Posts in Category: flowers
Monday Supplement: White Blazing Star
I can’t let Northern Blazing Star season pass without properly celebrating it, so here is another Blazing Star shot. About one in a thousand (just a guess) Blazing Star plants produce white blossoms. I have no idea why…whether it is in the plant itself or in the soil, or some combination of the two. The plants appear otherwise healthy and identical to their purple counterparts. OM Systems OM-1 with ED 100-400mm zoom at 585mm equivalent. Program mode with my custom birds and wildlife modifications. Processed in Pixelmator Pro. ISO 200 @ f7 @ 1/800th.
Maine! Bonus shot. Blazing Star and Goldenrod
I love the extreme color contrast between the Goldenrod and the Northern Blazing Star this time of year…though as I have mentioned before you have do some looking to find the two close enough to include in the same frame. This was taken with the OM Systems OM-1 and the ED 100-400mm zoom at 246mm equivalent. Still with my custom bird and wildlife modifications. Processed in Pixelmator Pro. ISO 200 @ f6.3 @ 1/800th.
Maine! Northern Blazing Star Show
Our first August in Maine I was driving out past the Kennebunk Plains in August and saw the Northern Blazing Star show for the first time. It was like this, dense and lush and covering the plains…and I have not seen it like this since, until this year. It has been good, and beautiful, in past years, but not like this! And under a perfect August Maine sky. Sony A5100 with the kit 18-50mm zoom at 24mm equivalent. Intelligent Auto. Processed in Pixelmator Pro and Apple Photos.
Happy Sunday! Northern Blazing Star
Northern Blazing Star against Goldenrod, Kennebunk Plains, Kennebunk, Maine. — Both Northern Blazing Star and Goldenrod are in full bloom on the Kennebunk Plains right now…but they the stands rarely overlap. I had to look long and hard to find two plants close enough to put them in the same frame, but who could resist trying? The color contrast is just too wonderful. I offer it as a celebration of Sunday! Sony A5100 with 18-50mm zoom at 45mm equivalent. Auto.
Maine! Northern Blazing Star
Northern Blazing Star: Kennebunk Plains Nature Conservancy, York County, Maine, USA. — It is the season of Blazing Star on the Kennebunk Plains. The Plains are one of the few remaining sand-plains in the Northeast, and are managed for several rare and endangered species…the Northern Blazing Star chief among them. Blazing Star is a fire-dependent plant, and the Plains are burned on a regular rotation to keep the population healthy. This time of year the Blazing Star is host of a wide variety of insect and bird species as well, and it is right now that the the Plains are perhaps the most alive. This year’s crop is notable for its height…all the plants are very tall, taller then average by almost a foot, and they have blossoms all down the stalk. If the weather holds the last of those won’t bloom until the first week in September, making for an exceptionally long bloom. I have been tracking and photographing the Norther Blazing Star bloom on the Kennebunk Plains for over 20 years now. Every year is different. OM Systems OM-1 with ED 100-400mm zoom at various focal lengths for framing. Program mode with my custom birds modifications (yes they work for plant macros as well…not need to change mode.) Processed in Pixelmator Pro.
Maine! Day Lilies
Day Lilies from our yard. The “wild-ish” Day Lilies that grow in our front yard are all “double blossom” lilies, with two flowers on top of each other. The Day Lilies that grow in our back yard are single blossom??? These are from the front yard. Both images are in-camera focus stacked (hand held) with the OM Systems OM-1 and the 100-400mm zoom at 300mm equivalent. It is still pretty amazing to me that the camera can do this. Processed in Pixelmator Pro. Nominal exposure ISO 2500 @ f5.7 and f6.3 @ 1/500th.
Maine! Wood Lilies
I am not sure what is happening with the Wood Lilies this year? I found only 2 plants in bloom where there are generally hundreds out on the Kennebunk Plains Nature Conservancy. I will check again this week but I am not hopeful…as the plants I found were in full bloom already. Wood Lilies are particularly hard to photograph as there is so much dimension to them, and every part is interesting and deserving of correct focus. This is an 8 deep focus stack, and again, hand held. (For those who do not know…when focus stacking the camera takes however many exposures you tell it to, varying the focus for each one, and then combines them in-camera so that every part of your subject looks in focus. It is particularly effective on close-ups. This produces a image that is much closer to what your eye sees…but it might look a bit strange in a photograph, as we expect to see the narrow plane of focus of the camera. 🙂 OM Systems OM-1 with 100-400mm zoom at 246mm equivalent. Program mode. Nominal ISO 200 @ f5.6 @ 1/640th.
Maine! Grass-pink Orchid (focus stack)
Grass-pink Orchid: Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve at Laudholm Farms, Wells, Maine, USA — I always go check for the Grass-pink Orchids too early…before they bloom…and then, sometimes miss them…getting to the little remnant bog at Laudholm Farms too late. This year I caught them (though there were no Rose Pagonias, the other orchid of that bog). The OM Systems OM-1 does in-camera focus stacking, and the 100-400mm zoom focuses to just over 4 feet at 800mm equivalent…making the system pretty amazing for flower macros (or close-ups at any rate.) I know from past experiences with other cameras (I have been photographing these Grass-pinks for many years now) that it is very difficult to get a close up of the flower with every part in focus in the same image. The flower is just too three-dimensional. Focus stacking (hand held here…and a tripod would not have helped as there was breeze and the flowers were moving) gives us the depth of filed needed. It took a couple of tries because of the breeze, but it is hard to fault the results. 770mm equivalent (to frame the flower from closest focus). Equivalent exposure ISO 200 @ f6.3 @ 1/640th.
Paramo
After the Resplendent Quetzals at dawn, and after a hearty breakfast at the lodge, we drove up to the very top of the Talamanca Mountains to Buena Vista peak…also called Cerro de la Muerte…one of the highest accessible peaks on the Continental divide and the highest on Pan American Highway, at 11,500 feet. On a clear day the mountain justifies its Buena Vista name, as you can see what looks like the length of the Talamancas, and both the Pacific on one side, and the Caribbean on the other. On a not so clear day, it can seem to justify its name as the Cerro de la Muerte…mountain of death…with a visibility in feet, and bone chilling cold…and that is when the wind is not blowing a gale. On any day, the fascinating plants of the Paramo, above tree-line, hugging the ground for survival, are a source of wonder. Take 2 minutes to view the slideshow. Sony Rx10iv. Assembled in Apple Photos.
White-fringed Bog Orchid: Saco Heath
White-fringed Bog Orchid: Saco Heath, Saco, Maine, USA — We are taking a break from my coverage of the Panama trip for today’s photos. My friend Stef and I spent a morning at Saco Heath…a remnant raised (or domed) peat bog in Saco, Maine…the most southern such bog in Maine. We were too late in the season for most of the bog specialties…we only found one Pitcher Plant…but we did find a small stand of White-fringed Bog Orchid at the far edge of the last hummock before the Atlantic White Cedar Island. A beautiful plant that, despite its common name, also grows wild in wet meadows and forests…though I have never seen it anywhere but in a bog in Maine. Sony Rx10iv at 600mm equivalent. Program mode with my custom birds and wildlife modifications. Processed in Pixelmator Photo and Apple Photos. These are actually two identical frames. The close up is just heavily cropped to show the flower detail, and then expanded in Pixelmator using their Machine Learning tool, for pixel count. ISO 100 @ f7.1 @ 1/1000th. Minus .7EV exposure compensation to hold detail in the whites.