Posts in Category: painterly

Abstract of sun, shadow, tree bark…

Shadows on a tree trunk. Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, Wells Maine

The green filtered light of shadows on a tree trunk at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters paints an abstract design. It is all about texture and light. Sometimes it is enough to just put a frame around it. 🙂

Sony RX10iii at 192mm equivalent field of view. In-camera HDR. Nominal exposure: ISO 1000 @ 1/200th @ f4. Processed in Lightroom.

A picture about nothing. Happy Sunday!

White Birch, Laudholm Farms, Wells Maine

White Birch, Laudholm Farms, Wells Maine

“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus

On my photoprowl out to the snowy fields and forest a few afternoons ago, I was on the boardwalk at the Wells National Estuarine Research Center at Laudholm Farms in Wells, looking for whatever spoke to me of winter. It was early afternoon and the light was already almost horizontal, but where, in the days before the snow, it seemed to pick out the warmth and texture of the world…now it cast blue shadows and drew the detail sharp. The contrast between the texture of the bark on this birch, standing a foot from the boardwalk, and the fine grained texture of the snow behind it caught my eye. There was something in the shadows, the way they lay across the snow and behind the birch, that added interest, and the little shattered stump, so pointy, fell in place as an accent. It was the matter of seconds to lift the camera, already set for great depth of field, frame, placing the diagonal just so, and shoot. In-camera HDR and processing in Lightroom brought up the shadows on the trunk and in the snow to make them look natural, subtly molding the surfaces the textures where they fell.

And still it is a picture of nothing in particular. It is a composition about composition…an image about imagery. I could look at it forever. I am tempted to make a really large print of it and hang it where my eye could discover it again, sometimes, in passing, and pause to see what is new in it. It would make a great picture for the wall of a doctor’s office. 🙂

It is, so to speak, a playground for the generous eye…inviting vision…inviting the light inside to come out and play. I think it brings the spirit to the surface, so it fills the eye, brimming like water in a spring. I think it wakes the wonder that is the life of our souls and tempts us to touch what is eternal in us and in the world. Ah, but it is just a picture, you say…a picture of nothing in particular. Yes, I say, and that is what is so wonderful about it! But it takes a generous eye to see. Happy Sunday!

Sunset through Beach Rose. Happy Sunday!

Sunset through beach rose, Kennebunk ME

“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus

The Beach Rose, in December, going on for Christmas, looks brittle and broken…a tangled mass of hairy, thorny stems without much redeeming beauty…but put it in front of the setting sun, and suddenly it is alive again, and full of light. It is all a matter of perspective…of attitude. I find it interesting that these two words, which name the physical relationships between objects, have come to also mean our mental, or even spiritual relationship to the world around us. Perspective names the effect of distance on the apparent relative size of objects between us and the visual horizon…and attitude, in its physical sense, names the angle of incline of objects relative to a plane (a ship on the sea has an attitude measured in degrees, relative to the sea). In the mental/spiritual sense, when we say we have perspective on something…we mean we are viewing it in right relationship to the really important things in our life. If someone says you need an attitude adjustment, they mean that that you need to change your “slant” toward the world. Instead of measuring it in degrees, we say there are bad attitudes and good attitudes…cheerful attitudes and sour attitudes. It is a matter of how you are holding yourself in relation to the world.

The generous eye, the eye that both open to let in the beauty and wonder of the world around us, and open wide enough to let the light within illuminate the beauty and wonder without…which is really saying the same thing twice…determines both our perspective and our attitude.

You can choose how you see the tangled mass of Beach Rose stems. At least at sunset, when the light is shinning in your eyes.

Happy Sunday! And a blessed season, as we approach the celebration of the rising, the birth, of Jesus, son of God and son of man…who taught us to look with generous eyes, and whose light fills our whole beings.

Day Lily Illustration Effect. Happy Sunday!

Day Lily, Kennebunk Light and Power, Factory Pasture Road, Kennebunk ME

Yesterday my wife asked me to take the electric payment to the office (we have a municipal power company that serves the town) on my way to the store. I was reluctant to do it, but she shamed me into it :). While I was dropping it off, I saw the mixed stand of Day Lilies at the corner of the parking lot. The Day Lilies all over town this year are spectacular. There must have been a town “beautification” project sponsored by someone that featured Day Lilies at a bargain, and these yellow lilies in particular…because there are plantings of them along the brick sidewalks, in the median of streets, around banks and other businesses…everywhere! I have been meaning to stop and photograph some of the more impressive spreads, and here was one right at hand in the electric company parking lot. And, of course, I had my Sony HX90V with me. Life is good.

This is not quite a photograph…or maybe rather, it is slightly more than a photograph. The HX90V has a range of Picture Effects built in. I have never been one for such “features”…I like my photography straight-up mostly…but I have been experimenting with a few of the HX90V’s effects. This is the Illustration effect…it attempts to turn the photo into a drawing…simplifying colors, emphasizing edges, etc so that the image looks like something drawn, perhaps with markers and bright inks, rather than a photograph. This is all done in-camera, before the image is saved to the card, so that when you first open it, it already looks like this. It can be very interesting with the right subject. As I say, not a photograph exactly, but an interesting image.

It worked particularly well here. The simplification of the yellow petals is striking, and the background has an artfully rendered look. I like it a lot. I think it is actually beautiful.

And there is a lot to work with in the image and the situation for The Generous Eye and the Sunday Thought. If I had remained stubbornly stingy when my wife asked me to run the errand, well…I never would have seen this Lily. The Generous Eye begins with a generosity of spirit that leaves you open to the needs of others…and to any and every adventure. Then there is the generosity of the town and their lily planting program that inspired me to look at lilies more closely this year. I equate The Generous Eye, at least in part, with “having vision”…in the sense of being able to visualize a better tomorrow and do something about it. Someone, or some group, in the town had to have “seen” with a generous eye what the town would look like this summer patterned with yellow lilies. And then there is the generosity of the Sony engineering team, who worked to include this effect in the camera’s software. I always wondered why they bothered. I am sure not many people use the Picture Effects at all…most who buy the camera will never discover that they are there…and yet a lot of time and energy must have gone into creating them, and refining them to work as well as they do. That was generous of Sony in both senses I have already highlighted. Finally there is an element of “willingness to try new things” in the Generous Eye. As I already suggested, an adventurous spirit is necessary for a generous eye. If I had stuck to my prejudices (stingy prejudices) then I would not have tried the Illustration effect…and missed this image.

Finally, I have to believe in The Generous Eye of the creator of all, who embodies generosity in all its forms and who loved every circumstance that lead to this image into existence. I am not who I am because I see God…I am who I am because God sees me…and God’s eye is always and all ways generous. Happy Sunday!

Wood Lily Glory. Happy Sunday!

Wood Lily, Day Brook Pond, Kennebunk Plains Wildlife Management Area, ME

The area near Day Brook Pond on the Kennebunk Plains Wildlife Management Area has not been burned for several years now so the Wood Lilies are much taller, and more of them produce a full head of 3 flowers. This plant was growing right at the edge of the forest at the west end of the pond, in partial shade much of the day. While I did find several heads of three flowers in bloom out in the full sun of the plain, these were blooming out of sequence. I suspect that today all three are open. Still, as a study of shape and texture and how the light molds the world we see, these lilies are just right. I reached out with the zoom on the camera to frame them from a distance, and isolate them against the out of focus foliage of the trees behind, which only emphasizes the basic forms more, and allows them to balance within the frame.

This is an “artistic shot”…carefully conceived, composed, and photographed for itself, as an image, rather than just as a capture of a slice of reality to share. It draws attention to itself, as an artifact, while most of my photos act simply as a window frame, through which I show you a bit of the world I see. In that sense it is more creative than most…which are more simply records of creation. There is more of me in it…my vision…my little portion of the one creative spirit. Mostly I show you bits of the world that might make you clap…in this shot you can hear me clapping. 🙂 It is a celebration of creating as much as creation.

Or that is what I am thinking as I look at it this morning, and, to be honest, what struck me first when I saw it on my monitor yesterday. I said to my wife when I showed her the photo soon after processing it, “Now that is a beautiful photograph…not just a beautiful flower.” And I guess it is okay, once in a while, to call attention to what is creative in me…since I am under no illusions as to where that creativity comes from, or who it belongs to. There is only one creator…if I am privileged to occasionally be the instrument of creation, that can make me thankful…but never proud.

And my prayer for you today is that the good and loving God will make you, in some way large or small, the instrument of creation. Happy Sunday!

Aldrich House Cat

Cat at the Aldrich House, Strawberry Banke, Portsmouth NH

My wife, Carol, and I celebrated our 32nd wedding anniversary yesterday with, among other things, a visit to Strawberry Banke Museum in Portsmouth NH. Strawberry Bank is a living history museum founded in 1958 to preserve the original settlement/neighborhood that became the city of Portsmouth. It contains several colonial homes, now renovated and furnished to look as they did in the settlement period, a Revolutionary War Tavern, a fully stocked World War 2 corner store, and examples of homes from eras right up through the 50s. Costumed Roleplayers are stationed in some of the homes, and uniformed interpreters in others…and there are daily demonstrations of household tasks and crafts. The grounds are lovely, mostly because of the preserved and restored lawn gardens…both ornamental and practical.

One of the homes there was actually already a museum when Strawberry Banke was founded. The Aldrich Home was the home of Thomas Baily Aldrich for a few years in his late teens, when he was sent to live with his grandfather. Thomas Baily Aldrich was a respected poet, novelist, and travel writer of the late 1800s, and editor of the Atlantic Monthly for 9 years. A contemporary and friend of Mark Twain and other respected writers of the time, after his death his wife (who Twain considered an “empty headed clothes horse”), bought his grandfather’s house and had it renovated to look like she envisioned it from Aldrich’s most famous book, The Story of a Bad Boy, which was set in and round that house. She got it mostly wrong…but she tried. The book itself, while not well known today, is often cited as a precursor to and an influence on Twain’s Huck Fin. To bring this long story to a close, among Mrs. Aldrich’s efforts is a formal memorial garden for her husband on the grounds…and this cat is a current resident of the garden. I could not resist trying the HDR Painting Picture Effect on the Sony HX90V on the cat, the lilies, and the fence. It is somehow very suitable for the house, the people, and the time. 🙂

Camera as above. Processed in Lightroom.

Snowstract

Snow detail. Kennebunk Bridle Path, Kennebunk ME

This is another deep HDR experiment from my trip out to look for owls the other day. I love the texture of the snow, the way the shadows play across the frame, and the contrasting hard shapes of the cluster of leaves and brush stubble. It is a snowstract…an almost abstract made of snow. 🙂

Sony HX400V at 56mm equivalent field of view. In camera HDR. Nominal exposure: 1/600th @ ISO 80 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.

October Light in the Forest

Laudholm Farm, Wells ME

Yesterday was one of those clear-blue-sky October days in Southern Maine, just past peak foliage color, when the forest is full of drifting leaves and everything is hopping and popping. Birds and beasts are busy with the final collections for winter. The slant of the sun, and the trees dropping leaves already, bare limbs showing at the tips…there is a feeling of rush…not panic yet…but an unusual concentration, a compression of life that promises to get the most from this day. And, of course, it is all so beautiful!

This is a boardwalk at the Wells National Estuarine Research Center at Laudholm Farm in Wells Maine, just down the road from us. I think it catches the feeling pretty well.

Sony HX400V. In-camera HDR at 24mm equivalent field of view. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.

A river runs through Maine too…

Mousam River at Roger’s Pond

Several, of course, but if you get the movie reference, this is one of the more popular fly fishing rivers and fly fishing spots in Southern Maine. It is the Mousam River at Roger’s Pond. There are fly fishermen here while the river is a narrow channel running through sheet ice, and they will be here until the snow blocks access to the stream. This shot combines the best of what the river and autumn in Maine have to offer.

It was not an easy shot. The sun on the water behind the fisherman made a conventional exposure impossible, and the motion of the fishermen made HDR problematic. I tried several shots to get this one in-camera HDR treatment. Even then it took more than my standard Lightroom processing.  55mm equivalent flied of view. Sony HX400V. Pretty much a classic: right off the cover of the Orvis catalog. 🙂

 

October Drama

Yesterday was a dreary day, just on the edge of rain when it was not raining, and today we are promised thundershowers until mid-afternoon…but this is typical Maine fall weather…and not without its drama. Wonderful skies for a few moments here and there as the front passed over us. I kept my weather eye on all morning, and took the camera out when it seemed there might be something special in the offing. It is wonderful not having to watch the clock and work my photography around real work. Photography and writing are my real work now 🙂

This is the view back to Route 9 from the Kennebunk Bridle Path…which, again, I have photographed in all seasons and all weathers. I love the weathered posts, and the tree line, and, often, the sky. This is a more static composition than I favor…with the horizon too close to the middle…but I find that I can not sacrifice anything at the top or bottom. The shadow of the post needs room at the bottom, and that patch of blue sky at the top is essential. I will have to trust to the detailed cloud-scape to provide dramatic tension. I think it works.

Sony HX400V at 24mm equivalent field of view. In camera HDR. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.