Posts in Category: water
Kennebunk River in Snow
This stretch of the Kennebunk River, behind Roger’s Pond, is excellent trout water. They have a fly-casting derby here every summer. It looks a little different after two good December snows. I like the shadows on the snow here, as well as the contrasting strong diagonals of the dark water and the white, snow-coated trees.
Another In-camera HDR from the Canon SX50HS. 24mm equivalent field of view. Recorded exif: f4 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Winter Waters: Kennebunk River
Another attempt, out early, to capture the cold beauty of fresh snow in Southern Maine. Here the clinging snow is contrasted with the swift waters of the Kennbunk River at the Roger’s Pond access.
This is another In-camera HDR, and you can see the slight blurring of the water due to the three exposures.
Canon SX50HS in HDR Mode. 110mm equivalent field of view. Recorded exif: f5 @ 1/400th @ ISO 80. I shot the three exposures off my Fat Gecko, 1 pound, carbon fiber, shock-corded tripod, and, as you see, it was plenty steady enough even at the longer focal length.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Kennebunk River in the Snow
We had a brief few hours of good light between fronts yesterday morning, after a night of heavy snow that clung, so I got out and did a tour of likely spots. The wind was coming up fast, and with the sun and that wind I knew the clinging winter-wonderland snow on the pines and spruces would not last long. You can see that the wind cutting across the top of the Kennebunk River bed had already dumped the snow from the tall spruces.
I took my Fat Gecko carbon-fiber, shock-corded tripod with me, intending to try some In-camera HDRs in the snow. Snow Scene Mode on the Canons SX50HS does really well keeping the highlights in the snow within bounds, but with a lot of sun on the snow, the greens go dark…losing most of their color. HDR produces a file that can be processed to show good values in the snow and keep the green in the greens! In this shot it also kept the water from going black. (Note: the In-camera HDR of the Canon SX50HS is not the overcooked, somewhat surreal, HDR that is often offered as examples of HDR processing. It is a gentle, natural extension of the apparent contrast range that produces very natural looking images.)
The only thing is, since the camera takes three images for every one, and then processes in-camera, a tripod is really needed. The Fat Gecko works well, and adds less than a pound to my kit. It is not a conventional tripod at all…the legs are shock-cored like tent poles, so they fold up rather than slide into each other. When you shake them out, the shock-cord pulls them together semi-automatically. It is easier to do than to explain. The carbon fiber legs and a small ball head provide a platform stable enough for HDR without the weight of a conventional tripod.
Canon SX50HS set for In-camera HDR. 35mm equivalent field of view. Recorded exif: f4 @ 1/500th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
High Seas! Kennebunk ME. Happy Sunday!
My weather app was flashing red yesterday with high surf warnings. We are getting the last tired remnants of hurricane/tropical storm Leslie moving up the Maine coast, bringing strong onshore winds and high seas, followed by a night of thunder storms and a morning of showers. This being southern Maine, and there being actually no real threat to life or limb, such a warning brings out 3 types: surfers, tourists, and locals…so, actually…just about everyone left in Maine in September. 🙂
There were probably 100 surfers in the water off Gooches Beach in Kennebunk, a high number considering Maine waters are wet-suit waters, and a good run on the best of days lasts about 30 seconds. Still if you are a surfer in Maine, you make the best of any opportunity. There were also more tour buses along the beach than I have ever seen on a single afternoon. It is the start of the fall foliage tour season, so I expect to see the leaf-peeper buses begin to arrive, but I suspect this weekend some enterprising tour company in Boston put on a Maine surf special, or, at the least, more than your average number of buses left the interstate in Kennebunk to loop the beaches and see what the waves were up to. And finally, there were the locals like me…drawn to the beach to take a few photos of higher than average seas…hoping for some drama.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 235mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 125. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. The 4 frames per second burst rate on the SX40 is just the right speed to catch the waves at peak if you shoot through.
And for the Sunday Thought. It is beyond denying that there is something in the human spirit, or at least in the human soul, that enjoys bad weather…that wants to walk the edge of the storm…that that wants to face into the wind and feel the sting of flying water. As above, it is, at least in part, the drama, the excitement, the mild rush of adrenalin that a calculated risk, a considered threat to life and limb, brings. There is a tipping point of course, where the excitement of the storm tips over into terror, but when it is just a high surf warning there is little danger of that.
I would like to think too, that there is a real spiritual element to it…that in facing the awesome power of nature we affirm both our selves, in our most durable, and yet totally vulnerable, smallness, and our relationship to the awesome and the overwhelming. It is a taste, and only a taste, of the root of all religious experience. It gives us, whether we know it or not, whether we are ready to admit it or not, a hint of what it might be like to be overwhelmed by the awesome love of the creator God…to be caught up in the surf of grace and lifted in a glorious spray over the rock of our selves into brief beauty. It gives us a sense of how small we are in our own loves, and how great and all embracing is the love of God in which we are submerged, in which we are carried on toward glory. And yet we endure. We are safe. We are, when surrendered to the awesome, most certainly and most truly ourselves. Our durability is in our vulnerability, and we can actually delight in our relationship to the awesome and overwhelming.
I would like to think (and really there is no one to stop me) that that taste of the divine is what draws us all down to the beach when the high surf warnings are flashing.
Evening Light on Back Creek Pond #1
This is one of those “magical moments” shots were the light is just amazing, and almost totally beyond the ability of the camera to capture the effect. Early evening, about 6PM, in southern Maine in July…with the sun still well up, but with a slant to the light that casts long shadows, and a color that is just warm enough to caress and draw up all the warm detail, without, as yet, any touch of orange. Clear blue sky. Very English light! The contrast between sunlight and shadow is what catches the eye…and what confuses the sensor.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 200.
Way more than my usual processing in Lightroom. Full shadow fill, black point well left, added clarity and just a touch of vibrance for a start. Then a Graduated Filter effect from the top left to darken the sky slightly, a GFE from the bottom to lighten the foreground and add clarity and warmth, and a GFE from the right to left to remove a bit of warmth from the sunlit trees. Close 🙂
Close enough, I hope, to convey what I saw in the scene.
6/27/2012: Orange Bluets in Tandem
I am still in Virginia at the Virginia Crossings Wyndham Resort doing the corporate retreat. This is another find from my little photoprowel down by the golf course ponds. This is a pre- or post-mating tandem pair of Orange Bluets. There are many Bluets damselflies in North America, and most of them are a bold electric blue…or at least the males are. The Orange is clearly a member of the family despite its color. The male could be mistaken for many of the females of other species, and but none are quite as aggressively orange! Electric orange? It must be the height of breeding for Oranges, since tandem pairs outnumbered single damselflies.
Canon SX40HS in Program with – 1 /3EV exposure compensation. 1680mm equivalent field of view. f5.8 @ 1/60th @ ISO 800. Because the evening light was low I set the ISO manually to get workable shutter-speeds…and even then the Canon image-stabilization was stretched to its limits at such high magnification. This image begins to break down at larger viewing sizes, but it is a fun image on your average monitor or laptop. 🙂
Processed on my Xoom Android Tablet in PicSay Pro for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4/10/2012: Brim full on Back Creek, Kennebunk ME
This another image from my Saturday photo-prowl. As I mentioned on Sunday, the tide was abnormally high over the weekend and Back Creek was brim full, right up to within a foot of the road. Getting dowm low and using the flip out LCD I was able to catch the clarity of the sea water standing over the normally dry marsh. And of course the drama of the sky and the finely detailed line…thin line…of the landscape across the frame as a divider. Normally I would not have put the horizon so near the center of the frame, but I think it works here. I find that I am unwilling to lose enough of the detail of the clear water at the bottom or the drama of the sky at the top to make a difference in where the horizon cuts the frame.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 100. Program with iContrast and -1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
2/11/2012: The Pond in HDR, Merritt Island NWR Visitor Center
Taking a Saturday break from birds, birds, birds. This is the pond behind the Visitor Center at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. In HDR. It is, maybe, a bit painterly. It is also a single jpeg tone-mapped in Dynamic Photo HDR for maximum drama…well…actually I took it into Lightroom after DPHDR and toned the drama down a bit. Still.
The pure Lightroom version on the left looks a little flat by comparison…but without the comparison it is still an interesting photo.
I always have mixed feelings about HDR. I certainly has immediate impact, but, honestly, the world is just not like that…or not often at least. I heard an interview with Trey Ratcliff, currently one of the super-star proponents of HDR and high drama photography (over 1 million followers on Google+), in which he said, in effect: more and more this becomes the world we see. Interesting. And, I suppose, true. I know that when I used to do a lot of HDR, I did consciously imagine every scene as it would look after treatment as an HDR.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f6.3 ! 1/1250th @ ISO 200. Metered off the clouds. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed as above in Dynamic Photo HDR and Lightroom.
1/8/2012: Webhanette Falls, in Ice
The Webhanette River flows between Wells and Moody Beach Maine and forms the Webhannet Marshes behind the dunes of Wells Beach. On its way down to the sea it flows over some rocky ledges. Waterfalls of any size in Southern Maine are few enough so that the Town of Wells has created a little park around the falls, not, honestly, much visited. It is a quiet spot just of busy RT 1, on a loop of road that has been bypassed by newer construction, and worth a look most seasons. Here it is in its winter persona, minus, due to our strange winter so far, the usual solid coating of snow that generally buries the rock and the ice itself…so I guess it is a somewhat unusual view.
I like the way the flowing water has frozen…the interesting shapes and textures…and the way the strongest flow has remained free.
Canon SX40HS in Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1) 120mm equivalent field of view, f4.5 @ 1/160th @ ISO 100. 2) and 3) 410mm equivalent, f5 @ 1/160th @ ISO 125 and 160.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought: Many places in the world, and even in Maine, no one would even notice Webhanette Falls. It is too small, too tame, too homely. But when you live on a coastal plain, hundreds of miles from real mountains (where in fact any decently high hill is called a mountain) any waterfall is a treat…a reminder of the beauty and the power of falling water. And what is it about waterfalls anyway? Why do we humans, pretty much universally, find them awe-inspiring…why do we drive and hike out of our way to see them? We paint them, we take pictures of them. We are irresistibly and undeniably drawn. Why did the town of Wells, when the new Rt. 1 was constructed, preserve this little park around this vest pocket water fall?
I can ask the questions but I can’t answer them. All I know is that waterfalls make me glad…a bit giddy in fact. They lift my spirit, fill my soul with wonder. They make me happy. There is a sense of play about them…from the smallest to the most majestic that speaks, always…maybe in a whisper at Webhanette and a roar at Niagara…but speaks always to the place in me that feels closest to the creator.
1/5/2012: Wave off East Point, Biddeford Pool ME
This is another shot from my unsuccessful Snowy Owl Prowl down the coast from Biddeford Pool to Kennebunk last week. Unsuccessful in finding an owl that is. From a photographic point of view I found much of interest in the massive waves and lowering sky as a front passed over and out to sea.
Directly off the point at East Point in Biddeford Pool waves coming in from the north east met waves coming in from the south east to create a cross wave effect that I could have watched for hours. The dynamic and the energy of the water was breathtaking. I did my best to catch a bit of that energy in images like the one above.
Canon SX40HS at about 90mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/500th @ ISO 125. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom. Besides my usual Intensity (fill light and blackpoint) and Sharpness adjustments I applied a Graduated Filter Effect from the bottom to bring up brightness and contrast…and then a second GFE from the top to pump up Clarity and Contrast to give the clouds slightly more definition. This is on the edge of being hyper-real, in the way many HDR treatments “go reality one better” and create a scene that is more dramatic than what the naked eye would actually see. (Some HDR treatments, in my opinion, boarder on the surreal. I don’t go there.) I think this image strikes a good balance.
Just for comparison, here is the same image with more intense tone-mapping in LightZone and final processing in Lightroom. This one is hyper-real…but it certainly has impact.
