Posts in Category: Sunday
6/10/2012: Snowy Against the Sun. Happy Sunday!
I took a late ride on my scooter down to the Kennebunk Bridle Path after supper yesterday to see if there were any dragonflies flying late. I found a Seaside Dragonlet, which is always a treat, but that was about it. However, there was an egret working the marsh pools along the Path, just inside the Rachel Carson National Wildlife boundary. I could not resist a few shots. I was not until I got back to the computer that I saw the effect of the late sun behind the bird and across the water. Ahaaa.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1680mm equivalent field of view (840mm optical zoom plus 2x digital tel-converter function). f5.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 100. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought: I was thinking yesterday on my two photo-prowls about just how aware looking for dragonflies makes you! It pushes the boundaries of what is possible. You have to be tuned to any motion, any fleeting shadow across the marsh grass, any tiny thing that moves. You have to check the likely bushes for dragons to hang up in. You have to scan every pool. You become hyperaware. And because of that you see more of everything. More birds. More flowers. More other bugs. More everything.
I requires constant effort. You drift. Or at lest I do. I catch my self just walking again, watching the trail ahead where my feet will fall and not much else, thinking about…whatever! And then I have to push my awareness back out of my head and start looking again.
And then there is an Egret standing against the low afternoon sun. It is not a reward for your attention. It would have been there whether you saw it or not. And I can’t claim much credit. After all I did not see the miracle of the sun behind the bird until I got home and looked at the image.
I know there is a correspondence to the spirit here…that my spiritual attention is not often at the pitch of my physical attention when looking for dragonflies. What if I looked for angels? What if I looked for miracles? What if I just looked for Christ in everyone I pass, in everyone I touch? What if I pushed by spiritual attention to see the spiritual in the world around me with that same intensity I devote to dragonflies? Is there such a thing as spiritual hyperawareness? Is that what means to be a saint?
Of course, I am cheating on myself here. I know that. I stopped separating the spiritual and the physical, in theory, some time ago. My search for dragonflies is a spiritual search. And I do experience the full impact, now that I have noticed it in the image, of the Egret against the sun on my spirit. Still…I have a feeling I am still missing too much…that my awareness needs to be kicked up a notch or two before I walk the miracle walk all the time. I have a feeling I have failed too often to see Christ in those I touch, just as I must have missed a thousand Egrets against the sun.
6/3/2012: Near and Far, Kennebunk Bridle Path
These two shots were taken yards and moments apart, along the Kennebunk Bridle Path where it crosses Rachel Carson National Wildlife land along the Mousam River. The Bridle Path is one of my local go-to-places for birds, bugs, wildflowers, and landscapes. I have written about it before, and it rarely fails me when I am out for a local photo-prowl. I posted a set of dragon and damselfly shots from pools along the Path last week. (Dragons down by the River).
The two shots also demonstrate the range of vision available in a small compact superzoom Point and Shoot camera today. They were both taken with the same camera using the fixed zoom that came with it. I use the word vision with intent. The camera is only a tool, and I try not to get caught up too much in the technology, but as a tool, the ability of the camera to capture everything from extreme close-ups to super-wide panoramas expands my vision so that I am paying attention to everything: near and far. This is good.
The first shot is a very large bumble bee in a Beach Rose blossom. I saw the bees in the blossoms and knew it would make a good shot, so I followed a bee until it landed in a likely flower and shot it at the equivalent of 1680mm from about 5 feet away. Even on a small monitor (or laptop screen) the bee is at least twice life size.
The shot is all about fine detail: the fur on the bee, the grains of pollen on its legs, even the texture of the petals. It catches our attention because we rarely look at anything that closely.
The second shot is a three frame panorama, each frame at 24mm wide angle equivalent. I have learned to trust the exposure system of the camera to produce three well matched frames, and the Panorama function in PhotoMerge in PhotoShop Elements to stitch them together pretty much flawlessly. My camera has a panorama assist mode to help line up the frames, but I have found that I can do it pretty much by eye, just by rotating my upper body and squeezing off overlapping frames. This pano is about 135 degrees, and 8000 pixels wide. To see it at all well, you might want to click on the image so it opens to fill the full width of your monitor.
This shot is all about the sweep and grandeur of the cloud-scape over the landscape, and the way the light interacts with the larger geometry of the wide view. In life, our zone of attention is narrower than this. We would sweep our heads and our vision just as the camera swept, seeing this in at least 3 segments, even though if we centered our vision and relaxed, we would see the whole sweep just as it is presented in the image. We just don’t do that, or at least very often.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness (after stitching in PSE for the pano).
And for the Sunday thought: it comes down to why I feel good about having my attention expanded to cover everything from bees in the blossoms to the the play of light across the widest expanse of cloud and landscape.
I think the pressure of modern life compresses our vision and our attention. We don’t look very closely at anything and we don’t stop to take in the vista for the same reason. We don’t have time. We don’t have energy. All our attention is focused on the middle ground…the things that are large enough so we have to deal with them, but not so large that we can’t deal with them. It limits us, both in the physical, and since the physical is the living presence and present-time of the eternal spirit, in the spiritual as well. In a very real sense, our spirits are only as big, in the moment, as our attention to the world around us. Modern life makes us small. When we expand our vision we make more room for the spirit, we get bigger. We are created as spiritual beings living a physical life, to be agents of creation in this world. We can not afford to let life compress us.
So, it is good for me to have a camera that encourages my attention to the bees in the blossoms near at hand one moment, and to the way the clouds pile over the wide expanse the next. It is good.
5/20/2012: Season of the Slippers. Happy Sunday!
It is Lady Slipper season once more. Every May the Lady Slippers in our local woods bloom. They are predictable. I know where they grow and, within a week or so, when they bloom. I begin looking for them on Mother’s Day, though they often don’t bloom until the last week in May. I was expecting them early this year, as most everything has been, due to our mild winter and early warm weather, but they are right on schedule. The first of them are only just now open at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters, on the sunny bank facing the river where they often bloom first. There are others, in less favored spots, that don’t look likely to bloom for a week or more yet. That means those in the woods by our home, two miles inland from Rachel Carson, where the spring is always a bit delayed, will probably not be blooming until well into June.
I photograph them every spring, often the same plants, spring after spring. I can’t help myself. It would not be May without a few shots of these stunning, brief, flowers.
The images change subtly year to year. Some years, for some unknown reason, the flowers will all be on the pale side, some years a much deeper pink. Some years, for equally mysterious reasons, I only get to see them on cloudy days.
And, of course, my equipment changes, year to year. The sensor technology in the small super-zoom Point and Shoot cameras that I choose to use has developed rapidly over the past few years, and the particular camera I have in hand in May certainly influences my Lady Slipper shots. Last year’s shots, for instance, were a bit flat (lacking in subtle variations in the pink hues) and not quite the right pink at that…and my disappointment was a factor in my decision to retire that Nikon camera early when a (possibly) more promising Canon model came out. The Canon has lived up to its promise. This year’s shots use an unconventional combination of features of my Canon SX40HS (one almost certainly not foreseen by the maker)…and are, I think, among the best Lady Slipper shots I have ever captured.
And then too, my processing software continues to evolve. We are on Lightroom 4 now…it was Lightroom 3.5 last May. In Lr4, the “clarity” (local contrast) function has been refined and improved. That contributes, along with the better sensor, and the unconventional camera settings, to the kind of “hyper-real” look of these shots. Improved technology and software allow me to capture what I like best about the Lady Slipper…which is the way sunlight interacts with the bladder, and with the fine hairs that cover the whole plant. I like this year’s shots, taken in early morning light, a lot.
I can not honestly say that I am a better photographer this year than last. While I am always learning, and finding new ways and new tools, new tricks, to produce better images, the visual engine that is behind my eye, maybe buried as deep as my heart and soul, and maybe even a physical manifestation of my spirit, which is by nature and by grace, twice over, one with the wonderful creative spirit that all in all…that changes much more slowly. In may ways it is still the same engine that made the world wonderful when I was a child. It is more refined now, more reflective, with a higher measure of respect, and a deeper knowledge of just how blessed I am each day, and have been all these years…but it is still, essentially, the eye that saw my very first Lady Slipper so many years ago. It is the same eye that found my first camera so useful, so much fun, such a great way of putting a bit of frame around what I saw and saying “look at that!” I don’t know why I have able to keep the wonder alive. I know I am no more deserving than the next. I truly hope that that there are none who have not, in some secret center of themselves, been able to hold the wonder all life long. I hope to never lose it. And to that end, I use it. Every day. Every spring. Every season of the slipper.
And I will continue as long as I am able…out in the world with my little frame…and here, and elsewhere, everywhere, saying “look at that!” I owe it to my creator. And I it is a debt I pay with joy. (Oh, how true that is in every sense you can make of the statement!)
It is the season of the slippers once again. Look at that! Feel the wonder. Feel the joy. Know you are blessed. Give thanks.
5/6/2012: Egret Chicks, St Augustine FL. Happy Sunday!
Though I am at The Biggest Week in American Birding along the Erie shore in Ohio this morning, I still have a lot images from Godwit Days in Northern California, and the Florida Birding and Photo Fest in St. Augustine to share. This is another from my one visit to the St. Augustine Alligator Farm rookery. Such a great place for bird photography!
In May there are many nests of several species and young in almost any stage of development from egg to fledgling. There is nothing quite so ungainly–elegant–beautiful–ugly as the chick of the Great Egret. And I do not mean that they are sometimes ungainly and sometimes elegant, etc. I mean that they are all those things simultaneously in a mix that most people just call “cute”. Yet, cute, in my opinion does not apply. I am driven to resort to compound and conflicted adjectives to capture even a hint of the nature of the creature. The image does it better.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. About 300mm equivalent field of view. f5 @ 1/300th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought: part of the appeal of Great Egret chicks, or any nestlings, certainly has to be that they touch our paternalistic instincts. They look so alive and so helpless that we are moved. We want them to grow and become…and in some vague sense we are willing to give ourselves to make that happen if necessary. Not that we think this through. It is called “the paternal instinct”. Some would say it is hard wired into our brains, as unavoidable as the knee jerk that doctor elicits with his little hammer.
I suspect there is a spiritual dimension to it as well though. I suspect it is more than brain chemistry and electrical patterns running a prerecorded routine. You could push the experience to say that on some level we are aware of our unity with all that lives. On some level we are aware of our responsibility for all that lives. Cute kittens, puppies, and, yes, Egret chicks break through our isolation as a species and as ourselves to call to a more basic calling. We are called to care. We are, I have to believe, made to care.
In the bustle and the busyness of business and relationships we sometimes forget. We sometimes think we are made to succeed. Or we are made to compete. Or we are made to acquire. Egret chicks on the nest at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm rookery are a gentle reminder that, indeed, we are made to care.
4/22/2012: Song Sparrow in the Reeds, Arcata Marsh
Happy Sunday! Arcata Marsh has two things in common with all my favorite birding and bird photography spots: abundance of birds (which includes a variety of species AND great numbers of at least some of the species), and access (ease of getting close to the birds). In these respects Arcata is just like Bosque del Apache NWR in New Mexico, the Cape May New Jersey hot-spots in spring and fall, Viera Wetlands and Merritt Island NWR in Florida, the Magee Marsh boardwalk in OH during migration, and Edinburg Wetlands and Estero LLano Grande World Birding Centers in the Rio Grande valley of Texas. Now, in all other ways those destinations are about as dissimilar as any set you could name…certainly the mix of habits and species is spectacularly broad…but all of these locations the offer the combination of abundance and access that makes them my top picks for birding and photography. (I could expand the list, of course, but those are the places I get to at least once a year, most years.)
And of course, part of what make abundance and access so attractive to the photographer is that is simply increases your chances of getting the shots that really satisfy. You are surrounded by opportunity. You shoot a lot. It is just way more likely that some of those images will have that little something extra that raises them above the ordinary bird portrait.
This shot of a Song Sparrow deep in the cat-tail reeds does it for me. I love the lines and textures of the reeds, the crisscrossing patterns of hard geometric shapes in contrast to the living bird. I really like the play of focus receding to the bird. I like the composition…with the bird high and centered, and looking left. And the green bokeh behind pulls the whole thing together for me. Even the dull, but well defused shadowless light, contributes to the effectiveness of the image. That is what I see when I think about it…but really I just like the way the image looks!
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 @ 1/200th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And to build out from that for the Sunday thought: abundance and access make bird photography easier, certainly, but that is never all there is to it. I used terms like “way more likely” and “increases your chances” because that is how we think of it, but of course it is not really a matter of chance at all. Without an attentive eye, developed over years in the field with your camera in your hand, an nurtured by many many visits to places like Arcata Marsh, you can just as easily come away from even a place with abundance and access without that memorable shot. Most people do.
And don’t think I am boasting here. No one is more surprised by an image like the one of the Song Sparrow in the reeds than I am. When I first saw it on my computer monitor while editing images, my thought was, “great image” not “well done.” I hesitate to take any credit for it at all. It is as though the spirit of the sparrow, and the creative spirit that is all in all, touched the creative spirit in me and the image just happened. I can only sit back and applaud. I am totally delighted at the gift.
That does not mean I don’t know that gifts like this come much more often in places like Arcata Marsh!
4/1/2012: Tree Tops and Self Portraits. Happy Sunday!
And a happy April Fools Day to you too!
Yesterday I set out in the morning for a photo-prowl, trying to fill my out my diminishing stock of images for this column, and, you know, just poking around to see what I might be missing. It was a dull day, with heavy overcast, and, since it is also that dull season between winter and the real onset of spring in southern Maine, I did not have high hopes. I was pleasantly surprised to find a few early birds (Song Sparrow and Eastern Phoebe) already on territory and setting up for nesting, as well as a rich variety of fungi along the trails. I will feature a few fungi for tomorrow’s Macro Monday post.
I was called back early by a daughter needing the car and retired to my computer to do the post-processing, and when I looked up, the sun had broken through and what had been overcast was now a smattering of clouds adding interest to the sky. So back out I went for a loop around the trail at the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge headquarters.
It was not spring there either but the forest without leaves was full of geometry, texture, and light…the clear crystalline light of a late March afternoon. There was beauty there. The super rough bark of a tree caught my eye as that light picked out every intricate detail I and began to think about how to capture the effect. I had been messing, earlier, in the Yard, with the swivel LCD on the Canon SX40HS…pointing it forward on the camera and getting down under Forsythia flowers to shoot up. I decided to try it there in forest, on that tree. Wooo. Strange geometries. And that lead to a whole series of tree top images, taken with the camera at waist level, looking straight up. Notice the red maple flowers in the second tree top shot.
I had to keep leaning back out of the image to keep my hat from getting in…and that made we wonder if I was missing a self-portrait/profile pic opportunity. Mostly my face was completely in shadow, but I noticed that if I stood in an open area of the path, enough light reflected from the ground to make an interesting effect. So in the spirit of April Fools Day, here I am, framed against the tree tops.
My wife Carol says it is frightening and my daughter Kelia says it is somewhat disturbing. I just think it is funny. When I posted it as my profile pic on Google+ someone commented that it made them think of Tolkien 🙂 My response was that I am already bigger than a hobbit, and even than most dwarfs, and not near wise enough to be a wizard. April Fools.
And for the Sunday thought. Self portraits. Well, I am thinking that we are defined more by the things we look at than we are by how we look. This series of images that I post here every day, taken as a whole, is my best self portrait. It is a record of the things, over time, that I find beautiful, interesting, worthy of celebration and sharing. That is much more me than the shape of my nose or the luxury of my beard.
Paul said, in his chapter on love, that today we see only dimly as in a darkened mirror…we see and know only in part…but that a day will come when we will see clearly…when we will know in full, even as we are known. And that day is linked, inescapably, with the persistence of love…a love that is not defined by our ability to love, but by the perfection of the Creator’s ability to love. I have said many times that these images are one way I express the love of creation and the Creator that is working its way out in me, day to day. I would like to think they provide a glimpse of the me you now see only dimly, and know only in part. Of, in fact, the me I only see dimly, and know only in part. The me that is capable of the enduring love which we celebrate this Easter season.
And that is a lot, for an April Fool, or otherwise, to say.
3/11/2012: Point Loma Lights, Happy Sunday!
Last Sunday I was in San Diego, covering the final day of the San Diego Birding and Nature Festival in Mission Bay Park. In the morning I made my yearly trek out the length of Point Loma to Cabrillo National Monument. Cabrillo sits high above San Diego Bay, at the tip of the point that forms the northern and the western boundary. Off one side of the point you see the full reach of downtown San Diego, and off the other you see, on a clear day, well out to sea beyond the Coronado islands.
The old light is on the grounds of the Monument, perched at the top of the point, where it must have been visible about as far out to sea as any light in North America.
It was not, however, overly helpful to ships trying to avoid the rocks off the very tip of Point Loma, and it was replaced long ago with a taller light right on the shore at the base of the point.
To me, the Coast Guard Reservation on Point Loma, seen here in a moderate telephoto shot from the top of the point, is about as tropical as you can get on US soil.
There is a small museum in the outbuilding of the old lighthouse, an its primary display is a duplicate of the huge focusing lens enclosure for the light itself. These 6 foot tall lenses are what made the light effective at such great distances, and are certainly testaments to the glass and lens-makers art.
The color you see here is light refracting through the various concentric lens surfaces ground into the single massive piece of glass.
And for the Sunday thought: I live right diagonally across on the other coast from San Diego, but we are just as caught up in the romance of lighthouses in Maine as they are in California…maybe more-so. I live right up the road from “The Lighthouse Shop” which caters to lighthouse aficionados traveling up historic Route 1, and, through their catalog and web-site, all over the world. I am pretty certain if I stopped by there would be a model of the Point Loma lights, or a post-card at the least.
And, of course, the lighthouse appeals to more than our sense of romance. In any community in the US you will find at least one (generally non-denominational) church that has taken the name of Lighthouse. And I don’t think it is the sense of warning that speaks to our spirits…though every lighthouse was primarily a warning device…so much as it is the sense of home, fellowship, safety. The lighthouse warns of the last dangerous passage this side of home, this side of land and safety, but it is home we hear…home that holds our hope and our joy.
And there is the sense in which each one of us is called to be a lighthouse…our bodies temples of light…our faces focusing lenses which beam home, fellowship, safety so brightly that we can be seen far across the seas of self that separate us, through the storms of self no matter how they rage.
Ah…but you are thinking I am getting caught up in the romance of the lights again…stretching the metaphor. I am certain I am not.
3/4/2012: Pelican Glory. Happy Sunday!
Besides seals and sea lions, you go to La Jolla in March for breeding plumage Brown Pelicans. I have never been sure what part of the Brown Pelican is brown. Certainly the predominate color, in all seasons, to my eye is a lovely silver gray. And in breeding plumage the bird is spectacular, with its cream or white cap, rich brown neck (there it is, but I can’t believe they named the bird after its neck), and vivid red and rust pouch skin boarded in pure white, all set off by the silver plumage of the body. And that does not cover the pink eyelid, and the old ivory tooth on the end of the bill. This is not a brown bird. (So, okay, if you catch one standing up tall, you can see, under the silver mantle of the wings, the brown lower belly and under tail…but, come on folks, this should be the Silver Pelican at the very least.)
And, once you get by the colors, the variety of textures in the feathers is just as interesting. You have fur like feathers on the head and neck, fine silver feathers like course shaggy hair over the upper chest and wings, and only a few conventional feathers showing in the spread wings and tail.
Spectacular bird.
And their habit of nesting in colonies, and traveling in squads hugging the crests of waves and riding thermals along cliffs…their plunge diving as they feed…all very hard to ignore. This is one great bird.
All these shots with the Canon SX40HS, in Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1) and 4) at 1680mm (840mm optical equivalent field of view plus 2x digital tel-extender). 2) and 3) at 840mm optical.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought: people who live with Brown Pelicans year round, and know them in all seasons, are often surprised, in my experience, when they see a close up of one in breeding plumage. Even when they see them in flight, which is always a miracle of grace, they don’t look closely, and they don’t marvel at the way these huge birds ride the wind. They are just pelicans. Brown Pelicans. “We have lots of those in California.” (Or Florida, or Texas, or where ever.)
Me, every time I see them, which is not so often as I would like, I have to stand and stare. I can watch them riding up the beach and over the waves for hours in any season, just to see how they do it. And, in breeding plumage? To be honest, I sometimes don’t get up to La Jolla on my March trip to San Diego, even though it is only 20 minutes from the hotel where I stay, and even though I have been there often enough to know what I am missing, and, this morning, I am wondering why. I would hate to think I am loosing any of my ability to see these birds as they are…full of glory…and shouting glory to anyone with eyes to see and spiritual ears to hear. I would hate to think I am getting full or fat or spiritually lazy or whatever you get when you think you have seen enough Brown Pelicans in breeding plumage.
Never enough please.
2/12/2012: Pelicans and Terns against Sunset Clouds: Happy Sunday!
This is another shot from the same Sunday evening, a few weeks ago, that was featured in last Sunday’s Pic 4 Today. Last Sunday it was the Skimmers crossing below the setting sun. This one was taken facing exactly the opposite way, away from the sunset, with the birds (White Pelicans and Terns) framed against the few clouds over the Indian River and Merritt Island which caught and reflected the reddening light. Perhaps because I know it was one of the last images taken that day, it has a going home…going to rest…feeling about it: but perhaps the feeling is actually part of the image, for anyone who knows the rhythms of the natural world.
Canon SX40HS at about 335mm equivalent field of view. f5 @ 1/125th @ ISO 250. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom to bring up the color, and for intensity, vibrancy, and sharpness. Cropped from the top for composition.
And for the Sunday thought: Going home. Going to rest. Part of the natural rhythm of the world. I had a little heart attack scare this week…an unplanned trip to the ER in an ambulance, oxygen, ekgs, x-rays…the whole thing. Turns out it was a strange combination of symptoms caused by indigestion and incipient bronchitis…with maybe a touch of pneumonia. Better safe than sorry.
And I find that I am not really troubled by the event. A thing like that might well bring thoughts and fears centered on mortality, but I am pretty much okay with it. Better safe than sorry. I am safe.
Of course I have no idea how I would have responded if the results of the test had gone the other way. I would like to think that, like the birds against the sunset, I would have seen it as all part of the natural rhythm of life. The birds are going to their night home…to their night roost…and they have no doubt in their minds that dawn will follow the darkness, and they will wake refreshed for another day.
Of course, as far as we know, they have no hope either. Hope is a human…thought? emotion? feeling? concept?…I am not sure there is a word in English to describe what hope is in the human mind and heart. But I do know that hope is a decision…it is a verb…it is something we decide to do, based on all the evidence available to us. We go home, we go to our rest, with (or without) hope in our hearts. It is up to us.
I chose hope. My faith demands it…my faith authorizes it…and, I believe, my faith justifies it. Come night, come dawn, I will wake refreshed for another day. All part of the rhythm. All part of the life of faith.
As true when lying on a gurney in ER sucking down oxygen, as it is on a beach in Florida watching the Pelicans and Terns head for roost against clouds reflecting the setting sun.
2/5/2012: Sunset Skimmers, Merritt Island FL, Happy Sunday!
Last Sunday, after tearing down and packing up the ZEISS booth at Space Coast Birding and Nature Festival, I drove out to Merritt Island for one last turn around Black Point Wildlife Drive in the light of the low afternoon sun. You might say it was my church for the day, or at least my act of worship. I got back to the bridge to the mainland, and the fishing area there on the Indian River, just as the sun was actually setting, pulled in quickly, and took a series of shots of birds in flight in the fading light and against the sunset…as well as of the sunset itself.
These are Black Skimmers. They rose up over the highway and then swooped down sharply to skim the water at the shore. I tried several times, with different flocks, to catch them against the sunset, shooting off a burst beginning before they crossed the shoreline and continuing to follow them out over the river. This is the best of the lot.
Canon SX40HS at 212mm equivalent field of view, f4.5 @ 1/400th @ ISO 400. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. I also used dueling Graduated Filter effects, darkening from the top, and lightening from the bottom, to balance the exposure to approximate what I saw.
And for the Sunday thought: “act of worship”? Yes, but…
I certainly do not worship nature, or photography, for that matter. But as I have said before, photographing the natural world, which I take to be the world created by a God who loves, is, for me, an act of worship…as natural as singing songs of praise…and, in fact, very similar to singing. Instead of attempting to surrender my voice to the congregation’s praise, to the beauty and awe of addressing the creator, I attempt to surrender my vision (and whatever skills I have with the camera) to the sense of beauty and awe I find in the experiencing the creation. Unlike corporate praise, the actual act of photography is a solitary endeavor, but then there comes the sharing. No image is really taken or created until it is shared…for it is in the sharing, is it not, that the image takes on life and, shall we say, sings it song. It is my hope always, that the images I share here will at least strike a note of beauty or awe in those who see them.
So, yes, my last loop around Black Point Drive, on a Sunday afternoon, just at sunset, was, and is, an act of worship. Happy Sunday.