Posts in Category: weather
5/23/2011: Primary Colors in the Fog, with Loon
We made a quick trip to Machias and Bar Harbor on Friday, chauffeuring a daughter from college to summer job. It was a cold, rainy day, only letting up toward evening, and then the fog persisted over the water. Still, with a few hours in Bar Harbor, while we waited for a second daughter to get out work so we could take them both to dinner, I had to find something to photograph. 🙂
So this shot is primarily about color. I took several versions at different zoom lengths for different framing, but only in this one is graced by a loon.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 215mm equivalent field of view, f5.6 @ 1/500th @ ISO 160. Program with Active D-Lighting and Vivid Image Optimization.
Processed for Clarity and Sharpness in Lightroom.
5/15/2011: After the Storm, Happy Sunday!
Happy Sunday!
I woke to a rainy Sunday morning this am, so this shot from last Saturday seems appropriate. We had a day of rain which finally broke up, late in the afternoon. I took a run down to the beach to see what the light was getting up to. The sky was not as dramatic as I had hoped, but in this shot, the foreground detail, I think, makes up for it.
This was an experiment in the Nikon Coolpix’s HDR mode…the camera took three shots and stacked them for an extended range. Results right out of the camera are almost always disappointingly flat…unless the scene is exactly as the authors of the software envisioned it…but some work in Lightroom can produce a very pleasant extended range effect…very natural compared to a lot of HDR you see. And, since the images are captured very fast (8 frames per second), shots of moving water like this one are possible.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 31mm equivalent field of view, f3.7 @ 1/640th @ ISO 160. Backlight (HDR) mode.
And for rainy Sunday thoughts…well, my mind is certainly in rainy Sunday mode already…thoughts are slow and pleasantly lagging and I am ready for a nap after an hour up. I am not sure exactly why rainy Sundays are so much more conducive to sleepy repose than rainy Thursdays (to pick a day at random), but they are. The day of rest is deeply engrained in us, perhaps? Maybe even at the cellular level? In our genes?
This scene, with its peaceful motion (in the water), its subtle light, and its restful balance fits the day. There is a quiet that is deeper than the flesh, when the soul lays in wait, on the threshold of revelation, and feels no need of motion beyond the gentle swirl of life around it. Rainy Sunday quiet.
5/3/2011: Matanzas Inlet (cloud portrait)
Matanzas Inlet is a beautiful place…popular with both fishermen and Least Terns…and easily accessible because it is part of Ft. Matanzas National Monument. But of course it is the clouds that dominate this image. Thundershowers waiting to happen. The low angle, thanks again to the flip out LCD on the camera, and the long stretch to the horizon add to the tension of the sky. The extra wide angle zoom also helps to capture the effect.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view, f8 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160. Program mode.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity and clarity.
And here is an alternative way of capturing the day. It needs to be viewed large. Three 23mm views, stitched in PhotoMerge in PhotoShop Elements 9, and processed for intensity and clarity in Lightroom.
3/20/2011: All in a day. Happy Sunday
Happy Sunday!
We woke to freezing rain yesterday, which, by full daylight turned to huge feathery wet flakes of snow. Not totally welcome as the last of the 3 plus feet of compacted snow from winter is just about gone from the backyard, and we are all (I think I speak for the general population here) getting a bit eager for spring in Southern Maine. It showed pretty heavily through noon, lightly covered any bare ground, and clung to bushes and trees and standing grasses.
This shot is out the window of the car at Parson’s Beach and gives a good sense of the density of the falling snow. In the dim light, I used Sports Mode, to force the ISO higher and the shutter speed faster, to catch the flakes, as much as possible, in mid-air.
And this shot was taken at about 3:15 that same afternoon, from just about exactly the same spot, looking the other way. The sky had cleared, the snow on the ground had melted away, and the sun had a touch of spring, even summery, warmth that made me, for one, hopeful.
And that is early spring in Maine…the most inconstant of seasons: Winter and seeming summer in a single day.
Both with the Canon SX20IS. 1) 160mm equivalent field of view, f4.5 @ 1/800th @ ISO 400. Sports Mode. 2) 28mm equivalent field of view, f4 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 80. Landscape Mode (biased for the sky by tipping the camera up and locking exposure…then processed for the foreground in Lightroom).
And being Sunday: certainly there must be a spiritual lesson in the rapid alteration of the season and the mood from morning to afternoon of a single day. Of course, the day itself is rare enough for record…in it we see the change that is spring happening in such an unmistakable way, in such an exaggerated way, that we can not miss it…so that the day becomes a parable for seasonality and, in a way, in this season, for the hope associated with the coming of spring. I know it makes me feel like throwing off care, like embracing a hopeful turn of mind, like renewing my trust. On a day like this I am reminded: Though dark may cloud the morning, I know who wins the day. And that is true in any season. It is just hard to miss on such a day.
2/5/2011: Great Hill from Parson’s Beach, Kennebunk
A break from the unrelenting diet of birds, birds, birds of the past two weeks, and a return to my current reality…snowy, snowy Maine. We now have, after another foot fell on Wednesday, and taking into account settling and melting (sublimation actually, since the snow is going directly from ice to vapor without ever being water) about 3 and a half feet of snow standing in our front yard. What you see here is a healthy stand of beach rose. The tallest of those plants tops five feet. This is a perspective shot taken at moderate telephoto. Great Hill with its houses is about an eighth of a mile behind the dune and snow buried rosehips in the foreground, on the far side of the Mousam River.
Canon SX20IS at about 70mm equivalent field of view, f4.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 80. Snow Mode.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity and clarity.
10/21/2010: Cadillac cloud event
Our most recent trip to Acadia was not Cadillac Summit weather. We had mostly rain and mist and fog, and then fog and mist and rain. It was beautiful, of course, and we enjoyed it as much as any trip so far. But it really looked like we would finally make an Acadia visit without a drive up the winding road to the summit of Cadillac.
The last day there, after hiking in the heavy fog around Jordan Pond, and a pop-over lunch at the Jordan Pond House where our daughter who works there got to wait on us (lucky her) and we got fully fed, we started for home and suddenly, just before the Cadillac turn-off, drove right out of the fog and into sun. Looking up we could see the summit, standing out clear against a blue sky. Who could resist?
As we drove up though, it became obvious that we were racing the front. The fog was literally boiling up the south flank of the mountain on a strong wind ahead of the mass of fog and cloud that closed the whole south east horizon like a wall, and already hid the mountains behind us. The first wisps were crossing the summit as I got out of the car. It was the strangest thing. A clot of cloud would tear of the front of the cloud mass, which itself was moving so fast you see it come, and race on ahead of the mass across the summit like a living thing…boiling and rolliing, twisting into a thousand shapes as the irregular mass of the summit and its complicated air-currents caught it and tossed it every which way as it passed. The wind was so strong I could barely stand to take a picture. I tried to catch several of the cloud things (cloud beings) as they passed, but this (above) is the best I could do.
I finally turned, just ahead of the on coming mass of cloud, for the car…grabbing this shot as I passed. In less than 30 seconds I was in cloud where I stood.
I am sure it is not all that uncommon an occurrence on Cadillac summit…but it was the first time I had experienced it. My only regret is that I totally forgot to shoot some video of it!
Canon SX20 IS. Post processing in Lightroom.
10/14/2010: jordan pond in fog
I have photographed Jordan Pond and the Bubbles in all weathers. It is the one hike (walk?) we never miss on any trip to Acadia National Park, partially because of its proximity to the Jordan Pond House, and a pop-over lunch (and where we generally have at least one daughter working), but mostly because it never fails to delight. This last trip we had a foggy early fall day to work with, and it was still beautiful.
Canon SX20IS all at 28mm equivalent, f4 @ ISO 80, Landscape program, and 1/200th, 1/400th, and 1/320th respectively.
Similar processing in Lightroom including heavy Recovery to restore transparency to the fog, Blackpoint right slightly, added Clarity and Vibrance, and Sharpen narrow edges preset. The last shot, with the lens of the camera tipped well down, required some distortion correction to bring the water horizon back somewhere near level.
10/7/2010: Great meadow / fall fire
In lean times I would definitely make four posts out of this series. The fact is that my trip to Machias and Bar Harbor, though the weather was not what you think of as photogenic, was very productive. I have a lot of images I want to share.
This is Great Meadow in Acadia National Park (more a marsh than a meadow) as the first of the fall colors are just beginning to show. Young maples and birches, in low wet ground, always take fire first.
Canon SX20IS at various zoom settings for framing. The last image is a three exposure HDR using Photomatix. All processed in Lightroom with Fill Light, Blackpoint, Clarity, Vibrance and Sharpen.
9/30/2010: Fog on the Cliffs of Quoddy Head
Fog is difficult to photograph, since the scattered light within the fog itself makes it photographically bright, though it has the opposite effect to the natural eye. A bank of fog almost always comes out as a white indistinct mass in an image. If you expose for the fog, to keep it natural, then the landscape under it goes dark and muddy. Seems like an ideal situation for HDR…kind of. I tried several shots on the cliffs of Quoddy Head to test the effect. As always with HDR, I’d have done better with a tripod…especially as the base exposures all had show shutter speeds due to the overall low level of the light. I did get a few shots that worked though, like the one above.
A secondary problem, if you go the HDR route, is Photomatix’s inability to blend exposures where fine detail masks an open sky…trees against the sky are particularly difficult for the app…and you almost always get a light halo around limbs and leaves where the lighter exposure shows through. Changing the smoothing setting can help in making this less obvious but in this image it still shows somewhat in the trees in the upper right.
The other way to work the fog is to use Revovery and Fill Light in Lightroom, along with some filter trickery. This shot is not HDR, but I was able to extend the range and keep the fog semi-transparent, by using heavy Recovery, which reduces the highlights in an image without effecting the rest of the tones. Fill Light for the foreground allows me to move the Blackpoint right to increase color depth and contrast. Finally, in this case, the fog in the upper left corner was totally blown out and distractingly white…so I went in with a Local Adjustment Brush, set large with maximum feather, and brushed in an adjustment area in that corner. I used to to reduce exposure and brightness selectively there, producing a more natural grey where it was white. If the area had not been so oddly shaped I would have just used a Graduated Filter Effect pulled down from that corner, but LAB worked better for this image.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent.
From Quoddy Head and Lubec ME.
9/27/2010: Quoddy Head Light
Quoddy Head Light, while not, perhaps, one of the more attractive Lighthouse in Maine, has the distinction of being the eastern-most Lighthouse in the United States, standing on the eastern-most point of land in the United States. It is so far east that my cell phone claimed it was in another time zone.
The other thing that distinguishes Quoddy Head is fog. Beside the light is the fog horn, and it goes part or all of most days. Certainly, while I had hopes according the National Weather Service, it never stopped sounding during my visit, and the fog never lifted more than a few feet off the ground. Maybe the NWS is not in charge of the weather in that time zone?
Still, you can’t visit Quoddy Head without photographing the Light, fog or no fog…so…
Though I tried this shot as an HDR, hoping for better light on the Lighthouse, I like this single shot version better, as I was able to maintain, and even emphasize, detail in the foreground grass…maybe I would have done better with the HDR with a tripod.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent, f2.8 @ 1/640th @ ISO 125. Programmed auto.
In Lightroom, recovery for the fog, Blackpoint right, added Clarity and Vibrance, and Sharpen narrow edges preset. Then I pulled a Graduated Filter effect up from the bottom to increase brightness, contrast, and clarity on the lawn (to bring up the fine details) and one down from the top to darken just a bit, increase contrast considerably, and add a bit of saturation. Finally, I used the vertical distortion control to straighten the house and Light.
And here it is from the other side:
