Posts in Category: still-life
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.
1/2/2012: Candied Rose Leaves, Kennebunk ME
The very first warm rays of New Year’s sun brought up the red under the frost in these beach-rose leaves, giving them the look of a confection. I backed off and used the long end of the zoom from 4.5 feet to throw the background well out of focus and –isolate the arrangement of leaves and berries. I used a Canon SX40HS super-zoom point and shoot camera with a real focal length only 150mm…so I got the depth of field of a moderate telephoto and the image scale of an 840mm lens. Best of both worlds.
This was just at dawn, so the exposure was f5.8 @ 1/100th @ ISO 800. This kind of shot is not possible without the excellent image stabilization of the Canon lens (handholding 840mm equivalent), and the excellent high ISO performance of the sensor which maintains color and detail without adding a lot of noise.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
12/26/2011: Winter Still-life
A vernal pool in the woods of Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, fallen oak leaves of several shades of warm brown, and just cold enough to freeze the surface into crazy patterns which catch the light in interesting ways. It must be that the patterns are caused by variations in surface tension (or perhaps even water temperature) due to the barely submerged leaves. I am sure there is science behind it, but the effect is, at least to me, captivating, especially when it is contrasted with the shapes of the leaves themselves.
This is a long zoom shot, at 520mm equivalent field of view, to provide just enough isolation to emphasize the patterns, and just enough magnification to clearly delineate them. Canon SX40HS in Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f5.8 @ 1/160th @ ISO 500. It is so nice to be able to leave the Canon in Program, with auto ISO, and just shoot, with confidence that the results will be excellent no matter how high the ISO goes to maintain decent shutter speed for handholding long zoom shots! If I had had to dance around ISO and shutter speed considerations for this shot, it would have difficult to impossible, and the result would not, certainly, have been either so sharp or so vibrant.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
12/25/2011: Merry Christmas. Happy Sunday.
Christmas on a Sunday is, in fact, not all that rare an event. There is a 28 year cycle and the gap between Sunday Christmas’ varies (due to leap years) from 11 to 5 years in a predictable way. The next one will be in 2016 and the one after in 2022. (I did not do the math myself. Check with Ask.com.) Still…
It feels just slightly more special. In some ways (purely temporal) it complicates the day. In some (mostly spiritual) it elevates it. But of course I profess to believe that for people of faith there is, or should be, no such dichotomy. The spiritual finds expression in the temporal or it does not exist at all. When all our moments are moments in eternity, in the presence of the divine, then we are living our faith.
And, in that spirit, I am not exactly certain why this is my Christmas Sunday pic. It was taken yesterday, on Christmas Eve Saturday, along my little stretch of the Kennebunk Bridle Trail where so many of my local pics are taken. We had an unusually high tide which flooded the marsh with salt water, so that the fresh water spread thin on the surface and froze to an icy lace. As the tide fell, the fragile skin of ice bent and broke around things as delicate as individual grass stalks, creating impromptu sculptures to catch the clear December light. I attempted to memorialize the effect in frames of various sizes. This one, at full zoom, is one of my favorites.
Maybe that is it. If light is spiritual and water temporal (as we often draw the lines), this image represents the fusion of the two, and just how fragile and fleeting our attempts to see them so too often are. Rare as a Sunday Christmas…but beautiful enough for memory…and frequent enough, the sweep of time, for hope.
Today I celebrate the birth of Jesus, Son of God, God with us, God in us, who through life and death and life beyond death, gives us life…today and forever…like, in some way, the clear light of December caught in fragments of ice on a falling tide. A thing of beauty and wonder worth celebrating.
Merry Christmas. Happy Sunday.
12/8/2011: Prickly Pear, Arroyo Colorado WBC
By an odd coincidence (I don’t actually believe in coincidence, but it makes a neat shorthand for “I have not yet figured out why”) I am back in Texas for the second time in less than a month. North Texas this time. Graham, in fact, which according to the brochure in the hotel lobby, is The Gem of North Texas. Eventually you will see the sunset pics I took last night from the high bluff south of town, but for today, to keep it in Texas, I will return to the Rio Grande Valley and Arroyo Colorado World Birding Center in Harlingen Texas. I popped out there after setting up my booth at the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival last month. Bird life, as I detailed in another post, was sparse (totally the wrong time of day), but there were dragonflies, and some very interesting light effects on the forest of tree-like prickly pear cactus. As I was working the area, I zoomed in on this tight composition of a single pad. I love the way the light is caught in the spines, and the receding planes of focus behind the pad in the foreground…and the general geometry of the curves.
Canon SX40HS at 840mm equivalent field of view. f5.8 @ 1/400th @ ISO 200. Program with iContrast and –1/3ED exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
12/4/2011: Happy Sunday! Sun Fire | Burning Bush
Hiking the Marsh Trail at Bosque del Apache, I looked up at the top of the loose conglomerate bluff at just the right spot and just the right moment to see this. It was late afternoon and the sun was getting low enough so the bluff cast a shadow across most of the trail, though the marsh itself was still in sun, and the light spilling over the bluff caught in the fine seed filaments of this plant (I am not sure what it was but I suspect, from the fine fibers, that it was Cliff Rose) and lit them up like the glowing wires of incandescent bulbs. I am sure it was a purely a diffraction effect…the seed fibers were fine enough to bend and focus light…they were not, of course, heated to incandescence themselves…but it certainly looked like I imagine Moses’s burning bush might have. I wonder what wonders I missed by not stopping to listen?
But then that question, apt as it is in logic of writing down my impressions, is not true to the experience. I actually experienced a wonder that goes well beyond questions of what I might have missed. I was, in fact, caught up in the act of wonder, and, simultaneously, busy trying to figure out how to record it so that I might, eventually, share it.
For me, that is what it means to be a photographer…and those are the moments I treasure…when I am caught up in wonder and fully engaged in making an image of it. I tend to favor cameras that do most of the work in those critical moments…auto exposure…auto focus…set-and-forget cameras that allow me to concentrate on framing what I am seeing effectively. I can think about that, about the framing and the composition, without losing the wonder. If I have to actually think about f-stops and shutter speeds and ISO values then I am in danger of getting separated from the wonder. And what fun would that be?
No, I need to be able to point and shoot…simple as that…so that when I see a burning bush I can share it with you without losing it myself.
And besides, what God is saying in most burning bushes is pretty simple. “I am here. I am with you. Trust and enjoy.” (We humans generally translate that into “Do not be afraid”, or sometimes “Trust and obey” but, believe me, it is “trust and enjoy” in the original language…the one you can only hear with the ears of the spirit.)
No, the burning bush on the top of the bluff spoke pretty clearly to me…and I hope I caught just a bit of the message for you.
Canon SX40HS (ultimate point and shoot) at 180mm equivalent field of view, f6.3 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 200. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
11/6/2011: November Light on Oak Leaves, Happy Sunday!
It is November. In Southern Maine the show of fall maples is long past. People have raked their yards and bagged the leaves, and hopefully they are their way to some composting center. Now we wait for snow.
But there is still a show in town. This is the season of November light and oak leaves. The oaks are slow to turn, tenacious on the trees, and the reds are muted, but before they turn brown (often still on the tree) they go through red to bronze to copper and, when the clear low sun of November lights them, they are, in their own way, as much a wonder as any maple ever hoped to be.
Where they fall in water, the water steeps the tannin out. The leaves go yellow and the water turns tea brown…a rich brew that makes still waters in November highly reflective. Where the leaves lie on the surface they make patterns on a reflected sky.
I especially love the way the light passes through the oak leaves, revealing an inner life, an inner fire, even at the end.
And sometimes you find one almost edge on to the sun, with light on both sides, illuminating unsuspected contours.
November light on oak leaves.
Canon SX40HS. All of these are medium to long zoom shots, to frame the leaves against an out of focus background, in Program with iContrast. ISOs range is from 125 on the lighter leaves to 320 on the last dark leaf, but with the Canon I just let it do its own exposure thing. Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
I don’t think there is much more to say for the Sunday thought. Except maybe: I hope when I am near my end, to be as tenacious as the oak leaves, and that a light as clear as November will be as revealing of my inner life…my inner fire…as this.
10/18/2011: Wind Writing in the Sand
Take a windy day and a fine stiff blade of beach grass (or two), laying close to the surface of the sand and you get wind writing, vaguely oriental, certainly recording a message of mysterious importance.
One of the things I love about advanced Point and Shoot cameras is the spontaneity. See the image. Zoom and frame the image. Capture the image. Just that fast. It puts the grab in grab shots…but with enough quality to make for serious photography. And you are ready for anything, just about always. Even wind writing in the sand.
For this shot I zoomed the Canon SX40HS out to about 138mm equivalent field of view and shot from a standing position at the exposure Program and iContrast provided: f4.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 100.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
10/16/2011: Goodbye to Fall Foliage
I was tempted to call this post “Goodbye to Fall” but that would not be accurate. We have weeks, maybe months, of fall ahead of us in this long slow slide to winter. Rain and wind have pretty well put out the fire of fall in Southern Maine this past week, and there are more leaves on the ground than on the trees. Still the trees will be bare a good long time before they are loaded with snow. We might even have an Indian Summer in between. So this is just goodbye to fall foliage…the brief weeks of stunning color here in New England.
Canon SX40HS at about 155mm equivalent field of view, f4.5 @ 1/80th @ ISO 200. Program with iContrast and Vivid set in My Color.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought. Maybe is just the hang-over from a week of intense meetings and late nights, but I can feel my mind shifting out of summer gear today, settling in to the more studious mode of fall and winter, turning inward. I feel the need of a fire in the fireplace. We don’t actually have a fireplace of course, but I still feel the need to huddle down to warmth and light, inside, and think deep thoughts. The thoughts of summer are all external, bright days and doing, life so fast and vital you can barely catch it, and never catch enough. The thoughts of fall and winter are internal. The days may be as bright and as full, and I may be outside just as much, but I become more alive than the world outside. I take my life out to experience fall and winter. Summer just breaks in and overwhelms me. And I am ready for fall…ready even for winter.
In my job fall and winter are busy seasons. Over the next month I will experience fall at least 4 times more in trips to the south and west, and even at the depth of winter in New England, I will be taking brief vacations into the shallows of what passes for winter in Florida and other points south. So it is more a thing of the mind and spirit, this inward turning. But I recognize the beginnings of it today, here in Southern Maine. It might be goodbye to the flame of fall foliage, but it is hello to the mind of fall.
10/15/2011: Simple
The Carl Zeiss Sports Optics offices are in an industrial park just off 295 in Chester, Virginia south of Richmond. It is a nice park, with lots of well landscaped catchment ponds and fountains, small groves of trees and well shaded walks. Flowers are everywhere you could plant flowers. All in all, a nice place for offices if you have to be in an industrial park. Many of the ponds are planted with decorative reeds and grasses. This is a simple shot of the seed head of a decorative grass, framed against the surface of the pond with a longish zoom. I like the lines and the colors. I like the bokeh…enhanced by sparkles of sun on surface of the water. Elegant. Simple.
Canon SX40HS at about 570mm equivalent field of view. f5.8 @ 1/160th @ ISO 400. Program with iContrast.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.