Posts in Category: storm
Blue and white…
Blue Spruce, Brown Street, Kennebunk Maine
We had another of those snowed all day and then turned to rain days in Southern Maine yesterday, but for a while there we had a nice white frosting over everything. This is just a Blue Spruce in the yard of a house down the street. I like the delicacy of the blue/green against the white, and the contrast in texture between the needles and the snow.
Sony RX10iii at 600mm equivalent field of view. Program mode. 1/250th @ ISO 250 @ f4. Processed in Polarr on my Android Tablet.
Under the winter pines. Happy Sunday!
Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge. Wells, Maine
“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus
It snowed all day yesterday. After clearing the drive (lunch and a rest) I decided to brave the snow covered roads at least as far as Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge headquarters where I was pretty sure I could get in to park and walk in the snowy woods. I was all suited up for the adventure…longjons base layer to high snow boots and a fleece lined parka. I took my umbrella as I hoped to take some pictures and I wanted to keep the camera relatively dry.
The woods were quiet. I was the only one foolish enough to brave the roads and the unplowed Rachel Carson driveway. The light was subdued. Snow fell steadily, in big flakes, to continue to fill the wood. Every tree and bush carried its burden of white. It was…I am tempted to say “magical”, but I don’t, on principle believe in magic.
We hear a lot about “magical thinking” today. Many people seem to believe that results can be achieved without effort if you just know the right thing to say. And many more seem willing to believe that our leaders will be able to achieve what they want, and have promised, just by saying it so and waving a hand (or wand as the case may be). And apparently there are those who want to be deceived by slight of hand, for the entertainments’ sake. They find it amusing, and admire the skill of the trickster. If you stop to think about it, magical thinking explains a lot about what has happened recently in American politics.
So “magical” is out as a way of describing the silent woods with the snow falling. Even this slightly other-worldly “under the snowy pines” scene. We need another word for what the generous eye sees. It has to catch the sense of awe…wonder…the sense that we are experiencing something out of the ordinary, beyond ordinary…the sense we are glimpsing the work of forces and intelligence larger than we are. It has to imply that we are touching the divine. And yet none of the words suggested: awesome, wonderful, extraordinary, supernatural, divine…at least in common usage, quite catch my meaning either. Maybe all of them together, but no one alone. If I were writing this in German I could just string them all together into one long unpronounceable word…or in English I could hyphenate them, or use the modern “/” (as in awesome/wonderful/extraordinary…which basically says I don’t know which word to use.) Though it still is not quite right, as it depends on this contrast with “magical” for part of the meaning, “blessed” or “full of blessing” comes close. The silent snowy woods with the snow still falling in big flakes was full of blessing.”
But then, everything we see is if we look with the generous eye. Happy Sunday!
Snow in the forest…
Snow. 120 Brown Street. Kennebunk Maine.
Carol and I were in New Mexico when the first snow fell in Maine, but we were home yesterday and watched, Frost like, the woods fill up with snow. It snowed most of the day, but never heavily, and by late afternoon we had about 2 inches on the ground. Gentle snow, and very little wind, so even that little bit built up on the evergreens to look like a much heavier fall. This is a little patch of mostly second growth forest (or 10th growth for all I know) just across the road from our house. It is posted, but I worked my way just far enough into the woods for this pic of the newly fallen snow, about 2:30 in the afternoon, before the light failed completely. There is always a quiet beauty to freshly fallen snow.
Sony RX10iii in-camera HDR. 24mm equivalent field of view. Nominal exposure: 1/100th @ f2.5 @ ISO 100. Processed in Snapseed on my Android tablet.
One of the best effects of HDR is maintaining green where it would otherwise go dark. Add a bit of shadow recovery in post processing, and the effect is very life-like. 🙂
Nubble Light, Winter Sky.
Nubble Light, Cape Neddick Maine.
I was coming up the coast from a abortive search for Snowy Owls on the beaches of New Hampshire and could not resist, despite the intermittent cold December rain, swinging out along the coast to see how Nubble Light was doing. They had the Christmas wreath up on the pump-house and a stiff wind was blowing the flag out. The light was dull enough so the beacon was lit and showing as it turned its circuit out to sea. The sea was steel gray reflecting green. Somber, but attractive in its own way.
In-camera HDR. Sony HX90V at 24mm equivalent field of view. Nominal exposure: 1/500th @ ISO 80 @ f3.5. Processed in Lightroom.
October Marsh
Little River Marsh, Laudholm Farm, Wells ME
When October sends a gloomy day…you take gloomy day pictures. There is still a beauty to be had. The sky broods. The colors burn like late embers. I seem to be stuck in cliche mode, but you get the gist. This is from the observation deck on the boradwalk trail at the Well National Estuarine Research Center at Laudholm Farm in Wells, Maine.
Sony HX400V in-camera HDR. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Stormy La Jolla
The weather in Southern California is so beautiful, so much of the time, that we forget they do have storms there. In fact, San Dieagens were looking forward to this storm, as it brought several inches of much needed rain. Not enough to bring them to average for the year, but enough to make a significant difference in the deficit. And it was a spectacular storm. Wind and rain three days running, and great crashing waves…seen here as they pound the cliffs at La Jolla. This is just up from the Children’s Pool where I had been photographing seals with their pups.
Sony NEX 3NL with 16-50mm zoom. 24mm equivalent. ISO 200 @ 1/640th @ f11. Processed in Snapseed for HDR effect. Perspective correction in Photo Editor by dev.macgyver. All on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
San Diego Under Siege
Or “The View from the Lighthouse Steps”. The old Lighthouse on Point Loma stands, appropriately, high above the bay and the city. What you see in the foreground is the water catchment and the cistern that kept the lighthouse supplied in all but the driest season. What you see in the sky, is enough water to fill the cistern several times over. The storm was still passing there to the east and south over and behind the city. It had cleared the Point about 40 minutes before…but another came through before dark. Several inches of rain over several days. That is pretty significant for San Diego and southern California in this dry year.
What attracts me in this image is the crystal clarity of the geometric rain washed foreground, contrasted with the geometry of the city fading into those amazing clouds. It is quite possibly the most successful shot I have taken from Point Loma, and, over the years of visiting in early March for the San Diego Birding Festival, I have taken many.
Sony NEX 3NL with 16-50mm zoom. 24mm equivalent. ISO 200 @ 1/800th @ f13. Processed for HDR effect in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
All in a Day in the Backyard.
From dawn to dusk in our backyard yesterday. From an awesome -11 degree sunrise to a 5 PM blizzard. We do it right in Maine 🙂 The way life is supposed to be. (And as I get the snowblower out of the basement to deal with 8 inches of fresh snow this morning I am thinking, “yeah, maybe not so much 🙂
Still, it is good discipline to find the beauty where you are, and to celebrate it. Keep those eyes open and those cameras clicking! It is good for the soul.
Sony NEX 3NL with 16-50mm zoom. 24mm equivalent. Sunrise: ISO 1000 @ 1/160th @ f4. Blizzard: ISO 500 @ 1/160th @ f4. Processed in Snapseed and Photo Editor by dev.macgyver, and assembled in Pixlr Express on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
Clearing Before Dawn
Clearing up the snow that is. Carol had to play at an 8 am Mass, so I had the snowblower out Sunday morning before first light to clear up 4 inches of wet, clingy snow from the walk and drive. I finished just as the sky to the east was beginning to lighten, and had to try this hand-held twilight mode shot with the new Sony NEX 3NL. It takes 6 images and then processes them down into one with less blur and less noise than a single hand-held shot could manage in this light. I have had similar modes on other cameras. Some work well, and some do not. It looks like the NEX implementation is one of the good ones.
24mm equivalent field of view. f3.5 at a nominal ISO of 6400. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
Found in the Storm. Happy Sunday!
We got several inches of clingy wet snow yesterday. It fell in such huge flakes…clumps really…that all day I thought it would amount to more than it did in the end. Still, in a few moments I will get the snow blower out and clear the drive. 🙂 It is enough snow for that.
Anyway, yesterday afternoon I suited up, took my umbrella to keep the camera dry, and took a walk around the neighborhood looking for images. This is the last picture I took on my rounds. The shapes of the curling berry-whips are elegant enough in themselves to warrant an image…but I suspect I might not have seen them at all if not for the clinging snow. I danced around a bit, under my umbrella, looking for the right angle to catch the effect, and zoomed in out for the right framing. This one does it, I think.
Sony NEX 3NL-B with 16-50mm power zoom. Superior Auto. ISO 500 @ 1/160th @ f5.6. 75mm equivalent field of view. HDR processing in Snapseed on my Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 brought up the detail in the background water, and highlighted the texture of the snow.
And for the Sunday Thought: as I said above, I probably would have missed this photograph if not for the clinging snow…and even if I had see the elegant curls, it would have been a very different image without the contrast of the snow.
I was watching Bones last night, and Sealy, the main male character, and the religious foil for Dr. Brennan’s hyper-rationalism (if you don’t know the show, just the contrast there is enough to carry the point…religion vs rationalism) made a comment about God in the face of a serious cancer in a young colleague. Dr. Brennan, struggling to cope with her feelings about telling the young colleague that he has cancer, asks Sealy something to the effect of…”but doesn’t your belief in God imply that there is someone good behind what happens in this world?” Sealy replies along the lines of…”yes, but God tests us to see what we are made of…and so we will appreciate what we have.” That is pretty conventional wisdom in the Religious world.
I have to say, though, that it is, in my opinion, bad theolgy. When bad, and often genuinely undeserved, things happen to good people, I can not…I will not…believe that they are tests from God…or that God is trying to teach us to appreciate good. What does that say about who God is? I can not pretend to understand this, and even when I try to explain it to myself I get into snares and balls of contradiction…but my faith tells me that God is good…all good…with no shadow or turning. And that God is there with us, working for good, no matter what bad things happen to us in this world. The goodness of God is the ground of reality, and all that happens, happens against that ground.
It is not the snow in this image, in fact, that makes it…nor the berry whips of another season growing from the mulch under the snow…it is the light…always the light. To put it another way then, God’s good is the light in which we see all that happens to us. There will be shadow and shape and texture to our lives, things we consider good, and things we consider bad, beautiful peace and outrageous, senseless storm…but overall and through all and in all is the goodness of God, the light of this world. That is not, maybe, what religion says, and it may never satisfy a rationalist, but it is word of faith. God is good. God works for good in all things. End of story.
And yes, perhaps that truth is, like the beauty of berry whips, easiest to see in a storm.
Happy Sunday!