Posts in Category: color
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.
October Drama
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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.
The Unbearable Beauty of Fall. Happy Sunday!
The Unbearable Beauty of Fall
Sometimes nature is just unbearably beautiful…as though it were a leading a conspiracy to overload our senses and our hearts. Sometimes it is place, like the Grand Canyon, that overwhelms…sometimes it is a spectacle like the Snow Geese rising at dawn at Bosque del Apache…sometimes it is just an otherwise quiet corner of our neighborhood, like this narrowing of Day Brook Pond on the Kennebunk Plains. Almost always the season is a member of the conspiracy, and often the weather…though some places, like the Grand Canyon, are unbearably beautiful in all seasons and all weathers. The few clouds caught over the water here are the weather’s contribution…and of course the fall foliage is courtesy of the season. The birch lying in the water…beaver work…but certainly the beaver knew his part no better, or suspected how essential his role, than the leaves scattered across the water or the wind that scattered them.
It is Sunday, and of course the spirit is on my mind. The spirit, both small “s” as in our spirits, the spirits that animate each of us, and big “S” as in the Spirit of all, the Holy Spirit, the Creative and Loving Spirit that is the ground of all and in all, and which embraces all our spirits…both are essential parts of the conspiracy. In fact, when I attribute leadership to Nature, that is just shorthand for what is visible in the world of that Spirit, and what our spirits can recognize as Its workings in the world.
When confronted with such a conspiracy to overwhelm with beauty, it is all we can do to keep breathing…but that is all that is required of us…to breath, to be, to receive, to let the beauty engulf us and lift us up to become a willing participant in beauty…part of the conspiracy. We are compelled not just to witness but to celebrate, not just to celebrate but to give thanks. That is the truth of the unbearable beauty of fall.
Sony HX400V in camera HDR. 24mm equivalent. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Fall Scatter
A found fall abstract. Nature throwing paint against a canvas. Very modern. Very moody. A wet day. A wet fall day.
Canon SX60HS. Vivid mode. About 50mm equivalent field of view. ISO 100 @ 1/40th @ f4. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Color Pocket
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Continuing the theme of autumn color…which will very likely continue well into October :)…here is a little pocket of color along the edge of a pool were a small brook enters Old Falls Pond on the Mousam River. One of my readers informed me yesterday that the trees along the water’s edge are more susceptible to an early turn because the wood is saturated with water. Certainly that and the fact that cold air pools along edges and in little coves like this, accounts for much of the early color we are seeing in Southern Maine. I like the contrast here between the layers. Peat-brown water, green vegetation, golden cattails, and the greens, reds, and oranges of the small saplings.
Sony HX400V at 24mm equivalent field of view. In-camera HDR. Nominal exposure ISO 80 @ 1/250th @ f5. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Fall Impression
Autumn in New England is full of these spontaneous tapestries…accidental abstracts. These trees were across Day Brook Pond from each other, clearly effected by their position on the shore, where I have to assume the pond was just wide enough to catch and hold a pocket of colder air. Moderate tele on the zoom to compress, and Program Shift to deepen the field, puts the color in the same plain of focus, and framing the image adds the intention which lifts this from accident to art. 🙂 Okay, so that is a bit over-the-top, but fall color always brings out the poet in me.
Sony HX400V at 122mm equivalent field of view. Â Nominal exposure: ISO 80 @ 1/125th @ f6.3. In-camera HDR. Processed in Lighroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Spring Flood: Happy Sunday!
Yesterday was the first day you could really feel spring in the air here in Southern Maine. It got, eventually, up to 50 degrees, but it was not so much that, as the lack of wind and the power of the sun that made the day feel springy. We have two days of constant rain (beginning at mid-night last night) promised now, which should put finished to the considerable amounts of snow and ice still on the ground, and then, hopefully, the winter dam will break and spring will come rushing in. Impatient birds are already moving in and through. I saw a pair of Song Sparrows along the Kennebunk Bridle Path, one lone Great Egret, and an Eastern Phoebe…as well as a Bluebird in the fields leading in to the beach. The buds are just beginning to show red on the maples. Maybe spring will come afterall.
This is a flood tide on Mousam River. All but a tiny bit of what you see here is normally marsh and well above water. I liked the green of the deepest water (backed up against the old dyke and path where an unnamed tidal creek passes through toward the Mousam) in the foreground, the variations of blues beyond, and the wispy clouds over the sea. The Sony NEX 3NL caught it all in this 24mm equivalent view, and HDR processing and image tuning in Snapseed brought it out, so the image is pretty much what I saw with my naked eye at the time.
And for the Sunday Thought: I have had to learn to appreciate the last-dregs-of-winter / before-spring-really-comes time in Southern Maine. It sometimes seems to stretch on for months. Mud season. Each year for several years now though I have found more of interest in that interval. I watch the birds come back. I watch the last drying of the grasses and reeds of last summer, their final turn toward gold, before the new green shoots come out. I watch for the first dragonflies in the pools where the sun warms them in the marsh along the river. And the changing skies of the season have their own attraction. This year we may actually miss much of that, since we stand to pass directly from winter into spring without that long pause. I might even actually miss it.
I have found that the more closely you look at any season, the more intimately involved you are in its development and passing, the more interesting it is…so that there is interest in any season and in all seasons, if you will only look. It requires a bit of discipline actually. You have to make your self look beyond, deeper than, the apparent dullness of the days. And that is, of course, a spiritual discipline that will repay itself where ever you apply it. Dull is what I am when I don’t look. It has nothing to do with the world around me. Certainly the Creator lavishes the same amount of attention and love on each day. There is always wonder to be found. Even in mud season in Southern Maine.
Going-on Easter Cactus
We have a Christmas Cactus that blooms faithfully every Christmas season. It has a second bloom, generally close enough to Easter to call it our Easter Cactus as well. 🙂 For some reason it has started it’s second bloom early this year. There are a few buds, and even one open flower already.
As it happens, I just got a set of “macro attachment lenses” for my Sony 16-50mm zoom lens. The 16-50 focuses relatively close, but it is certainly no macro. Screw-on macro attachment lenses are cheap…$16 for set of 4 from Vivitar in their own little protective pouch…and I thought it was worth trying them out. They actually work amazingly well! This was taken with the +10 diopter attachment lens at 50mm equivalent from about 2 inches away. And, it was taken hand held at ISO 3200. Not too shabby! At macro distances the Sony was able to auto focus with the attachment lens in place, even in this low light. This little set of attachments, or at least the lens I end up using most, are definitely going to become part of my regular field kit!
Sony NEX 3NL with 16-50mm zoom. ISO 3200 @ 1/60th @ f5.6. Processed in Handy Photo on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.