Posts in Category: yard
Wet Fall Morning
Before dawn on Friday, we had enough rain to give everything a good wetting…and to bring a lot of leaves down. When I opened the back door to the deck my first thought was, “Ah, this is fall!” It felt like fall, smelled like fall, looked like fall. But of course, it was only a wet fall morning…late fall at that…but there is a lot of atmosphere to a wet morning in late fall…a lot of memories to key…a touch, at may age, of definite nostalgia. I went back inside for a glass of cider 🙂
But then I got the camera and wet back out to see what I might find to capture the mood. This is an odd image for me. I realize that I rarely take pics, or a least share, pics of man-made objects…and cars least of all. I am not a car guy. As long as it runs reliably and is not actually embarrassingly dirty, I am fine with it. Just a car. But I could not resist the deposit of wet leaves on the windshield. That is just so fall! So wet morning fall.
Samsung Smart Camera WB800F in Rich Tone mode. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
And here, for you traditionalists, is a more typical wet fall morning shot. Same camera and settings.
Sure as God made big green tomatoes!
Yeah, I know that is not the quotation, but this image certainly brings it to mind…or maybe that is just the way my mind is working this morning. 🙂 It is Saturday the 14th and I am proclaiming it a “lucky” day (though I am not a believer in luck of any kind…let’s say a “blessed” day). Saturday the 14th is, from this day forward, such a good day as to make people look forward to it with as much good energy as they (if the do) invest bad energy in Friday the 13th. It will be such a good day today that late green tomatoes will ripen on the vine! Sure as God made big green tomatoes.
Samsung Smart Camera WB250F in macro mode. Processed in Snapseed on the new Google Nexus 7 and Auto Enhanced by Google+ Photos. Taken in our yard between thunderstorms.
Lily in the rain
Raindrops on petals…as the Sound of Music has it…are certainly one of my favorite things…and the fact that they made it into song lyrics, and the lyrics of that particular song, is a pretty strong indicator that the feeling is at least arguably universal. 🙂
This is a Day Lily from our yard one rainy morning. Samsung Smart Camera WB250F. Macro mode. Processed in PicSay Pro on the Galaxy S4 smartphone.
Wet Rose Visitor
I went out early on Saturday, just to the yard, to see what a day and night of steady, and sometimes hard, rain had done to the flowers, and to poke around generally looking for photo-ops in the lovely early light. The rain drops clinging to the rose petals, of course, just had to be done. It was not until processing the image that I saw the Visitor. It seems like, this year, you can hardly take a flower shot without catching an insect of some kind. Good year for the bugs! I believe this is a tiny Hoverfly of one kind or another.
Samsung Smart Camera WB250F. Program with -1/3 EV exposure compensation. Telephoto Macro at 432mm equivalent field of view from about 5 feet. f5.8 @ 1/180th @ ISO 100. Processed in PicSay Pro on the Samsung Galaxy S4. Cropped slightly for scale.
Social Camera
Owning the Samsung Galaxy S4 has opened a slightly new photographic world for me. It is not that the camera will do anything in particular that my Canon SX50HS will not…but I find myself pulling it out a lot for the quick HDR (when I do not want to set up a tripod for the Canon…no tripod necessary on the phone), or certainly an occasional panorama, and certainly if I think there is any chance I will want to share the image before I get back where I can work with it on my laptop. PicSay Pro on Android is a very capable image editor…I like both the way it works and the results it produces…and it works with full resolution files. Then too, Google+’s Auto Backup is a formidable attraction. I don’t have to do a thing, and my images from the S4 are uploaded to my Google+ account. Once there, Auto Awesome does some interesting things. For instance, if I take a conventional sequence of exposures to use with an HDR program later, Auto Awesome recognizes them as such, and makes the HDR…again, without my intervention. And it does a pretty good job! Then too, I can I can instantly share my PicSay Pro edited image on Facebook, email them to friends and family, etc. etc. The Galaxy S4 is a social camera…and its instant and painless connection to the social side of my life is one of its main attractions.
So that lead me to take a look at “real” cameras…you know, with a real zoom lens, and other creative options…that might provide some of the same experience. The obvious choice would have been the Samsung Galaxy Camera, which is every thing my phone is (except a phone) and a pretty much a real camera at the same time. However it is 1) relatively expensive for a Point and Shoot, and 2) I suspect, due for an refresh (as in Galaxy Camera 2) before the end of the year. So I looked for cameras that would connect to my phone and transfer images painlessly so that I could do the editing and sharing almost instantly on the phone. I knew from past experience with Eyfi cards, that I wanted a solution that let me choose which images got transferred to the phone. The Eyfi cards and their like just dump everything you take onto your connected device. You can fill the memory on a phone or tablet really fast during a full day in the field with your camera. That narrowed it down to a few wifi equipped Panasonics and, of course, the Samsung Smart Camera line. The Samsungs were less expensive and had as good reviews, I am already familiar with how the camera apps in them work, and they got the best ratings on the ease of using them via wifi with a phone or for direct upload to cloud storage, Facebook, etc.
So this is among my first shots from the Samsung WB250, 14mp biCMOS sensor. 18x zoom starting at 24mm equivalent (the wide angle is a requirement for me). All kinds of shooting modes, including in-camera HDR that does not require a tripod, auto bracketing for real HDR (ditto on the tripod), a great Macro mode, waterfall mode, night scene, shot, smart-zoom (automatically reduces the pixel count to maintain quality over the 18x mark), etc. etc  I have only begun to explore. This image was taken in my yard, transferred wirelessly to my phone, edited in PicSay Pro, auto-backuped to Google+ Photos, and now shared here directly from Google+. It all works really quite well. It will not replace my Canon SX50HS for most of my work…but it is a great Social Camera, and goes well beyond what the camera in my S4 can do.
There is probably a Galaxy Camera in my future, when they get around to a refresh, but the WB250 seems to do exactly what I need for now!
The Universe in a Spider Web: Happy Sunday!
I don’t know why, but this simple image of water drops on a spider web covering grasses and leaves from my photoprowl around the yard yesterday morning seems to contain the whole universe…from the tiny detail among the grasses, to the vast expanse of the starry sky. I could look at it for a long time. Click on the image to open it in the lightbox where you can view it as large as your monitor allows.
Samsung Galaxy S4 in Rich Tone / HDR mode. Processed on the phone with PicSay Pro.
And for the Sunday Thought: The universe in every atom of the universe, eternity in every second of time, is a thought as old as thinking itself. It has occurred to poets, certainly…to philosophers…to scientists…to anyone who has closely observed life and being. It is, according to the universal testimony of people from all religions, an essential element of the “mystical experience”…of transcendence…of any intimate contact with the spirit of all that is…any contact with a God worthy of the name. There are only two responses available to us in such contacts: fear and awe. And fear is just awe without hope…without the feeling of overwhelming love which makes such an experience of the all in all both bearable and glorious. Fear drives us down. Awe lifts us up. Fear causes flight or fight response…and a tightened hold on our lives and our selves. Awe causes us to let go of ourselves, and fly willingly to an embrace in infinite love. Fear holds tight to what is. Awe lets go to the beauty and rightness of what will be.
Just occasionally that experience gets caught in an image, as, for me, it does here…in the water droplets covering the spider web over wet grass and leaves, in my yard, on an ordinary morning after a night of rain.
Rose, with Transient
With our very strange weather here in Maine this spring/summer, only one of our roses is blooming, and so far it has produced only one flower. But what a flower! It even survived the last three days of heavy rain. Not only beautiful, but strong. I think, on closer look, the transient of the title (on the left) might be a mosquito…any port in a storm…I will grant even a mosquito that. Especially after three days of heavy rain.
This is an Rich Tone / HDR shot from my Samsung Galaxy S4’s excellent camera, as I was walking around the yard seeing what the storms had left standing. It was processed on the phone with PicSay Pro.
Rhododendron Abstract: The Yard
The Rhododendrons in our yard, and on the boarder between our yard and the yard next door, are in full bloom these past few days. The weather was variable yesterday so I got two series of images of the flowers…one in the subdued light of the overcast morning, and one in direct sun, a little after noon. This is from the sunny shoot, and is close enough to turn the image, almost, into an abstract. I like the way the light is just catching on the two anthers and the tip of the stigma, which stand out against the bokeh of the petals in the background.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. -1/3EV exposure compensation. In order to create this effect, I backed away and shot at 1800mm equivalent field of view, from about 5 feet. f6.5 @ 1/160th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Wildflowers in the Yard: Spring at Last!
I still have lots of birds to share from my trip to The Biggest Week in American Birding, but I feel compelled to celebrate the late but inevitable arrival of spring in Southern Maine. My wife has been working in the yard, planting and transplanting flowers, but I was mostly interested in the volunteers…the wildflowers of my mossy yard. Spring Beauty is always there, but the clumps this year seem bigger. And I caught a bonus Hoverfly at work in this clump.
The Dog-tooth Violets are blooming in every woodlot, and are even more lush in our sunny yard.
Then you have the Wild Strawberry, another widely abundant plant in Southern Maine, that has made a home in the margin of our lawn.
And finally Cinquefoil, which might be new this year, creeping in from the woods across the road. Both this, and the Strawberry image are littered with fallen petals from our Ornamental Plum.
So, pretty tame by true wild-land standards, but not bad for a yard at the edge of town. And, just so you don’t feel deprived of wild, I will finish with a true wildflower, a Painted Trillium from a lunch-time walk around the trail loop at Rachel Carson NWR Headquarters yesterday noon.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. A mix of tel-macros at 1200mm and wide-macros at 24mm plus 1.5x digital tel-converter. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Downy vs. Hairy :)
The number of birds using our back deck thicket feeding station has increased dramatically over the past week. Both Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers are frequent visitors. When seen together, or in rapid sequence, at least here in New England, there is no mistaking one for the other. The size difference is dramatic. However, when seeing either without the other present or recently seen, it is always a bit tricky. Even the bill size “field mark” can be very hard to distinguish when only one bird is there to look at.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. 1200mm equivalent field of view. 1) f6.5 @ 1/640th @ ISO 800. Â 2) f6.5 @ 1/400th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intlensity, clarity, and sharpness, with a bit extra because taken through glass.