Posts in Category: light
Form and Light (otherwise Flower)
Sometimes it really is about form and light and how they interact more than about the subject itself. Abstract is too angular a word, too, well, abstract, to describe the pure play of light we occasionally see and catch in nature, but I can not, off hand, come up with a better.
What I like here are the big bold colors obviously, orange on green with spikes of red…but it is more about the range of the orange, the shadings and shadowings, the texture of the orange surface, the burning translucency, contrasted with the solid points of the furled petals. And running through it, the single filament of spider web, catching the sun. (If you look closely you can see the author of that thread on the third spike from the left 🙂
This is, I believe, some sort of giant exotic iris from the demonstration gardens at the Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle Washington. It is part of at least 3 blooms, stacked by the telephoto perspective.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view, taken from about 15 feet. f6.5 @ 1/640th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Spider in the sun, weaving rainbows. Happy Sunday!
My workshop yesterday was at the Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle, which is adjacent to the Union Bay Natural Area. The whole area used to be a city dump…but the city and the University of Washington Botanical Gardens reclaimed the land and turned it into wonderful little chunk of nature along the shores of Lake Washington. It is a great spot for bird watching, walking your dog, jogging, etc. Between the Horticulture Center and the lake is Yesler Swamp, which is also being developed. There are temporary trails leading down on the east and west to the lagoon off Lake Washington and plans to build a boardwalk over the wetter swamp and the lagoon to complete the loop.
This spider, which I have not had time to id, was one of several who had constructed very large webs along the east trail. The angle of the morning sun was just right so that the web diffracted the light and created a “rainbow” effect (minus the rain…I suppose it is more accurate to say the web diffracted the light into is spectrum 🙂 Whatever…the effect was quite striking.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f6.5 @ 1/160th @ ISO800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought. Almost everyone knows that what we call white light is really made up all the colors in the spectrum…reds and blues and greens and violets. We see it most often in a rainbow; occasionally cast on a wall by prism hanging in a window; more rarely, early in the morning or late in the afternoon when the sun is low, across the face of street sign painted with luminous reflective paint full of glass beads; and very rarely indeed in something natural like this spider web hanging in the sun. Still, often enough so when we stop to think about it, we know white light is, miraculously, all the colors combined.
But we don’t often stop to think about it. We take white light for granted. We forget that red things are red because they reflect the red light within the white…and green things are green because they reflect the green. As a photographer, ie, one who plays with light all the time, I am a bit more aware, but not so much that I can’t be taken by surprise by a spider web in the sun.
I have said before that love is the light of eternity…of, if you will, the realm of the spirit. Many who encounter God come away with impression of the pure white light…again, remembering that that light is love. And yet, since what we experience in the physical realm of time and space is a physical manifestation of the eternal, the love/light of the spirit has to be made up of all the colors of the rainbow, or we would not see all the colors of eternity. There must be a red love/light and a green love/light within the white love/light of God’s presence. Each of us, each of our lives, must reflect back our particular color. Certainly that would explain a lot about the variety of love we see in human beings.
Rarely, there might be a life, or even a second of a life, that is so lived as to show all the colors of God’s love. It might be some instant as fragile as a spider web in the morning sun beside a trail in a swamp in Seattle…but it would be a moment to treasure, a life to treasure and to celebrate. Or that’s what I think.
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.
Fall Grass in the Wind and the Sun
On my way back from Old Falls on Sunday, I swung by the Kennebunk Plains to see what was happening there. The Blazing Star, of course, is all gone to seed, and the tall prairie grasses have ripened and turned that color…something between brass and gold. There was a stiff wind blowing, so the grasses were in constant motion, but I really liked the way the low afternoon sun was caught in the grain heads. I tried several zoom settings, shooting bursts into the most dense stands. Of course the wind was in charge of the final composition. I like the effect of this with the glow of soft grain framed by sharper seed heads.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 840mm equivalent field of view. f5.8 @ 1/400th @ ISO 125. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
What the light did to the wet Petunia
This is another shot from the back deck on that Sunday morning when the sun was reflecting off the glass of the sliding doors to provide natural fill light for the flowers we keep there, balancing the strong sun coming from behind. The water drops, left over from rain the night before, only add interest to the unique light. I especially like what the light from the back is doing with the center of the flower.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm macro with 1.5x digital tel-converter function for image scale and working distance. f4 @ 1/125th @ ISO 100.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. I also cropped this shot from the right to get the flower out of the center, and used the Selective Adjustment Brush in Lightroom to carefully paint the backgound in darker.
Branch Brook, Kennebunk ME
I continue my search along the streams of York County Maine, for the American Redspot…an so far elusive broadwinged damselfly that might or might not be found in York County. I want to see one. I have not. Yet.
The search, however, has taken me some interesting places. I feel compelled, when the road crosses any stream or river, to, if at all possible, park the car and climb down to the water. I am often surprised by what I find.
This is Branch Brook, which forms part of the water supply for the Village of Kennebunk, a mile or two upstream from the Water Works. It runs in a fairly deep and steep cut through most of the last part of its course, but where Wells Branch Road crosses it, you can, if you are careful, climb down to the mossy banks and the peat brown water.
This is one of those scenes that is very difficult to capture. The range of light is well beyond the ability of even the best digital sensors. Even traditional HDR techniques, in this kind of scene, too often result in a flat imitation…something very different than what the eye sees.
I started by dialing down the exposure compensation by one and one third stops (which, visually, brought the highlights in the water just in range), and letting the exposure system do its worst for the rest of the scene.
Then, in Lightroom, I brought up the shadows, toned down the highlights, shifted the backpoint to add depth, and finally added clarity and vibrance to give some life to the moss. Finally I used the Auto Color Temperature tool to remove a bit of the shadow blue. The result is about as close as I hope to come to the impression the scene would make if you were standing there.
I did try an sudo HDR treatment using Dynamic Photo HDR…and the result was interesting…with brighter greens and more open shadows…but it produced a different impression than I remembered.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –4/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view. f3.2 @ 1/30th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom as above.
Another Back Porch Geranium
On Monday I posted an image of this Geranium plant with rain drops from our back deck (here)…in a unique light that was a serendipitous mix of direct sun and bright reflected light from the sliding glass doors of our kitchen. Studio perfect lighting, but due to no effort of mine. I also posted the pic and text to Google+ as my Pic 4 Today over there. For whatever reason, it went, shall we say, relatively viral. It gathered, in 24 hours, 905 +s, 120 shares, and 230 comments. It was viewed (on Google+ that means it was clicked on and opened in the viewer) by over 183,000 people! For the rock stars of Google+ that might only be bacterial, but for me, when compared to my average 30 +s, 2 shares, and 5 comments, it is definitely viral 🙂
This is another blossom. And again, what makes the image special is that blend of direct sun and reflected light, and what it does for the drops and the texture of the petals. This is a complex blossom, with a second blossom attempting to grow out of the center of the first.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm macro, with 1.5x digital tel-converter for image scale and working distance. f4 @ 1/400th @ ISO 100. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Late Day Light on Lelystad, The Netherlands
I have been back from Holland a week now, but before the experience passes completely into memory, I will share at least one more shot of the Yacht Basin at Lelystad, across a narrow brick street from my hotel. Back from a stormy day at the Dutch Birdfair, with the weather finally beginning to break, I could not resist the the low angle of the sun picking out the foreground detail and the deep layers of massed clouds over the Markermeer.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view. f5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
12/24/2011: Kennebunk Plains, Christmas Snow?
The great Christmas Snow Storm of 2011 has come and gone. Of course, it fell mostly as rain. If it had been a few degrees colder, we would have had a good foot and a half of snow cover today…but, alas, it was not to be. I went out in the late afternoon when the setting sun was trying to get out from under the cloud cover in the west to see if there was more snow inland, but evidently it turned to rain at least an hour before the storm passed there too. There were only remnants. Still, the light in the sky on the retreating cloud mass was worth the trip.
This first shot is the view north and east. Turning right around and facing south west, we have the horizon view.
And finally a zoomed in shot of the same horizon.
Canon SX40HS in Program with iContrast. -1/3EV exposure compensation. 1) 24mm equivalent field of view, f4 @ 1/200th @ ISO 160. 2) 50mm equivalent, f4 @ 1/200th @ ISO 200. 3) 173mm equivalent, f4.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 250.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness. All received some color temperature adjustment as well as dueling Graduated Filter Effects to lighten the foreground and darken the sky.
12/4/2011: Happy Sunday! Sun Fire | Burning Bush
Hiking the Marsh Trail at Bosque del Apache, I looked up at the top of the loose conglomerate bluff at just the right spot and just the right moment to see this. It was late afternoon and the sun was getting low enough so the bluff cast a shadow across most of the trail, though the marsh itself was still in sun, and the light spilling over the bluff caught in the fine seed filaments of this plant (I am not sure what it was but I suspect, from the fine fibers, that it was Cliff Rose) and lit them up like the glowing wires of incandescent bulbs. I am sure it was a purely a diffraction effect…the seed fibers were fine enough to bend and focus light…they were not, of course, heated to incandescence themselves…but it certainly looked like I imagine Moses’s burning bush might have. I wonder what wonders I missed by not stopping to listen?
But then that question, apt as it is in logic of writing down my impressions, is not true to the experience. I actually experienced a wonder that goes well beyond questions of what I might have missed. I was, in fact, caught up in the act of wonder, and, simultaneously, busy trying to figure out how to record it so that I might, eventually, share it.
For me, that is what it means to be a photographer…and those are the moments I treasure…when I am caught up in wonder and fully engaged in making an image of it. I tend to favor cameras that do most of the work in those critical moments…auto exposure…auto focus…set-and-forget cameras that allow me to concentrate on framing what I am seeing effectively. I can think about that, about the framing and the composition, without losing the wonder. If I have to actually think about f-stops and shutter speeds and ISO values then I am in danger of getting separated from the wonder. And what fun would that be?
No, I need to be able to point and shoot…simple as that…so that when I see a burning bush I can share it with you without losing it myself.
And besides, what God is saying in most burning bushes is pretty simple. “I am here. I am with you. Trust and enjoy.” (We humans generally translate that into “Do not be afraid”, or sometimes “Trust and obey” but, believe me, it is “trust and enjoy” in the original language…the one you can only hear with the ears of the spirit.)
No, the burning bush on the top of the bluff spoke pretty clearly to me…and I hope I caught just a bit of the message for you.
Canon SX40HS (ultimate point and shoot) at 180mm equivalent field of view, f6.3 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 200. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.