Posts in Category: weather
10/1/2011: Rainy Day Water Meadow
There are only two things to do with a rainy Saturday in Maine: 1) Stay inside and look at sunny pictures taken on other days…the antidote method, or 2) Go outside and find some good rainy images…the embrace the day method. Last Saturday I chose embracure. (It remains to see what I will choose today :), but posting this image puts me already on the path to an embrace.)
This is a watery marsh/meadow that I have imaged many times over the past few years, just off the Kennebunk Bridle Path. In this shot I really like the swirl of the foreground grasses in their first fall brown and what the light is doing in the trees along the edge…all under that moody sky. Not a high energy shot, but one that I find I can look at for quite a while without running out of content.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 22mm equivalent field of view, Backlight/HDR mode. Nominal exposure f4 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160 (nominal as the image is an in-camera tone mapped series of images.)
I applied the Coolpix’s in-camera Quick Retouch before uploading to my laptop, and then final processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
9/26/2011: Just a touch of fall on the marsh…
Another shot from Saturday’s fotoprowl®…just to prove I did eventually get out of the yard (see yesterday’s post). The trees, as of Saturday, had just been touched with the earliest color of fall. Things will progress rapidly now, and indeed, by Sunday morning the color had advanced far enough to leave no doubt that the season is upon us. In this shot, an in-camera HDR, I tried to catch the marsh at this delicate balance between the seasons, with maybe the last of the Beach Rose among the Asters and Goldenrod in the foreground, the unique fall greeny-yellow-brown of the marsh grass, and the few red maples in the background. As you see, it was fully overcast, so I also worked to bring out at least a little detail in the clouds. If I were a purist I would edit out the dead branches obtruding from the left…but I am a realist…and I actually prefer to leave them in.
Nikon Coolpix P500 in Backlight/HDR mode. 23mm equivalent field of view. Nominal exposure f3.4 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160 (nominal because an in-camera HDR is the sum of several very rapid exposures with different settings).
Before uploading to my laptop, I also used the in-camera Quick Retouch, which, when applied to an in-camera HDR, restores some of the contrast, brightens the foreground, and sharpens the whole image. The combination, while not as good as a three exposure HDR processed in Photomatix, is pretty satisfying. Final processing in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness. Cropped slightly at the right to eliminate a half post leaning out of the frame.
9/16/2011: Lake Erie Morning
The Midwest Birding Symposium is at Lakeside Ohio and, as you might guess from the name, it is right on the shores of Lake Erie in Ohio’s resort belt. I always forget that Lake Erie is a major body of water…an inland sea in fact. The “lake” label obscures the actual nature of the experience. It is, in my experience, a pretty wild stretch of inland sea at that…with its own weather even.
A front was passing yesterday morning as I was headed out from Lakeside to Magee Marsh and Ottawa NWR, and I had to run down to the lake to catch a bit off the action before getting in the car for the drive. Amazing waves and clouds.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view. 1) f4.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. 2) f3.4 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160. Program with Active D-Lighting.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
8/27/2011: Another Mood of Rutland Water
Rutland Water is one of those places I could photograph over and over again…which is fortunate since this is the view out my window (so to speak) for 3 days every August. I have already posted two different moods of this view. This is yet another, and about as different as different can be. From the final day of the British Birding Fair with lots of weather drama in the sky.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view, f8 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160. Programed auto with Active D-Lighting.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity, Sharpness, Intensity and color temperature. Cropped slightly at the top for composition and to eliminate some brunt out clouds.
7/26/2011: 101 in the Shade
We had a run to three days last week when the temperatures were over 95 degrees. That is unusual weather for Kennebunk and Southern Maine…so unusual that most year-round folks, like us, do not have air conditioning. We are Mainers. We suffer through the few days each summer when we need air conditioning using window fans…taking drives in our air conditioned cars…and, of course, sneaking down to the beach when we can find parking. That generally means later in the day, in our long summer evenings. This day, the one in the pic above, the temperature was still over 100 degrees at 5PM, and there was little relief at the beach. You see a few people, in absolute desperation, out in the water. (Average summer water temperatures in the ocean off Maine beaches are between 50 and 60 degrees…and that is cold!)
I like this shot for the bright yellow slide framing the sky blue umbrella, and the general atmosphere, and the next one for the color.
Around the corner, a evening and a bit later, about 7:30PM, on Gooch’s Beach. Still in the upper 90s. Notice that the surfers are all in wet-suits.
And we will finish off with a sweep panorama of the whole beach. View it large by clicking on the image. (It is a sweep panorama, done in camera, not a stitched panorama made from individual exposures, so the resolution is not what you would expect from a stitch job…but is certainly is a lot easier 🙂
Nikon Coolpix P500. Processed for Clarity and Sharpness in Lightroom.
7/16/2011: Pool of Clouds in Evening Sun
The pool behind the bridge on Back Creek near where it flows into the Mousam River in Kennebunk, on a summer evening with the late sun across the marsh and the clouds caught.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 31mm equivalent field of view. Backlight/HDR mode. Nominal exposure f3.7 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. Quick Retouch applied in camera.
Processed for Clarity, Sharpness, and Contrast in Lightroom.
7/7/2011: Storm over Mothers’ Beach
My daughter and a friend like to walk in the evening. They got ambitious last might and walked the 2 miles or so to the ocean. Unfortunately when they turned to come home, this is what they saw bearing down on them, complete with flashes of lightning. I was called to the rescue with the car, and, while there, of course, had to try to capture the sky. It is really more impressive (even more impressive :)) in the enlarged view available by clicking the image.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view, f3.4 @ 1/125th @ ISO 200. Programmed auto with Active-D Lighting.
This took more than my usual processing in Lightroom. I did not think to switch the White Balance to Cloudy, and the auto WB did not respond well…the clouds were blue, blue, blue. Auto WB in Lightroom took care of most of it, but I also had to selectively reduce the saturation of the blue and aqua bands, using the color selection tool in the HSL panel. To capture the visual effect, I also had to reduce overall brightness. Though it still looks a bit strange…it did in fact look a bit strange in reality. Very weird light!
A little luminance noise reduction smoothed the dark sections of the clouds.
Finally, since I had the camera tipped up a sharp angle, and the zoom set to 23mm, the wide-angle distortion was very visible in the houses and beach structures, especially on the right. Lightroom’s lens and vertical distortion tools restored correct perspective, at the cost of minor cropping of the top right and left.
6/26/2011: High Plains Sky, Happy Sunday!
I had forgotten how big the sky is on the High Plains of Colorado. The Rockies push up amazing clouds that drift (or drive as the case may be) out over the gently rolling prairie. This is near Byers Colorado, about 90 miles east of the cloud factory of the Front Range peaks. It is a 4 frame panorama. Click on it to open it to the full width of your screen or monitor.
I spent an afternoon and early evening at a shooting range north of Byers demonstrating spotting scopes (work), and had an ideal opportunity to watch (and, between sessions, capture) the variety of High Plains clouds that you can see in a single day.
All these shots make use of the Nikon Coolpix P500’s Active D-Lighting to maintain detail in the clouds, and Lightroom’s Graduated Filter Effect to bring up the foregrounds. If you click the image to open it at WideEyedInWonder, and then click the Show Details button at the top right, you can see complete exif data on any of the images.
And for the Sunday thought: I really did not expect much from a shooting range on the high plains…in fact I was disappointed when I found out that our one day outside was to be further from the mountains than we already were at our hotel. I forget that no matter how flat the landscape of our lives at any given moment, the creator can, and very often does, fill the sky above with glorious evidence. We just have to look up and notice.
6/20/2011: Wet Wood with Stream
On the way back from a very wet hike up South Bubble in Acadia National Park, we stopped at the Bubble Pond parking because I wanted a picture of a brook. This is Bubble Brook as it leaves the pond begins its run down to Eagle Lake. I love the wet woodland, the colors of the decaying leaves and the green foliage, and textures of bark and stone, and the curve of the stream, the parallel placement of the diagonal downed tree, the bow of the pine on the right, the roughness of the birch bark on the left, etc. etc. There is a lot going on in this image, but I think it is held firmly together by the sweep of the water, and well anchored by the base of wet stone and last years oak leaves. It is another image I could see printed, framed, and hanging on my wall.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view, f3.4 @ 1/30th @ ISO 200. Program with Active D-Lighting and Vivid Image Optimization.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
By the way. My morning posts are offset in time this week as I am on the west coast 
6/14/2011: High-Bush Blueberry Blossoms in the Rain
I spent the morning yesterday shooting Acadia National Park from under an umbrella in the rain. Different. I plan an extended post on the experience on Point and Shoot 4 Landscape one of these days soon.
These high-bush blueberry blooms were at the Wild Gardens of Acadia at Sieur de Mont Springs in the Park. I was shooting from under the branch, looking up at a sharp angle, and the dark background is the peak of the roof of the Nature Center at Sieur de Mont. I love the way the rain has beaded the flowers. A close look (click the image and use the size controls at the top of the window that opens) will show lens effects of several kinds…there are drops where the bush and what is behind it are imaged…you see shots like that often…but there are also drops that are acting as close up lenses, showing the fine texture of the petal they are on.
Nikon Coolpix P500 in Close Up scene mode (assisted macro) at 32mm equivalent field of view, f3.7 @ 1/200 @ ISO 160.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.