Posts in Category: marsh
12/25/2011: Merry Christmas. Happy Sunday.
Christmas on a Sunday is, in fact, not all that rare an event. There is a 28 year cycle and the gap between Sunday Christmas’ varies (due to leap years) from 11 to 5 years in a predictable way. The next one will be in 2016 and the one after in 2022. (I did not do the math myself. Check with Ask.com.) Still…
It feels just slightly more special. In some ways (purely temporal) it complicates the day. In some (mostly spiritual) it elevates it. But of course I profess to believe that for people of faith there is, or should be, no such dichotomy. The spiritual finds expression in the temporal or it does not exist at all. When all our moments are moments in eternity, in the presence of the divine, then we are living our faith.
And, in that spirit, I am not exactly certain why this is my Christmas Sunday pic. It was taken yesterday, on Christmas Eve Saturday, along my little stretch of the Kennebunk Bridle Trail where so many of my local pics are taken. We had an unusually high tide which flooded the marsh with salt water, so that the fresh water spread thin on the surface and froze to an icy lace. As the tide fell, the fragile skin of ice bent and broke around things as delicate as individual grass stalks, creating impromptu sculptures to catch the clear December light. I attempted to memorialize the effect in frames of various sizes. This one, at full zoom, is one of my favorites.
Maybe that is it. If light is spiritual and water temporal (as we often draw the lines), this image represents the fusion of the two, and just how fragile and fleeting our attempts to see them so too often are. Rare as a Sunday Christmas…but beautiful enough for memory…and frequent enough, the sweep of time, for hope.
Today I celebrate the birth of Jesus, Son of God, God with us, God in us, who through life and death and life beyond death, gives us life…today and forever…like, in some way, the clear light of December caught in fragments of ice on a falling tide. A thing of beauty and wonder worth celebrating.
Merry Christmas. Happy Sunday.
12/18/2011: Happy Sunday! Home for the Holidays
I have done a lot of travel in the last 30 days. I spent significant time in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas (Harlingen to McAllen), in New Mexico (Albuquerque, Gallup, Bosque del Apache), and at Wildcatter Ranch in Graham Texas. But now I am home in Southern Maine for 3 weeks…one already past…and vacation time the next two. I still have a few images from Texas and New Mexico to post, but I forced myself away from the computer yesterday long enough to get out on the local patch and see what was happening photographically.
It was chancy day…little balls of ice falling off and on, trying to convince us it was snow…and massive rolling cloud cover doing its best to make a gloomy December day. I drove down toward the ocean and my favorite walk along the Kennebunk Bridle Path through the marshes beside the Mousam river. The landscape was, indeed, dull…a winter landscape without the saving grace of snow. Brown grasses, bare trees, and, under the overcast, steely waters…as chill as the wind on this 30 degree day.
But the sky was impressive. And behind those clouds the sun was making every effort to break through. The clouds were shot through with light, and full of form and shadow. It was truly a dimension sky and pulled the otherwise dull landscape out of its doldrums.
This is looking toward the sea from the Route 9 bridge over the Mousam. Now that is what I call a sky, and I composed with just enough land in the foreground to give it scale.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent. Program and iContrast, with –1/3EV exposure compensation. f8 @ 1/1600th @ ISO 200. This was great exposure for the sky (and I tipped the camera up when metering to bias it for the sky) but it left the foreground dark and lifeless. Fill Light, rather heavy, in Lightroom restored some life to the landscape, and a blackpoint adjustment restored it even more. Finally I used Auto Color Temperature to offset the under-corrected blue bias from the camera’s Auto white balance setting. All of which brought it pretty close to what I saw standing there.
So, for the Sunday thought: no matter where you roam, and no matter how dull by comparison, it is always good to be home for the holidays. As a photographer I am not really anywhere until I can see the beauty and experience the wonder of the landscape I am in…and that can be a challenge at home. But it must be done. You do have to come home, all of you, everything that is you, for the holidays. In the house, we have been listening to Christmas music (and I have bought my limit of three new Christmas albums), and last night we put up the tree and decorated it and set up the crèche. Packages have been arriving all week from Amazon. The kids are gathering in or setting arrival schedules. The season is in gear. But until I went out yesterday to find the beauty and wonder in the winter dull landscape, I was not really home. We will, of course, have sunny days sometime in the next two weeks, and I can still hope for snow for Christmas, but whatever happens now is okay…I am home for the holidays. And glad to be here.
12/12/2011: November Light on the Bosque
As I may have mentioned, if there is a place where the light is more beautiful than New Mexico in November, then I have not seen it yet (a distinct possibility…but that does not diminish my affection for New Mexico Novembers). A crisp, clear high desert morning with a few clouds to reflect off the water at Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, and the mountains etched on the horizon…the contrasting warmth of the cottonwoods in autumn plumage, and the grasses and reeds browning toward winter…and all flooded with that unique light: there is nothing quite like it.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view, f4 @ 1/800th @ ISO 100. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
11/8/2011: Balancing the Sky.
Sometimes the sky is so big that it dominates the landscape. It takes a foreground full of visual interest and a midground rich in detail to balance it. For me, this shot works. The fine mass of beach grass in the foreground. The details where the creek meets the river. The drift log. Etc. And the contrast between the blue blue sky and the autumn tones of the landscape. It all just works. And yet some will say that it is a picture of nothing…that it lacks a center of focus. To me that just draws me in. I can wander in the image and enjoy it as I would the actual scene.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 100. Program with iContrast.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
10/20/2011: Along the Bridle Path
As I have mentioned several times in the past, the Kennebubk Bridle Path, and old trolly route from Kennebunk to Kennebunkport, now a protected nature preserve through a group of Federal Agencies and local conservation groups, is one of my favorite area spots for birding, butterflying, dragonflying, and photography.
This is the view across the little corner of marsh between the Path and route 9. I love the aging fence posts.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f4.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 200. Program with iContrast.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpess.
10/1/2011: Rainy Day Water Meadow
There are only two things to do with a rainy Saturday in Maine: 1) Stay inside and look at sunny pictures taken on other days…the antidote method, or 2) Go outside and find some good rainy images…the embrace the day method. Last Saturday I chose embracure. (It remains to see what I will choose today :), but posting this image puts me already on the path to an embrace.)
This is a watery marsh/meadow that I have imaged many times over the past few years, just off the Kennebunk Bridle Path. In this shot I really like the swirl of the foreground grasses in their first fall brown and what the light is doing in the trees along the edge…all under that moody sky. Not a high energy shot, but one that I find I can look at for quite a while without running out of content.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 22mm equivalent field of view, Backlight/HDR mode. Nominal exposure f4 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160 (nominal as the image is an in-camera tone mapped series of images.)
I applied the Coolpix’s in-camera Quick Retouch before uploading to my laptop, and then final processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
9/28/2011: Great Egrets in Bad Air: Wildlife Wednesday
When you are working with a spotting scope, with a digital camera behind the eyepiece, where you can reach ridiculous equivalent fields of view…1000mm to 5000mm…it is tempting to reach out for those far birds, and occasionally, when the air is just right, you get a reasonable shot. More often, the air between you and the bird, or the heat shimmer and moisture in the air between you and the bird, produce a shot that is not quite satisfying. Astronomers call it “bad air”, and it limits observational astronomy and astro-photography just as it does bird photography. Most of the bird photography you see on the internet and in books and magazines was done at very close range. There is no other way to capture that feather detail. But still…sometimes the light is so fine, and the bird so elegant (or ugly, or cute, or just so full of itself) that you have to try. Sometimes, despite the bad air, it works.
This Great Egret was in an impondment on the Wetlands Trail at East Harbor State Park in Port Clinton OH, just over the first ridge of beach from Lake Erie, in mid-afternoon of a late summer day. The wind was brisk, and through the scope, you could easily see the heat shimmer in the air…so I did not have high hopes. In the first shot it is the lighting, and the posture of the bird that saves the shot. In the second, I really like the delicate reeds in front of the bird.
Then, crossing half the continent to a morning a few days earlier, we have another Great Egret, this time in the marshes of Southern Maine, along the Kennebunk Bridle Path. This image is really about the early morning light on the marsh grasses, already touched with fall, and the way it molds the Egret…folds the Egret…in its golden warmth. The pose helps, beak just parted, and alert, but not yet nervous. Way too much shimmer…bad air…between me and the bird, and little hope of a sharp shot, but still…gotta try, and for me, as an image (in distinction from a bird shot) this works.
All three with the Nikon Coolpix P300 behind the 15-56x Vario eyepiece on the ZEISS DiaScope 65FL spotting scope. 1) about 2000mm equivalent field of view, 1/1000th @ ISO 160, f5.5 effective. 2) about 3500mm, 1/500th @ ISO 160, f9.6 effective. 3) about 1000mm equivalent, 1/320th @ ISO 160, f3.4 effective. All Programmed Auto, and auto focus.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
9/26/2011: Just a touch of fall on the marsh…
Another shot from Saturday’s fotoprowl®…just to prove I did eventually get out of the yard (see yesterday’s post). The trees, as of Saturday, had just been touched with the earliest color of fall. Things will progress rapidly now, and indeed, by Sunday morning the color had advanced far enough to leave no doubt that the season is upon us. In this shot, an in-camera HDR, I tried to catch the marsh at this delicate balance between the seasons, with maybe the last of the Beach Rose among the Asters and Goldenrod in the foreground, the unique fall greeny-yellow-brown of the marsh grass, and the few red maples in the background. As you see, it was fully overcast, so I also worked to bring out at least a little detail in the clouds. If I were a purist I would edit out the dead branches obtruding from the left…but I am a realist…and I actually prefer to leave them in.
Nikon Coolpix P500 in Backlight/HDR mode. 23mm equivalent field of view. Nominal exposure f3.4 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160 (nominal because an in-camera HDR is the sum of several very rapid exposures with different settings).
Before uploading to my laptop, I also used the in-camera Quick Retouch, which, when applied to an in-camera HDR, restores some of the contrast, brightens the foreground, and sharpens the whole image. The combination, while not as good as a three exposure HDR processed in Photomatix, is pretty satisfying. Final processing in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness. Cropped slightly at the right to eliminate a half post leaning out of the frame.
9/6/2011: And with Goldenrod all along.
My last several posts have been from the Kennebunk Bridle Path. This accidental water meadow is on the north side of Route 9. It may, in fact, back in the era of salt-farms (decreasing through the early 1800s) have been an intentional water meadow for salt-hay. Hard to tell along the banks of Southern Maine’s tidal rivers. Certainly the meadow/marshes and drainage ditches on the other side of 9 have a very intentional look about them.
I like the way the Goldenrod has colonized the immediate banks of the stream to form a boarder on its twisting path. I have many wide angle shots of this meadow, but here I zoomed in to emphasize the stream and its yellow boarder.
Here it is, the same day, with the sky as a primary interest.
Nikon Coolpix P500. 1) 53mm equivalent field of view, f5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. 2) 23mm equivalent, f4.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. Program with Active D-Lighting.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
9/1/2011: Hair by Irene
Okay, so this is not hair, but it always reminds me of a slightly punkish do, combed and coiffed by the tidal currents of the Mousam River in its ebb and flow where it meets the current from a small feeder stream and evidently sets up a swirling eddy. Hurricane Irene brought a storm surge that flooded the marsh at high tide with particular energy, backed up all the feeder streams, and left the grasses extra styled.
I reached out with the tele-range of the Coolpix zoom to frame this small section of the pattern. This is a wider view and you can clearly see where the swirl sits as the tide goes out.
And one more view, near the full reach of the zoom, to isolate the pattern more.
Nikon Coolpix P500. 1) 435mm equivalent field of view, f5.6 @ 1/500th @ ISO 160. 2) 23mm, f4.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. 3) 723mm, f5.7 @ 1/500th @ ISO 160. Program with aActive D-Lighting.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness. Some color temperature adjustment on 1) and 3). 3) cropped for composition.