Posts in Category: color
Harvest!
Farmer’s Market Stand, Common Ground Fair, Unity ME
The Common Ground Fair draws organic farmers and gardeners from all over New England. There are two Farmer’s Markets: one near the Pine Gate and one near the Rose Gate. I have always been attracted to the displays of color and texture in fresh fruits and vegetables put out for sale in open markets like this. Such a lot of goodness!
Sony HX90V in Superior Auto. Processed in Lightroom.
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!
Northern Blazing Star on Goldenrod
Northern Blazing Star in the foreground, Goldenrod in the back. Kennebunk Plains Wildlife Management Area, Maine
As though the Northern Blazing Star were not purple enough already, I found spots on the Kennebunk Plains Wildlife Management Area where it was growing in association with Goldenrod. I made several attempts to capture the effect. 🙂 The Blazing Star is, as predicted, doing well this year.
Sony HX90V in-camera HDR at about 300mm equivalent field of view. 1/500th @ ISO 80 @ f6.3. Processed and cropped slightly for composition in Lightroom.
Masses of Wood Lilies
Wood Lilies, Kennebunk Plains Wildlife Management Area, Maine
It was three years ago that I first found Wood Lilies growing on the Kennebunk Plains. I am certain they have been growing there for as long as there have sand-plains there…but I had not seen them. This year, though, is special. There are Wood Lilies everywhere on the plains…well, not everywhere, they tend to cluster in open clusters of 5 to 25 plants…but lilies in much higher numbers than I have seen before, by a factor of 10 at least. More clusters, and more flowers in each cluster. Not only that, but a much higher percentage of the plants are making double, and even triple blooms. In the past the vast majority of the plants hand only a single bloom, with a few doubles. This year at least half have multiple heads and at least a quarter of those are triples. I have even see a plant with 4 blooms, but they were not open simultaneously…or at least were not on the day I saw them. This shot is three plants, all triples, for 9 flowers in a single group. One Wood Lily is beautiful. Nine together is breathtaking. 🙂
Sony HX90V at 92mm equivalent field of view. 1/400th @ ISO 80 @ f5. Processed in Lightroom.
Grass Pink Orchid
Grass Pink Orchid, Wells National Estuarine Research Center at Laudholm Farms. ME
The little remnant bog at Laudholm Farm, smaller than a baseball diamond, seems to be particularly healthy as bogs go, and produces several interesting species of bog wildflowers. This is Grass Pink, one of Maine’s few native orchids. The name is peculiar. The single leaf may be grass-like but the flower, at least as it grows in Maine, is certainly not pink. It is obviously purple, which is only made more certain when it grows, in our bogs, next to another Maine orchid, the Rose Pogonia, which is, in fact, very pink (See my post on Rose Pogonia here). According to my little bit of research, the presence of Grass Pink is a good indicator that the bog’s surface and the ground water are healthy and pure. It is very sensitive to contamination. It is one of the few orchids to be “right side up”…having its fringed lip at the top when the flower is mature. All orchids start out with the lip at the top, but the stem holding the flower twists as the flower matures so that the lip is presented at the bottom. Very strange.
Grass Pink is also one the few orchids that can be grown from seed…and you can buy plants for wet sunny corners of your yard…or for inside cultivation. I far prefer to find them growing in the healthy little bog at Laudholm Farm. 🙂
Sony HX90V at 44mm equivalent. 1/320th @ ISO 80 @ f4.5. Processed in Lightroom.
Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks
Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument
Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument between Albuquerque and Santa Fe New Mexico is one of the newer NMs…designated and opened in 2001. Kasha-Katuwe means white cliffs in Keresan, the traditional language of the Cochiti Pueblo, who are partners with the Bureau of Land Management in protecting and developing the area. The cliffs are adorned with many hoodoos…conical formations weathered out of the volcanic tuff…and heavily banded with magenta layers. All in all it is a very impressive landscape. Carol and Anna climbed the Slot Canyon Trail to the top of the cliffs for a panoramic view, while I worked along the base of the cliffs on the Cave Trail, taking many panorama shots to try to capture something of the effect of the cliffs. To view this for full impact, you need to click on it and open it full screen.
I was experimenting with the little (tiny) Sony WX 220’s panorama and HDR functions. This is a simple sweep panorama with the camera held vertically. Processed in Lightroom.
Color Riot!
wooden / paper flowers in Santa Fe, NM
We are in Santa Fe New Mexico for a few days, visiting our daughter Anna who just started Grad School in Art Therapy at South Western University. We spent out first afternoon walking around the Plaza area and along Canyon Road, poking into shops and galleries. This riot of color was at an amazingly eclectic shop just off the Plaza. I am not certain if they are painted wood or paper, but the effect, in mass, is irresistible…or it is to me. (Someone suggested they might be corn husk.)
To be as unobtrusive in Sunday crowd of tourists I shot mostly with my little pocket Sony WX220, which is small enough so most people mistake it for a phone 🙂 I fit right in, and it produces images just as fine, within its range, as my superzoom! This is an in-camera HDR at the wide end of the zoom…25mm equivalent field of view.
Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Christmas Day Secrets
Lobster Trap on the Beach: Kennebunk ME
We went out, after Pumpkin Roll and presents, for a short Christmas Day walk on the beach. The sun had come out for the first time in the better part of a week, and it was a very unseasonable 50 degrees. Who could resist? Despite the warm temperatures we still had the December sun in Maine…low in sky…slanting, glancing light with little warmth, and long, long shadows. This lobster trap had washed up in the high tides and heavy seas of the past few days, and provided a spot of brilliance on the sands. Tight framing turns it into a found abstract…all color and line. An unexpected present for Christmas Day.
Sony HX400V in camera HDR. 560mm equivalent field of view. ISO 80 @ 1/500th @ f5.6 (program shifted for greater depth of field). Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Bittersweet. Happy Sunday!
This is somewhat a reprise of yesterday’s theme…though yesterday the Bittersweet was the ornament in the landscape (seascape?) and today it is the subject itself. 🙂 It would not be too much to say that East Point Sanctuary in Biddeford Pool is a riot of Bittersweet right now. This composite image catches both the mass and the macro effects.
I was inspired to do a little Bittersweet research this morning. Bittersweet is a vine that grows over and eventually dominates other bushy plants and small trees, and, as such, deserves it’s name. It certainly puts on a striking show in late fall when nothing else is very showy, but at a price to it’s hosts. There are actually two varieties in Maine: native American Bittersweet, and invasive Oriental Bittersweet. While both are climbing vines, and both will kill the vegetation they grow on, I suppose it might, from our standpoint, be preferable to be strangled by a native. ?? The berries, while pretty, are poisonous to most mammals…which is why they are still on the vine in late autumn. Birds to eat them, though I doubt they derive much nourishment from them.
This, unfortunately, is most likely Oriental Bittersweet, and therefore (except for beauty) has no real redeeming value. You can tell because the berries grow along the vines as well as at the tips. Most stands of Bittersweet today are actually a mix to the two species, or even a hybrid of the two. This could well be hybrid Bittersweet.
To complicate matters, neither of the common Bittersweet plants are actually Bittersweet at all. Both American and Oriental Bittersweet are more properly called “False Bittersweet” as the name Bittersweet belongs to Bittersweet Nightshade, also an invasive plant introduced to North American from Europe. While false bittersweets have a red berry in a yellow husk, Bittersweet Nightshade has berries that begin yellow, turn orange, and end up red. I found a few plants of Bittersweet Nightshade growing at East Point as well. And, like all Nightshades, Bittersweet is poisonous.
By the way…all of the Bittersweets get their name from the taste of the bark…which has been used in herbal medicine as a diuretic.
So what is the spiritual dimension to all this Bittersweet talk. It is Sunday. I will admit I got distracted in my research…but there is just so much to know. And knowing is such fun. Bittersweet fun, certainly…always…since looking deeply into anything is likely to turn up both the bitter and the sweet. That is the way of this world…or at least the way we humans see this world. And I think that is okay. As long as the world is…as long as life is…both bitter and sweet I think we are okay. We need to be able to taste the sweetness so that we do not despair…and we need to be able to taste the bitterness, so that we do not forget our capacity for causing pain. Sweetness is our delight. Bitterness keeps us humble. This is good. Bittersweet is good. You might say Bittersweet, like the plant, is beautiful. And beauty is always its own redemption.
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.