Posts in Category: still-life
Shell in the Beach Rime.
I am not actually quite sure how these large crystals of ice formed where they did, in little foot square patches along the high water mark on the beach near our home. There was a large stretch of open sand above these patches, where previous high tides had cleared the snows of last week off the beach, and, at low tide yesterday, close to 70 yards from the here to the water. It looks like rime, which is generally frozen mist or spray, and indeed may be frozen spray from the high edge of the surf hours ago, but I just don’t know. It is the extreme localization and specialization of the patches that has me wondering. Why just there, and why not elsewhere? What I do know is that these patches really caught my eye…those long, almost fibrous crystals, and the jumble of them, with the sand showing through. I had to find a shell set among them for a still life.
Canon SX50HS at 632mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/500th @ ISO 80. Snow Mode.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Snow on Apple. The Yard.
Today we are getting up to 7 inches of wet snow mixed with freezing (and not freezing) rain, but on Christmas Day we got about an inch of dry crystalline snow. I went out the next morning to look for a few images that would catch the feel of the light coating of snow.
We have two little apple trees in the front yard, and this year they made fruit (they don’t always), but bugs got to it before we did, so we just left it in the tree. This is the largest of our apples. With snow. Mostly it is just a study in shape and texture. 🙂
Canon SX50HS with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. Program with –1/3 EV exposure compensation. 1800mm equivalent field of view (for the macro effect). f6.5 @ 1/400th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Christmas Macro Magic
Merry Christmas Eve!
I went looking for a macro this morning. It is MacroMonday over on Google+, and, as I mentioned yesterday, I need a break from posting images from the Rio Grande trip to Texas and New Mexico. Something new. The living room was dark, with only the little white seed lights of the Christmas tree glowing (along with the screen of my wife’s laptop :). I was attracted to the way the light caught in the hair of this little nutcracker ornament. I was attracted by the way the figure was suspended in the shadows and shapes of the pine needles with only the Christmas Tree lights on.
And here is where the magic comes in. This is a handheld, ambient light, macro taken in “handheld night scene mode” at 24mm equivalent field of view with the Canon SX50HS. And the “ambient light” came from the few white seed lights that were close enough. The exif data reads f3.2 @ 1/15th @ ISO 1600 but that is not the whole story. To make this happen, the camera took three shots in rapid sequence and then stacked them to produce an exposure with has much of the noise processed out, and which has been stabilized by using the position data in the three images to process out motion blur. I did use a monopod under the camera to help steady it a bit, but still, this is nothing short of magical! I have linked the image to the lightbox view at WideEyedInWonder on SmugMug so with a couple of clicks you can view this image as large as you like. (Size controls are at the top of the page.)
The third of Clarke’s Three Laws (Arthur C. Clarke, the famous SiFi writer) is “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It certainly seems as though our cameras today are getting to the point where the technology is that sufficiently advanced. This shot could have been made even in the days of film…but it would have taken a lot of work, and a very skilled artist. Today’s P&S cameras put this kind of shot within the reach of anyone with enough imagination to see it…enough sense to read the manual…and just enough courage to press the shutter button. That is magical!
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness using my hyper-real preset.
Still Life with Tomatoes: Happy Sunday!
Yesterday morning while wandering through the kitchen I saw these two tomatoes sitting on the counter with their split stem, and just had to go get my camera and do some still lives. I turned a closer shot into paintings in three different styles yesterday, but this is the shot I originally saw, before I even went for the camera. There is something about the variations in greens when compared to the red of the fruit that really catches my eye. Then too, I found the subtle molding of the tomatoes by the mix of ceiling and window light very attractive.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 24mm macro plus 1.5x digital tel-extender. f3.5 @ 1/20th @ ISO 1250. (And who would have believed, even two years ago, that a small sensor P&S like the Canon could produce this kind of quality at 1250 ISO??) Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness, using my hyper-real preset.
And for the Sunday thought. Almost all my posts over the past month have been images from my last trip…to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and then the same valley in New Mexico. Birds, bugs, and landscapes in the bright, dramatic southwestern light. That is because we are having a totally uninteresting winter in Maine…photographically. Sunny days with no clouds over bare trees and brown landscapes…or murky days with a mix of rain and snow and very low light levels. I have gotten a few squirrel shots out the back door, and I put up a feeder and filled it with high quality seed…but apparently there is still so much fodder left in the bare woods and hedges that the local birds are not greatly tempted by my feeding station. When they come, it is always when the light is lowest, just before or just after a bout of rain with a few snow flakes mixed in.
I am not complaining. Really. I have been spending time building ebooks of the Bosque, my local Rachel Carson shots, and, currently, of pictures taken over the past several years in and around Acadia National Park. Still, I am getting an itch for new images. Which is why the tomatoes appealed so strongly.
I need to be creating. Oh, building ebooks might be considered a creative task in some sense…but it is more curative than creative…and not really a satisfying substitute. I need to newly frame the world and press the shutter button and process the results into a new image. I need to do that. It is a hunger. It is a spiritual hunger. I need it not for today’s life but for the eternal life that is in me. I need it to be who I am in the spirit.
And that is why the tomatoes caught my eye. And that Is why I am sharing them with you. 🙂
Happy Sunday! And may you find today, that which satisfies the creative spirit within you.
4/29/2012: Happy Sunday! Sunflower in late sun. St. Augustine FL
The sun does not set in North Florida in late April until 8PM, so you have these long golden hours between supper and sun down. The light is at its best. There is often the first breeze of the day off the ocean. It is altogether an enchanted time of day.
This sunflower was along the boardwalk leading into Ocean Hummock Park in St. Augustine Beach. I could not resist the way the low sun was illuminating it. I did not see the passenger on the left petals until I got it back on the computer and was processing it. That is a tiny, tiny little fly or bee…one or the other. I especially like the detail maintained I the green back of the flower and the way the bright flower is framed against the dark background.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1240mm equivalent field of view (840mm optical plus 1.5x digital tel-extender). f5.8 @ 1/400th @ ISO 100. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought. If I could stand this transparent, no more no less, so that the full character of me was revealed in the one light of all that is, I would be a happy man. And that is how I think it should work. We don’t loose our identity, our individual persons, when we stand in union with the light of creation…we are just completely illuminated, filled with light, and more completely ourselves than we can ever be elsewise.
I am not sure what the tine bee has to say in all this, but he is still there.
3/18/2012: Feather Found, Lake Champlain. Happy Sunday!
We walked along the shore of Lake Champlain as far as North Beach which is right below Burlington College where my daughter is a student. We sat there on blocks of marble at the edge of the sand and the girls talked…sister talk and mom talk…and I messed about framing the beach, and leaves in the litter, too lazy to get up and really go look for a picture. From where I sat on my block I eventually noticed, deep in the leaf litter, a strange smooth banded shape. I suspected a feather, and so it turned out to be when we finally got up to climb the sharp bluff to the college grounds above. I dug it out of the leaves and set it up on a rock for its portrait. Of course, out of its safe nest in the leaves the wind wanted to blow it away and it would not sit still for a shot. I would flip it to its good side and the wind would flip it back. After several tries on the bare surface of the rock, which I wanted for texture contrast , I had to let it blow to an edge, where it rested, at least right side up, and take the shot. The little round of acorn top was an unplanned bonus, as was the diagonal where sand meets rock.
Canon SX40HS at 1680mm equivalent field of view (840mm optical zoom plus 2x digital tel-extender function). I am finding this combination useful for tel-macros as well as more conventional long shots. Program with iContrast and -1/3EV exposure compensation. f5.8 @ 1/125th @ ISO 100.
Processed on Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought. This is one of those much ado about nothing shots…just a little found still life…a study in form and texture and light. A happy accident…except that I don’t ascribe to the theory of accidents. Where others might tend to see chance, I see intention. Not fate, mind you…but conscious, intelligent, living intention…moving in time as I do, one second at a time, but with the perspective of eternity where every second contains all the seconds…where every instant is all, and every found feather placed by hand and wind where rock meets sand contains the universe. Within the limits of my perspective, and tempted to count every second against some unknown store…my attotment so to speak…I cooperate with that intention, and, at my best, resist the temptation to count, and simply live within the moment I am given, with shared intent. That attitude allows me, often enough, to find a feather along the Champlain shore, to pick it and place it, to chase it where the wind puts it, to frame it…and to share it with you.
Happy Sunday!
3/10/2012: Bougainvillea Photopaints
Over on Google+ where I am active ( +Stephen Ingraham) there is quite a large group of photographer/artists who are expressing their visions of the world by creating painterly renderings of photographs. Quite a few of them use Pixelbender within PhotoShop. I use Dynamic Auto Painter 64x Pro, which is a program that attempts to mimic the effects of different classic painters by analyzing your photograph down to basic shapes and colors and applying the master’s brush methods to recreate it as a painting. It is a fascinating program to watch work, as it builds your image from a bare canvas, one brush stroke at a time.
I also do some finger-painting on my Xoom’s touch screen, using PicsArt Studio to selectively apply various effects with my finger tip, and then PS Touch to add a texture layer or to do final processing.
My offering today is a gallery of examples based on the same photograph…a sprig of bougainvillea against a terra-cotta brick wall at Mission Bay in San Diego. This is a shot that I actually took with painterly processing in mind. I liked the color and texture contrast as a photograph…but I was definitely thinking of it as a painting when I pressed the shutter release. The original looks like this.
The first image (at the top) is done in the style of Van Gogh. Following, we have the same same photograph rendered after a Matisse’s Lily Pond, followed by the same pic again, this time rendered after a work of Cezanne.
Finally we have the same pic again, finger-painted on the Xoom using various effects in PicsArt Studio, with a photo-texture layer (macro of a pocket handkerchief) overlaid in PS Touch.
Clearly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so what do you think? I will chime back in if comments warrant it 🙂
2/3/2012: Palm to Infinity, Merritt Island NWR
Taking a break from birds today. This palm fond along the boardwalk behind the Visitor Center at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge caught my eye for what the light was doing to shape…caught it and lead it a merry chase toward infinity down that spiral. I zoomed in pretty tight for emphasis.
Canon SX40HS at 260mm equivalent field of view. f5 @ 1/100th @ ISO 800. Program with iContrast and -1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Cropped slightly on the left to eliminate a distracting element.
1/20/2012: Venetian Gondola
Continuing with found beauty in Vegas, unlikely as that is…
The Gondolas on the Canal in the Venetian are all ornate, but this one is particularly attractive, especially against the blue water and the red brick. I tried this as an HDR, but I like the untreated image better. Any painterly quality here comes purely from the high ISO…though this is pretty good IQ indeed for 1000 ISO on a small sensor in artificial light.
Canon SX40HS at 100mm equivalent field of view. f4.5 @ 1/20th @ ISO 1000. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
1/4/2012: Frosted Seaweed, Kennebunk ME
According to my internet weather app it is 5º outside in southern Maine this morning. Frosty. This is from New Year’s Day dawn on the beach a few miles from our home, with the frost on the seaweed lighted by the rising sun. It makes a nice abstract study, with the mix of textures and colors, unified by the frosty coating. The contrast in the color temperature from the right where the low sun is striking to the left which is still in shadow is pretty dramatic too.
Canon SX40HS at 212mm equivalent field of view. f4.5 @ 1/100th @ ISO 800. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.