Posts in Category: weather
Another Wide on the Mousam.
A three shot panorama looking up the Mousam from the bridge on Route 9 in Kennebunk. Again. I have been compelled to take this view before. It is one of the few spots in our flat forested county were you can get a mostly unobstructed view of the horizon to the west. East is easy. We have the ocean on that side. West, well you can go here, or you can go to the Kennebunk Plains, but that is about it. And here you have the river to catch the sky. 🙂 We are coming up on some of the best skies of the summer, as fronts pass in late August and early September. This is certainly one of them. (For the best view, click the image and it will open at the full width of your monitor.)
I thought about cloning out the bit of telephone pole on the left and the wires on the right, but decided they add to the framing and don’t distract too much. Besides I like the bobber and bit of ribbon caught on the wire 🙂
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. Three 24mm equivalent shots. f5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 125. Stitched in PhotoShop Elements’ PhotoMerge tool. Final processing in Lightroom.
Weather at the Pond. Happy Sunday!
Yesterday afternoon I took my electric scooter out, even though, at a casual glance, my weather app said there was a 67% chance of thundershowers. The great thing about weather apps, to me, is that you have access to real time radar maps of your area. At the click of an icon you can check the area to the west (at least here in New England it is the west, though certain seasons you do have to have an eye to the south) to see what weather is, or is not, coming. When I looked at the map, I could see storms well to the south of us, and tracking east out to sea, but nothing to the west…so I headed out, and had a good 3 pond photoprowl. And all under spectacular storm skies. And yes, I got home safe and dry.
This is the little pond where I am doing a lot of my dragon and damselfly hunting these days. As you see it is really drainage for a small industrial complex, now converted to a health care center. Health care is a major industry in Kennebunk. We have probably a dozen large residential care centers, three pharmacies, and two major medical outliers (mini hospitals) from larger full-service facilities in the area. And that is not counting all the physicians who are in practice on their own. Now if you live in a city you are probably thinking “ha, that’s nothing” but Kennebunk is a small town of 11,000 souls. We have become, somehow, an assisted living retirement destination. Go figure? (Actually the whole southern coast of Maine is hopping with residential centers…I have never lived anywhere where there were so many.)
That is not, of course, why we moved here…but, maybe because I turned 65 this week, it is more apparent to me now than it was when we got here 17 years ago.
But back to the image. I just like the intense sky and the empty parking lot…and the way the sky and trees reflect in the water. For me the shot has a lot of quiet tension…it should be pretty static…restful…calm…but that sky just keeps pulling the emotions in other directions.
Technically the scene was underexposed to catch all the detail in the sky. Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 160. I brought up the shadows (basically the whole foreground back to the building) using the selective exposure controls in Lightroom, and then added a final Graduated Filter effect from bottom to top to increase the brightness of the foreground for a more natural look. I think it works.
And for the Sunday thought. Lots of places to go here. At 65 I have to kind of, sort of, wish there were a life-weather app that would give me real-time radar of the life-storms that are, or are not, moving in from the west.
I also got my disappointingly small pension packet from the limited time I was in the pension system at my most recent employer (before they closed the system and went to mandatory 401ks), and had the inevitable discussion with my boss about when I was planning on retiring and what that means for my work, and the nature of my job, over the next few years. A kind of “lets get everything we can out of you while we phase you out” talk. Heady stuff. Stormy stuff if you let it get to you.
And I am feeling much like this image. There is a quiet, almost a calm, certainly a beauty…but an undeniable tension. I am not anticipating storms, but I can not deny the possibility. And yet, at my best, I would not have it any other way. I have lived my life by faith…never building barns (pension plans), as it is in Jesus’ parable…and, life-weather app or no, I know who has my hours and my days and all my years in hand. I will go on as I have gone. And I will, where ever I encounter it, celebrate the beautiful tension of living in this world.
And yes, I fully expect to get home, if not completely dry, at least completely safe!
6/24/2012: Prairie Ramble. Happy Sunday!
I told a bit of my Prairie Ramble story in the Prairie Sunflowers post a few days ago. It was my last field trip at the Potholes and Prairies Birding Festival, and was quite different. The mission of the Arrowwood, Chase Lake and Horsehead trips was to find as many birds as we could see in the day, 60 of us, moving rapidly from stop to stop on a big tour bus and spending from 30 to 60 minutes at each stop. On the Prairie Ramble a much smaller group set out to enjoy a relatively small area of unbroken short grass prairie by walking it for several hours. I told a bit of the history of the section we walked in the previous post. You might want to click the link above and review. And on the Prairie Ramble we were just as interested, perhaps more interested, in the plants (bugs, reptiles, etc.) we might find there as we were in the birds. Very different. As befits the adventure, this is going to be a long rambling post with lots of stops and close looks. Find a few moments to enjoy it. 🙂
The lead shot here shows the terrain we walked to good advantage, and Ann Hoffert (who has been the primary force behind Potholes and Prairies for all 10 years of its existence) and Freddie (a film maker from the UK, here doing a trailer for possible National Geographic Channel show on birding) provide the human scale. There is even a prairie pothole there on the right. The potholes are semi-permanent or seasonal wetlands that from in low areas of the prairie and provide habitat for hundreds of thousands of migrating and nesting waterfowl, and millions of nesting song-birds. And I may actually be underestimating the numbers by a factor of factor of 10.
When we got to Prairie it was still misting after a night of heavy rain, and everything was soaked. At the same time the front was passing off ahead of a stiff wind from the west. It was not ideal conditions for walking the hills or for photographing the small prairie plants, and those of without boots were soon wet to the knee. :)The next two shots are Prairie Smoke, one of the classic wildflowers of the short grass, and a very unique and interesting plant.
Rich Bohn, a native of the North Dakota prairie who works with one of the agencies attempting to preserve as much of this habitat as possible, had walked this section a few days before and was able to lead us directly to many of the most interesting prairie plants and grasses.
The wind was blowing so hard that in order to get sharp close-ups of some of the taller flowers, like the Deathcamas in the 4th image, I had to resort to stilling the flower with my hand. Deathcamas is, as its name implies, deadly poison to both humans and livestock.
As we wandered the prairie, seeing what was to be seen, we found small caterpillars on the rocks. Lots of small caterpillars! Julie Zickerfoose, well known naturalist and writer (her most recent book The Blue Bird Effect was featured on Oprah recently), was with us, and got down to examine the bugs more closely.
She eventually convinced us that the caterpillars were actually eating the lichen on the rocks. Unlikely as that sounds, a little research, first on my smartphone and then on my tablet when we got back to the bus, determined that there is indeed a Lichen Moth (2 actually) that lives on the prairies of North Dakota. It later turned out that Rich Bohn, unknowingly, had a photograph of the moth itself on one of the plants he had photographed in this section a few years before. You see both the caterpillar and its pellet-like droppings in the image.
There were a few other bugs of note. We found a morning stilled Dot-Tailed Whiteface dragonfly and some Marsh or Boreal Bluet damselflies. The dragonfly was so cold and wet I was able to pick it up so the whole group got an excellent look at it. I put it back down before my hand could warm it enough to get in motions while the air was still too cold.
At the other end of the spectrum from caterpillars perhaps, we found several of the tiny Prairie Rose plants in bloom. This is a wild rose (rosa pratincola) and a close relative of the eastern wood rose (rosa woodsii), but it only grows inches tall (at least on the short grass prairie of North Dakota). There are few things more delicate in this life than a wild rose.
Over the brow of the first set of hills, we found this perfect prairie pothole, where a few White Pelicans, some Mallards, and a family of grebes were cursing in the mist.
There were birds nesting on the shot grass itself of course. We flushed what was probably a Grasshopper Sparrow (shown in the following image) from this nest. That was fortunate as the nest was right in our path and so well hidden that one of us would likely have stepped on it. We were careful to cover it once more before we moved on.
As the morning progressed and we wandered deeper into the prairie, the sun broke through and the clouds flew off to the east. However, it got even windier. Here we have Julie and Ann on the left and two of my fellow ramblers on the right, cresting a hill on the prairie, and then a shot of the prairie under clearing skies.
Better light made close-ups a bit more likely, and the rising wind made them a bit more unlikely. A wash. This is a Penstimon with a tiny grasshopper or katydid passenger.
As we headed slowly back toward the bus, we walked up on this Prairie Garter Snake…one the lager Garters I have seen, and very fresh looking, either from the wash she got in the wet grass or because she had recently shed a skin.
And a few moments and several hundred yards further on we happened across a Northern Leopard Frog, which was undoubtedly what brought the Garter snake out onto the short grass.
And we will finish as we began (almost) with one last shot of Prairie Smoke and an image of a few of my fellow ramblers on the short grass prairie…by now under a clear blue sky.
And after all that there is still the Sunday thought. I will keep it short. The Prairie Ramble is a celebration in so many ways of spirit as it works out in humans, and I can only be thankful. Thankful that this little remnant of short grass prairie exist at all, and to all the individuals who have kept it unbroken over the years. Thankful to North Dakotans like Ann Hoffert and Rich Bohn (and so many others) who are currently working to save the prairie…Ann through promoting tourism and birding, and Rich by working directly with farmers. Thankful most of all, of course, to the creative spirit who loved this complex and wonderful ecosystem into existence in the first place, and then gave us the gift of the capacity to enjoy it! Happy Sunday.
6/21/2012: Prairie Perspective
On my first full day in North Dakota for the Potholes and Prairies Birding Festival, I took a field trip which toured much of the Arrowwood National Wildlife Refuge. Arrowwood sits in the valley of the James River, which, given the slow current of the James, is a surprisingly broad eroded depression in the high prairie, giving the impression of actual hills at its boundary if you look east or west. This is a view up the valley to the north…and the valley bottom itself is even flatter than the rolling prairies that surround it. The Refuge contains several larger bodies of water where the James has been dammed. The largest by far is Arrowwood Lake. What you see in the relative distance in this image is Mud Lake, the second largest on the refuge. The lush green growth along the road has its own story: a year to the day before this image was taken, all this was under 10 feet of water as the James River flooded for the second time in 2 years. Looking to the east or west you can easily see the “high water line” where this green growth meets the more subdued prairie grasses.
That evening, also at Arrowwood, I met a British film-maker, Freddie, who was on assignment to produce a trailer for birding show to pitch to National Geographic Channel. He had flown direct from London and, after a frustrating day stranded at the Chicago Airport, had continued to Fargo, where he rented a car and drove to Carrington across the prairies. He was now a day into his North Dakota experience, and was simply, as he put it, “blown away.” (Apt considering the 20 mph wind blowing around the edges of the new Arrowwood Visitor Center where we were standing, or trying to stand.) Nothing in his considerable experience of the world (he is a trekker and has traveled extensively) had prepared him for the Potholes and Prairies country of the the Dakotas…the sweep of the rolling landscape, the vastness of the sky, the isolated farms with their shelter belts dotting the prairie. He kept using the word “unimaginable” and I can identify. That was my impression of the place when I first visited it the mid 80’s. Unimaginable.
This image catches, I think, just a bit of that unimaginable grandeur. The people (fellow birders who had wandered away from the bus) and the road give it scale. The storm clouds moving over (and away…it cleared a few hours later) provide the drama. And the unbroken, wide horizon stretches the eye and the mind to vast dimensions.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/1000 @ ISO 100. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4/8/2012: Happy Easter! Back Creek under Clouds (again)
There are some scenes I can photograph over and over. In fact, if a scene is worth photographing once, chances are, it is worth photographing again…many times. The basic conformation of the landscape might not change (at least during the reasonable life-time of a tree), but if there is water involved, water is never the same twice, and the sky, of course, is always changing. I was reminded by a TV show I watched this week on Amazon Prime (Inspector Lewis, if you must know), that the painter Constable, during one period of his life, went out daily, to the same spot, and painted the sky…clouds in particular…because he was fascinated by ever changing play of light and form.
Back Creek, about 2 miles from our front door, is such a place for me. The road to our closest beach crosses Back Creek about 400 yards from were it empties into the Mousam River. It is a tidal creek in every sense, and the water is constantly rushing under the bridge in one direction or the other, as the road creates a dam that catches water on the up tide, and releases it on the down. Yesterday, during my Easter Saturday photo-prowl, we had an exceptionally high tide, and I was there just at the crest. I had made a run down for the sky, which promised great things from our doorstep, but when I got there, the marsh on either side of the road was completely under water. That is rare enough to be of note. And the sky lived up to its promise. A front was coming in from the south-west, and the leading edge of the cloud cover, ragged big soft clouds with gaps of blue, was filling the sky in that direction, piling backward more densely over the horizon. It was awesome!
With the water right up against the road, only a foot below the road in fact, I flipped out the LCD on the Canon and got down to ground level to shoot out across the water from a low angle. This shot, on the side of the road away from the sea and sheltered from the wind, the reflections are just as important as the sky.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f4.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 100. I am astounded, and delighted, with this little camera’s ability to capture a scene like this without resorting to any HDR techniques. All it needed was pretty standard processing in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Now it is, of course, Easter Sunday. I live by faith in the risen one. It is a choice I have made, and I know that, but most of the time it feels like I was compelled to that choice. It was always a gentle compulsion…a matter of how I am made and how the world is…in the end an inability to deny the awe I feel in life, in living here and now, every day. I was made to ask why and how…in the end, I found I could not avoid asking who…and the answer, despite every evasion I could come up with, was right there, planted in long ago Sunday and Vacation Bible School encounters, and nurtured over time by a patient spirit revealing wonder at every turn. There are some stories, some truths, you can return to over and over, every day, because they are never the same twice. They are alive, like the land and water scape under clouds, and I come back again and again to see what wonder they display today…how my mind and heart are illuminated, refreshed, reborn in the light of what the risen one has for me today. Happy Easter. He is risen. He is risen indeed.
2/21/2012: Three Birds on a Snowy Day in VA
So, I had planned this trip to Virginia for a week of meetings and face-time at the office. Flights on Monday were prohibitively expensive, so, I thought, I will just fly down on Sunday. We don’t have any children who actually go to school (we home-school) so we are not as attuned to the vacation and holiday schedule as some households, which is why it never occurred to me that the office would be closed on Monday. President’s Day! By the time I realized, less than 30 minutes before my flight, it was too late.
And then, of course, I flew from relatively spring like Maine into a raging blizzard in Richmond. They got 6 inches at the airport and I woke to snow shrouded trees, white lawns, and inches of wet slush in the parking lots of Chester. I did not pack my winter boots.
Still, in light of Sunday’s revelation about keeping more current with my photography, I got out for an hour to Henricus City Park and Dutch Gap Conservation Area to see what could be seen. I was dependent on finding bare paths and ground, as my dress crocs are in no way suitable for snow.
There were lots of Ring-necked Ducks on the big marsh (pretty much a lake after the storm) as you drive into Henricus City Park. There were also a few Northern-shovelers, Mallards, Coots, and Canada Geese. The Veery and Red-bellied Woodpecker were down near the boat ramp. And yes, I made it back to the hotel with relatively dry feet. My socks dried in less than an hour. 🙂
Of these three birds, I have always thought both the Ring-necked Duck and the Red-bellied Woodpecker were woefully miss-named. Who has ever seen the neck ring on the Ring-neck Duck?…while the ring on the bill is so obvious. What’s wrong with Ring-billed Duck? And the woodpecker? I guess there is some excuse. If you called every red-headed woodpecker “Red-headed Woodpecker” then where would we be… Still. Red-bellied does not leap right out at you when looking at this bird. Okay…I get the Veery. It is an ear thing, and I am okay with that.
All three shots with the Canon SX40HS at 1680mm equivalent field of view (840mm optical plus 2x digital tel-extender function) handheld. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1) f5.8 @ 1/400th @ ISO 100. 2) f5.8 @ 1/500th @ ISO 200. 3) f5.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 100.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
1/14/2012: Snowscape with Birches
Another shot from Thursday’s snow storm. This classic country estate with its long reach of pond and covered bridge is pretty in any season, but particularly striking in this winter scene.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/100th @ ISO 100. Program with iContrast. –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Dynamic Photo HDR, and then final processing in Lightroom.
1/13/2012: Snow!! And a road in the wood.
We finally got our first significant snow yesterday in southern Maine. They predicted 1 to 3 inches, and we got 6 to 8 🙂 Heavy wet snow finishing off in little pellets of ice late afternoon. The roads were as bad as I have ever seen them in Maine. Still that did not stop me from getting out mid-storm to get a few pics. This is a wood road that runs through Rachael Carson National Wildlife land between us and the coast.
This is not sensor friendly light…levels are low in a storm like this…and exposing to hold highlights in the snow almost always results in greens that are grey at best, and mostly verging on black. I was really pleased to be able to pull up the greens while processing the image in Dynamic Photo HDR without losing the white of the snow. This is very much a naked eye view.
Canon SX40HS at 126mm equivalent field of view. f4.5 @ 1/80th @ ISO 200. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed as a single jpg HDR in Dynamic Photo HDR. Final processing and a slight crop from the top in Lightroom.
And just for fun, here is the same image processed in Dynamic Auto Painter as a painting.
1/11/2012: Back Creek and the Mousam under Skies.
This is another experiment with the Dynamic Photo HDR application and another shot from the gloomy Sunday at the coast. DPHDR gives you all kinds of options for fine tuning the tone mapping, even from a single .jpg…and it produces a well rendered image with very little haloing (halo is the light band where dark sections of the image meet light sections, common in HDR work…or it is a similar light band around individual pixels that limits the smoothness of tones in HDR work.) Final adjustment in Lightroom using a Graduated Filter effect to lighten the sky was required to keep the whole thing from going surreal. As you may have noted, I don’t mind hyper-real images, but I do try to avoid the surreal look of overcooked HDR.
For comparison, here is the pure Lightroom version.
The Lightroom version is perhaps a bit truer to the mood of the day. It was undeniably gloomy. But the DPHDR version has more impact as an image. I am going to have to pay more attention…take some shots intentionally to test and challenge my memory for light values before I can say which one is “truer” to reality…to the naked eye view.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/640th @ ISO 160. Program with iContrast and –1/3 EV exposure compensation.
Processing as above.
And just for fun, here it is rendered as a paining in Dynamic Auto Painter, with the original overlayed in PhotoShop Elements as a grayscale using Vivid Light to bring up more detail.
1/9/2012: Moody on the Beach, Kennebunk ME
I almost did not go out for a photoprowl yesterday, though my stock of recent material for Pic 4 Today is getting low. The day started out with promise, but by the time I got out of church, the sun had gone and banks of heavy cloud had come over. Still, when my wife announced that she was going for a walk on the beach, I decided to break away from the computer and join her. Good choice.
It was indeed gloomy, moody, and atmospheric on the beach, but there was light along the horizon for contrast and interesting reflections of the cloud mass in the wet beach. This is looking a bit west of south, out over Wells and Ogunquit. That little bump on the right is Mount Agamenticus (in case you thought I was kidding yesterday when I said tall hills in Southern Maine are called mountains). It is a low angle shot, taken from about 6 inches above the sand…I am ever thankful for the flip out lcd on today’s superzooms.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/640th @ ISO 125. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. Metered on the horizon.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness. I used a Graduated Filter effect to lighten both the foreground and the sky. The frame was added in Picasa, something I next to never do, but the tone of the image was just too close to the tone of the background here for effective display.