Posts in Category: weather
Front Passing. Cape May NJ
This is the time of year when New Jersey Audubon has someone stationed on the Hawk Watch Platform at Cape May Lighthouse State Park every day, counting the passing hawks. It is a long-standing research project, and the scientific community uses the data from this site, and others like it in Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin and many other states, to assess the health of the environment as it is reflected in the numbers and distribution of migrating hawks. Besides…what could be more fun than standing on a open platform all day counting hundreds, sometimes multiple hundreds, of hawks of a dozen species coming over? The official counter is rarely alone…and on weekends there can be an actual crush on the platform…and it s a big platform.
I can also be a beautiful place to be, looking out over the marsh and Lighthouse Pond, north up the coast of New Jersey. And on a day with weather, it can be spectacular. While I was there yesterday, the first cold front of the year was passing, piling up the sky with massive clouds, and shadowing the windy landscape. Drama!
Samsung Smart Camera WB800F in Rich Tone mode. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
Roger’s Pond HDR
I have presented this view before. It is Roger’s Pond, a fishing and ice-skating park along the Mousam River just off Main Street Kennebunk Maine. It is one of the few places close to home where I can go to shoot the sky. And it certainly has its beauty.
This is an in-camera HDR from the Samsung WB250F camera…with processing in PicSay Pro on the Samsung Galaxy S4. I am finding the combination of the two Samsung devices to be satisfyingly and surprisingly powerful, and certainly well suited to the photography, and especially, the sharing that I do. The camera is amazingly versatile…I even shot dragonflies with it yesterday using the intelligent zoom feature (while I waited for the long zoom on the Canon SX50HS to unfog from being in air-conditioning in VA too long)…and the Smart Modes, which include the in-camera HDR (Rich Tone), are exceptionally good. I really like the way PicSay Pro works as an editor…it is kind of like Lightroom for Android, with funky filters added (which I mostly don’t use). All in all it is a fun combo. I am I liking the results.
Wide on the Prairie
The folks at Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge are justly proud to have been chosen for one of 20 NEON sites spread across the country. NEON is the National Ecological Observatory Network which has ambitious plans to collect ecological data across a broad spectrum, and across the whole continent to help with future policy decisions. See the informative article on Wiki.
This was taken on a stormy North Dakota day from the newly built installation on a ridge overlooking the native and reseeded prairies of Chase Lake. The raised metal boardwalk is to avoid human contact with the soil, which might effect some of their measurements. The image itself is a sweep panorama with the Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone camera. Processed on the phone with PicSay Pro.
April Ocean: Kennebunk/Kennebunkport. Happy Sunday!
We did not see any sun until yesterday evening, and the temperatures hovered in the mid-40s, but I still had to get out on my new scooter for at least a short photo prowl. I mean, that is what the scooter is for! Long-johns and a fleece vest under a windproof jacket, and my winterized scooter helmet and gloves kept me barely warm enough…as long as I kept my speed down 🙂
Both the ocean and the sky were gray, as only a grey day in April can be, but full of subtle drama. I tried a few in-camera HDR shots to see if I could catch the feeling. With a bit of extra processing in Lightroom this image comes close. We are looking out over Gouch’s Beach and the beach front summer cottages of Kennebunk and, across the Kennebunk river, the Colony Hotel and the first of the summer mansions on Old Fort point in Kennebunkport.
Though HDR with water is always a problem (the three exposures never quite overlap because the water moves), it works here. If you look carefully you will see three separate surf lines where the water meets the sand.
Canon SX50HS. In-camera HDR Mode. 24mm equivalent field of view. Recorded exif: f5.6 @ 1/500th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom with my hyper-real preset, and then tweaked for black clipping point and contrast.
And for the Sunday Thought: What with the new scooter and all, I have a bad case of spring fever. It is generally my April mood. I am ready for the wildflowers and dragonflies of late May and early June (this is Maine after all), and we are still stuck with melting snow piles in the parking lots and maple buds still not fully open to flowers. Generally I am gone two weeks in April, to the more mild, and further advanced (but no warmer) spring of Northern California, and then to the riot of spring in Northern Florida around St. Augustine. I am a little sad this year that two events are the same week…and I was forced to choose Northern California. I will miss spring in St. Augustine!
On the other hand, perhaps it is for the best. Coming back to April in Southern Maine from Florida was always a shock, and probably made my spring fever worse instead of better. I am about to find out.
Of course, I know the cure for my spring impatience. It is the same cure that cures so many ills. Presence. Note that I said “presence” not “patience.” Â I need to be more present to the moment, to each moment of every day. I need to make myself totally available to whatever is happening now! and not be always living a week or a month or a season ahead of myself. God is in the now. Always completely invested in the now. Or so I have come to believe. We can not experience awe in some future that has not happened yet. Awe is the appropriate response to right now, where God is. And, of course, that is the feeling I was trying to catch in the grey clouds over and grey ocean under Kennebunk.
Confluence at High Tide
Which is a high-flaunting way of describing where little old Back Creek meets the Mousam River behind the barrier dunes on their way to the sea. 🙂 I have a lot of versions of this view. It is a great place, as on this day earlier this week, to catch the clouds of a passing front. And, of course, I really like the driftwood in the foreground.
Canon SX50HS. In-camera HDR Mode. 24mm equivalent field of view. Recorded exif: f5 @ 1/500th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.I really like the In-camera HDR files from the Canon. They are very easy to work with in Lightroom to produce a very satisfying extended range image. I took a comparison image in Program, and while I could have worked with it, the HDR simply has more life and more pop…especially in the foreground.
Winter Again
Winter storm Nemo dropped 29 inches of snow on us two weekends ago. Last weekend we got another 6-8 from an unnamed storm. Yesterday we got maybe 8-10 inches from the remnants of winter storm G, which raged across the mid-west before it got to us. G is the first of them to create classic winter scenes though. Wetter, clinging snow and little to no wind allowed snow to build up on any remotely horizontal surface. The clothes-line is 3 inches tall this morning. This image is from sunrise today.
Canon SX50HS. In-camera HDR. Recorded exif: f4 @ 1/320th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, sharpness, and color temperature.
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.
Winter Kennebunk Plains
As promised, I got out a bit yesterday to see if I could find some images to catch what Nemo did to Southern Maine. Not that it did much…damage wise. We got a lot of snow and potentially damaging winds but the timing of both snow and wind was such that we are left with a windswept snowy landscape and very few bad memories (unless you count the sore muscles from shoveling).
This is the Kennebunk Plains, which you have seen here in other seasons and other lights. It is also a three shot panorama, in Snow Mode. You should be able to see it full width on your screen or monitor by clicking on the image.
It does not look very deep here, but I was standing in a hole the wind made swirling around one of the Conservation signs, and I can testify that you are looking at between 2 and 3 feet of snow. I like the way the wind has sculpted the surface, and I like the radiating cloud mass.
Canon SX50HS, as I said, in Snow Mode. There overlapping 24mm exposures. f5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Fall Fog, Fall Color: Happy Sunday!
Yesterday was one of those rainy, misty, foggy late fall days, when everything is wet, and the last colors of the season excel in depth, rather than brilliance. It brings out the colors of oak and elm and understory shrubs much better than a sunny day could, while the fog softens distance and keeps your eye in close.
Once the rain had stopped, I got out for a loop on the trail at the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge headquarters down the road, just into Wells. I got there between banks of heavy fog, when the conditions were just right to capture the mood of the day.
Everything was still dripping wet, and any color burned against the foggy background.
With the fog-bound focus of my vision, details dominated, and foregrounds became the focus.
The maples with their sunlit brilliance had had their day…now the understory and oaks held sway.
I was experimenting with the Vivid setting on the Canon SX50HS, and, for this kind of day, it was perfect. It gave just enough extra emphasis to the colors so that I could produce an accurate visual effect in Lightroom…or maybe just do so with less processing.
All shots Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast. Vivid Color Space. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness, with my hyper-real preset.
And for the Sunday Thought. Of course when fall comes we miss the high bright days of summer. Even in fall, the days we generally treasure, in New England, are the days of wide vistas, bright sun, blue skies with puffy white clouds, and the brilliant reds and oranges and yellows of the Maples. But a day like yesterday teaches that there is a different beauty in the fogs of later fall. There are fewer and less brilliant colors, but every color deepens and draws the eye, and smaller and more subtle details take on life.
It is good to remember that the same thing can happen in the spirit. We treasure the peek experiences…the days of wonderful light and high spiritual skies when we see the brilliance of truth spread round us as bright as autumn Maples. But there is something to be said for those days when a spiritual fog softens and deepens the light…forces us to look close and look deep, to see the patterns of truth and beauty in the foreground of our lives.
Those are good days too. I expect we just have to find our own “vivid” setting…which I suspect must be there, somewhere in our spiritual menus, for just such days. I found mine yesterday. I only hope I remember where it is the next time the fog rolls in.
Fall Weather on the Kennebunk Plains
As I mentioned yesterday, we have been having a rainy fall so far. On my Sunday, unbrella-packing, photoprowl, I swung by the Kennebunk Plains to see if there was any drama in the sky or any color in the maples. You can probably see a very little bit of color in the far tree-line, but at least the sky did not disappoint. The view over the plains and into the clouds, side on, so to speak, revealed a lot more character than the solid grey blanket overhead.
I exposed for the sky, mostly, by metering high and recomposing…and then brought the foreground up in Lightroom. This is a technique that works well with the Canon sensors, which hold a lot of detail in underexposed areas. Besides my usual Lightroom processing (see the page link above), I used a Graduated Filter Effect from the bottom to add brightness and clarity to the grasses, and visually balance the exposure against the sky.
I really like the layered in light clouds and the foreground provides just enough texture for balance. The tallish stalks are what is left of the Northern Blazing Star.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/640th @ ISO 125. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness, and as above.