Posts in Category: water
A Bit Of England
Not exactly England in its native state as this is the very managed landscape of a golf resort, but the sky at least is all England. 🙂 And who can resist an upturned boat in such a display?
This is a vertical sweep panorama from the Samsung Smart Camera WB250F. A normal 24mm shot would end about halfway up the tree at the right on the skyline. I certainly do enjoy the options sweep panorama brings!
Processed in PicSay Pro and Photo Editor on the 2013 Nexus 7.
Water’s Way
I return frequently to the little stretch of the Batson River protected by the Kennebunkport Land Trust as Emmons Preserve. It is a peaceful spot where the sound of the water descending over rock ledges soothes the soul and let’s the spirit surface. Or so it does for me.
This is an in-camera HDR from the Samsung Smart Camera WB750F. Since the camera has no flip out LCD I had to hold the camera low and shoot blind. It required some trial and error, but the stream, though running musically, was not going anywhere, and I had time. 🙂
Processed on the 2013 Nexus 7 in PicSay Pro.
Pool in the woods
The Batson River makes a long loop through Emmons Preserve, with many pools, overhanging rock ledges, tumbling falls, and gentle stretches of water reflecting trees. It is really an amazingly varied stretch of river considering it can’t be more than a quarter mile of it included in the Preserve. This is one of the far pools, beyond the main, and most visited, section of the trail. The river splits here, with the main channel rushing through a narrow gap between standing stones, and a smaller side channel feeding this still pool. I love the play of light here, and the ripples leading out to the still water with its reflections and lily pads. Perhaps because of the depth and the odd angle, it has a kind of abstract feeling to it.
Samsung Smart Camera WB250F in Rich Tone (HDR) mode. Processed in PicSay Pro on the Samsung Galaxy S4. Auto Enhance by Google+ Photos.
Evening at Back Creek
Back Creek is a tidal creek that flows into the Mousam River a few hundred yards from its mouth in Kennebunk Maine. The beach homes you see are on Great Head, across the Mousam. It had been a day of rain, heavy at times, and the front was still moving off the coast…but the sun broke through just for an hour or so before setting. Great light. Great sky. Landscapes are never better, I think, than when the sun breaks through under a stormy sky. You have drama on the land and drama in the sky. What is not to like?
This is a sweep panorama from the Samsung Smart Camera WB250F. I really like the fact that you can hold the camera vertically and sweep it around horizontally…producing a panorama that is fully as wide as a conventional panorama (this one is about 200 degrees), but much taller…not nearly so “pinched”. These tall panoramas also fit computer displays much better…if you click the image above on any computer with a reasonably sized display, it should fill your screen.
As I say, Samsung Smart Camera WB250F in Panorama mode. f4.6 @ ISO 100. I discovered a Panorama trick for these cameras that have sweep pano modes. You pick the part of the view that has either 1) average brightness for your planned sweep, or 2) the brightness you want for the whole sweep (you might, for instance, want to expose for the sky rather than the land), point the camera at that section of the sweep and half press the shutter release to lock in exposure, then swing the camera, holding the shutter half pressed, to the where you want your pano to begin, and fully press the shutter. That way the whole sweep has the exposure you intend, and not the exposure that happened to be at the start of the sweep. Processed in PicSay Pro on the Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone.
Silky Water: Happy Sunday!
Back in the day of slow film emulsions, taking a photo of a waterfall, or water falling over ledges as in this image, especially in deeply shaded glens where waterfalls are likely to be found, resulted in the “silky water effect.” During the long exposure required to capture the image, the moving water painted itself on the emulsion as blur, with all detail submerged in a smooth flow like a cascade of silk. As it happened, the result was very like how some painters rendered falling water, attempting to capture a feeling of motion in the blur. As film speeds and quality increased, it became possible to “freeze” the flowing water, even catching ripples in their run and splashes in mid-air. However, the “silky water effect” never lost its appeal. Photographer’s today go to great lengths, internationally undermining the strengths of their equipment with neutral density filters and the like, to recreate the painterly, traditional, silky water effect.
The engineers at Samsung, when designing the software for their Smart Camera family, included a “waterfall” mode among the Smart Camera Modes. If you have the camera mounted on a tripod, it will take a very long (90 seconds or more) exposure of moving water…resulting in what I would call a “super silky water effect.” I find that the longer I am away from the actual scene…as the sound of the rushing water and the play of the play of the light in the ripples and falls recedes into memory…the more I like the effect. I have to break away from memory and look at the image for what it is, not what was there. For sure, this is not the way I see rushing water…but I can understand the attraction of the image, as an image. I can understand that that rush and tumble and joyful confusion of water in constant motion can be reduced to the calm rendering of silk, and that it captures a different, and equally valid, emotional response to the falling water than I might otherwise feel. I get it. I am still uncertain as to whether I totally approve. 🙂
And that leads to the Sunday Thought. Silky water is not real. It is a photographic artifact, or the imaginative impression created by a painter’s mind and brush. And yet it captures a real emotion…or at least one among many emotional responses to reality. It speaks to a calm in the center of confusion that appeals to us all. In a way, it is, from a traditional point of view, the more spiritual response…a seeing through to the assumed essence of what is behind the rush of our daily reality.
However, I can’t help but feel that it is, at least a bit, a cheat. I think there is as much spirit in the rush and tumble and churn of detail that is our immediate response to falling water (and to life). I appreciate the peace of the long view, but I am not willing to give up the excitement of the moment. My instinct is that they are both elements of the spiritual view. Joy in the confusion. Joy in the underlying calm.
Interestingly enough, by happy accident (if you believe in such things), Google+ assembled two images of the same tumble of water into an animated gif…one taken in waterfall mode, and one taken in Rich Tone / HDR. Hopefully your browser will display it properly. Joy in the confusion. Joy in the underlying calm. Happy Sunday!
The Universe in a Spider Web: Happy Sunday!
I don’t know why, but this simple image of water drops on a spider web covering grasses and leaves from my photoprowl around the yard yesterday morning seems to contain the whole universe…from the tiny detail among the grasses, to the vast expanse of the starry sky. I could look at it for a long time. Click on the image to open it in the lightbox where you can view it as large as your monitor allows.
Samsung Galaxy S4 in Rich Tone / HDR mode. Processed on the phone with PicSay Pro.
And for the Sunday Thought: The universe in every atom of the universe, eternity in every second of time, is a thought as old as thinking itself. It has occurred to poets, certainly…to philosophers…to scientists…to anyone who has closely observed life and being. It is, according to the universal testimony of people from all religions, an essential element of the “mystical experience”…of transcendence…of any intimate contact with the spirit of all that is…any contact with a God worthy of the name. There are only two responses available to us in such contacts: fear and awe. And fear is just awe without hope…without the feeling of overwhelming love which makes such an experience of the all in all both bearable and glorious. Fear drives us down. Awe lifts us up. Fear causes flight or fight response…and a tightened hold on our lives and our selves. Awe causes us to let go of ourselves, and fly willingly to an embrace in infinite love. Fear holds tight to what is. Awe lets go to the beauty and rightness of what will be.
Just occasionally that experience gets caught in an image, as, for me, it does here…in the water droplets covering the spider web over wet grass and leaves, in my yard, on an ordinary morning after a night of rain.
Falls on the Baston. HDR
The falls on the Baston in Emmon’s Preserve in Kennebunkport are, like the Redwood Forest, another subject that has always proved difficult to capture. The falls lack the scale of the Redwoods, but they are well shaded by trees, and present the added difficulty of bright white highlights from sun on the foaming water. Once more, a subject that demands deeper HDR than my in-camera HDR can provide.
Which is why my last Sunday photo-prowl found me down by the Baston with my Fat Gecko, carbon fiber, shock-corded tripod. As I had suspected, 3 exposure HDR also gives a nice understated silky look to the rapids, without the need to resort to long shutter speeds.
This is not the falls at their most difficult. The leafless state of the mostly maples that combine with the pines to shade this stretch of stream let more light in than there will be later in the season. I will go back in 6 weeks and try that challenge.
Canon SX50HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. -2 1/3, -2/3, and +1/3 EV exposures. Blended and tone mapped in Dynamic Photo HDR. Final processing in Lightroom. This is one of those HDRs that challenges the eye, or at least my eye. The range of light is so natural that the image looks a bit painted. We just do not expect this effect in a photograph.
Crease in Old Falls
When I went, on Monday, to pick up my new scooter in Sanford, I stopped on the way back at Old Falls on the Mousam River to see what was up. Not much was up but the water. The Mousam is still loud with the last of the snow melt from a very Snowy February and March. There is a crease in the center of Old Falls that produces some interesting effects. It is always fun to see what I can catch.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. -1/3EV exposure compensation. 105mm equivalent field of view. f5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Water in the Desert
There is a spiritual resonance to water in the desert…whether it is an oasis or a simple seep…but running water…a living stream in the desert speaks to the human spirit in tones of absolute grace. No one can deserve such beauty…such a gift. 600 vertical feet and one and half miles above the base of the mountains the Palm oasis and stream in Palm Canyon at Anza Borrego State Park are everything water in the desert should be. The sides of the canyon are steep and rugged. The floor of the canyon is littered with huge boulders, and several kinds of palm grow have their feet in the water.
This is below the Palms, looking up the last stretch of the stream from about where the Alternative Trail breaks off.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view. f5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 125. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Cold Duck
When I went out on Sunday to find some images of the snow Nemo dropped on us here in Southern Maine, I found a pair of Mallard ducks in the half-frozen Mousam River behind Roger’s Pond in Kennebunk. They had found themselves a little eddy against the drift that came right down to the water on the far shore. They did not look all that comfortable…or maybe that was just a projection on my part. I know I would not have been comfortable in their situation. This is the female. The male was hunkered down, head under wing the whole time I watched them, but the female was moving around, testing different spots…perhaps the male already had the only good one. 
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.