm equivalent field of view. 1/500th @ ISO 125 @ f6.5. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Spring Tide HDR
We have had really high tides the past week, flooding parts of the marsh that I have never seen under water. This area along the Kennebunk Bridle Path normally remains high and dry at the highest tides. These high, spring tides, are, I hope, another sign that Spring is finally coming to Southern Maine. Here, with the transparency of the sea water, the wind ripples, and the clear light, it makes an excellent subject for HDR. This is my usual single frame HDR, processed in Snapseed on my tablet.
Sony NEX 3NL with 16-50mm zoom. 24mm equivalent.
Rainy Day at Winter’s End
On Sunday, it rained all day, sometimes hard, sometimes just a spattering, but always wet. There were aerial and coastal flood warnings from the National Weather Service office in Grey. But, at least in part, because I had only that morning written about finding the wonder in every season and every day, I forced myself to pick up my cameras and head out to see what I could see. If I can’t take my own good advice, well then it is not that good, is it? I took an umbrella, but the wind was blowing hard enough so that I knew I would mostly photograph what I could see from the car. I drove down to our local tidal marsh behind the dunes at the beach, and then down past the Rachel Carson NWR Headquarters to Laudholm Farm and the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve, then back up the coast to sit at Mother’s Beach in Kennebunk and shoot gulls out the window of the car. I took a few scenics along the way, trying to capture the wet day/late winter/early spring atmosphere, and hoping for some interesting HDR effects.
This is along the road into Laudholm Farm, where it passes through a thick stand of second growth firs and pines. With the rain, the little brook that passes under the road in a culvert, was brim full. The wet leaves, blown in there from last year, the reflective water, the evergreens and patches of old snow, all framed against a background made soft by the water in the air…well, I liked it enough on the way in to pull over and get out of the car on the way back out, sheltering the camera for a couple of shots. HDR processing and some image tuning in Snapseed brings up the effect very nicely. Or that is what I think.
Sony NEX 3NL with 16-50mm zoom. 24mm equivalent. ISO 200 @ 1/160th @ f4.5. Processing as above.
The Bluebird of Happiness?
So, tell me, if you know, how did the the Bluebird become the bird of happiness? Have you ever seen a photo of a bluebird, at least our Eastern Bluebird, that looks anything other than grumpy? There is that famous mug shot (litterally, it is generally seen on a mug for sale in some gift shop) of the “Angry Bluebird”, with its feathers ruffled and it’s face set…but really, that is just the face the good God gave the bluebird. It is something in the shape of the bill and the placement of the eyes, of were the line of blue meets the line of brown. The bird just looks aggrieved. The Bluebird, in fact, could have been the prototype bird for Angry Birds! The Bluebird of agrivation! That is more like it.
Of course, maybe the ancients had some other bluebird in mind when they coined the phrase. Maybe it was already a cliché when the first European settlers named this little ball of blue and rust feathers. Maybe it is all, after all, just a missunderstanding. 🙂
Then too, I was happy to see this particular bluebird in the fields down by the ocean the other day…we don’t see them too often in Kennebunk at any season, and this bird is my first for this year: a hint, at least, that spring is finally beginning to spring in Southern Maine, despite the snow still on the ground.
This shot is right out at the limits of what can be usefully done with the 75-300mm zoom on the Olympus OM-D E-M10. I used the 2x digital extender in the camera for a 1200mm equivalent field of view, shooting off my bean-bag head on the monopod. I could crop it slightly..and the bird would be bigger in the frame, but there would be no more detail…and I like the composition here.
Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
Spring Raptors
Though the thermometer might not know it or show it yet, and though we still have, in places, over 3 feet of snow in the yard, it is spring in Southern Maine. The angle of the sun, and the length of the day can not be disguised. Certainly birds, if a bit late, are trickling back through New England. I saw my first Turkey Vulture last week, and, more than any Robin, the Turkey Vulture is the sure sign of spring in Maine. Sorry…but it is true. The TV is the first of the big raptors to return, and I was not surprised to see a Red-tailed Hawk out over the marsh on the Mousam on Saturday and a Red-shouldered beside the interstate in New Hampshire on Sunday, just below the Maine border. The raptors of summer are coming. Sure as sunrise creeps earlier and sunset later day by day.
This series of a Red-tailed Hawk in flight was taken with the Olympus OM-D E-M10 and 75-300mm zoom at 600mm equivalent. I have a flight shot setting programed into my E-M10 and set on one of the programmable function buttons so I can switch to it instantly at need. The individual panels are heavy crops even at 600mm, and it was not good light…but still.
Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014. Collage assembled in Pixlar Express.
Branch Brook Sweep Panorama
I have done several panoramas in different seasons here at the “S” curves in Branch Brook at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge. It is a tempting scene in any season. This is spring coming on…and it is my first “sweep” panorama at the spot. I generally build panoramas one shot at time, and stitch the shots later in PhotoShop Elements. For this shot I used my Samsung Galaxy S4’s Sweep Panorama mode. You just open the camera app, set it for Panorama, point at one edge of the scene, touch the shutter button, and slowly sweep the phone around however many degrees you want in a continuous motion. The screen displays a little track and gives you pointer arrows to correct when you drift too far off a horizontal line (or a vertical line if you are shooting a vertirama). It is easy, fast, and it works. And with the Galaxy, unlike some smartphone sweep panorama apps which automatically downsize the sweep, you capture the full resolution of the sensor times however long your sweep is. Holding the phone in portrait mode gives you relatively tall and and as wide as you want panorama. Once you touch the shutter button a second time, the processor in the phone “stitches” the panorama. If you look closely here you will see that it could not quite handle the rail that is parallel to the motion of the sweep. There are some jaggies there where the image was stitched. But in general, and with less challenging lines, the app does amazingly well!
With a little tweaking, either right on the phone in Snapseed, or in Lightroom on my laptop, the results can be pretty amazing. (Though Snapseed is an amazingly capable editing app it does downsize the results…this is a Lightroom version. You can see it as wide as your screen will allow by clicking the image to open it in the lightbox on my WideEyedInWonder galleries.) This is about 200 degrees of sweep.
And from a phone camera!
Old Falls Maple Red: Happy Sunday!
One of the reasons I invested in a gas powered scooter this year (as opposed to the electric scooter I had last year) was to have the range to reach Old Falls on a regular basis this summer. I want to be able to check this stretch of water at least once a week for dragonflies. I found two unique ones there last fall and I suspect there will be more that I have not seen this summer. Of course, I enjoy photographing the falls in all its seasons. They are not much in the way of waterfalls by any imaginable scale…but they are one of the few falls within a day’s drive of my home in Kennebunk. Southern Maine is worn pretty flat.
I like the way this HDR treatment brings out the red of the maple blossoms, and the intense greens of the young pines and spruces…against the dark water, and under this intense sky, with the boiling white of the falls in the foreground.
Canon SX50HS. Three exposure HDR at -2 1/3, -1/3 and + 2/3s EV. Blended and Tone Mapped in Dynamic Photo HDR. Final processing in Lightroom.
And for the Sunday Thought. It is the red of the maple blossoms that really makes this image stand out for me…it is also what I was trying to catch. Most people don’t realize, or don’t really notice, that Red Maples are red twice a year…not just in the fall but in the spring as well. I will include a shot from a few days ago in our back yard which shows where the red in the Old Falls shot is coming from.
Our back yard maple flowers are a bit more advanced that the ones on the trees at Old Falls, but you get the idea. The Maples of New England are fire in the fall and fire in the spring. And all summer that fire burns in them, obscured by the green of the busy leaves making food for a season’s growth, for a crop of winged maple seeds to sow the future, and to survive another winter. It is easy to miss the fire in the summer, but it is there.
I would like to think our lives are like that. Fire in the bud, fire in the flower, and fire at last in the fall. If the fire in us is obscured in the summers of our lives by the busy green of making a living, of raising children, of laying up our stores, surely it will rise up in us once more before the final winter. As the world dies out of us, so the spirit should show through more and more. Perhaps that is what we are really seeing when we say a man is in his second childhood. Red in the bud, red in the flower, red in the end. That’s what I hope.
5/27/2012: Unknown Beauty, Kennebunk Bridle Path. Happy Sunday
Every spring I find a few of these flowers growing near one of the old bridges on the Kennebunk Bridle Path where it crosses land owned by Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge along the Mousam River. I can’t identify it. It looks so familiar, so like I ought to know its name. Again today, I have spent way too long looking…in my wildflower guides and on-line, but it eludes me yet…once more. I suspect it is closely related to Canada Mayflower and False Lily of the Valley, though it is not either of those. Canada May Flower grows further down the path in the more shaded areas, and the leaves are the wrong shape for False Lily of the Valley. There are a lot of flowery bushes right along there, including Barbarry, which I know is not native, so I have come to suspect it might be a garden flower left over from when the Path, which was, in fact, a trolley line connecting Kennebunk proper with Kennebunk Port at the turn of the century, was landscaped. But which one?
No matter what it is called, I love the delicate white flowers and the strong bold curves of the veined leaves, especially as they are shown off here in the spring sun. The sunlit brush in the background is, I think, just far enough out of focus to provide framing and balance for the strong leaves in the foreground, and the slightly radial lines of the dry plant stems actually draw the eye downward to the flower at the center. This is a ground level shot. I have a slightly tighter framing that focuses more on the flowers, but I really like what the light is doing in the lines of the leaves.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm macro, plus 1.5x digital tel-extender for the field of view of a 36mm lens, f4 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 125.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought. I am not sure why it bothers me so much to have to post this beauty without a name. The flower is beautiful. The image is strong. It needs, I think, no apology. It is a thing of beauty in itself, whole. A name would not make it any better, or even any more complete. And yet, there is a vague sense that I am failing in my duty when I publish it without a name attached. And that is it exactly. I am not feeling ashamed at my ignorance, or my lack of diligence. We can’t know everything, and I have spent a reasonable (some would say unreasonable) amount of time trying to find out. And yet I do feel that it is part of my job as one who celebrates the creator’s creation to supply the name we humans have given this plant. As though that mattered. Strange.
I was thinking about language this week (probably in the shower where all my deep thinking takes place…I think the quality of thought in the world may have diminished in direct proportion to the conversion from bath-taking to shower-taking 🙂 Words are really just our way of indexing experience and memory. When I say “Canada Mayflower” I instantly tap into a whole complex of connected memory and experience stored somewhere in the biologic cloud that is my brain, and going back in time to my earliest experiences. And now, today, it is so easy to type that name into the browser of my computer, and be instantly connected to the vast web of human memory and experience that resides in the digital cloud that spans the world, and reaches infinitely further back into time than I can go myself. But the words themselves, “Canada Mayflower” are just the index key that pulls all that information together. It is the way our minds work. It is the way we humans work.
Which is way I always smile when I remember that, according to the story that comes along with my faith, our first job was to name the animals (and presumably the plants, and even the rocks, too). It is our most inherent duty. And this is good, because the other aspect of the job is caring. We were to care for creation as well as name it. They are deeply linked in the way we are made. Both logic and faith tell me this is so.
This is a beautiful flower, I think, beautifully framed to share with you. But I still have the vague feeling that if I don’t care enough to know beauty’s name, then I do not care enough.
Happy Sunday.