Posts in Category: morning
8/4/2011: Rocking the Beach
Depending on the season and the tide, this corner of the beach where the Mousam River meets the sea is either pebble or sand, as the pebble bed is alternately exposed and covered. This summer there is an extensive reach of pebble showing, here somewhat exaggerated by the low angle and the tight crop on the sky. The sky was blank blue…not a cloud in sight…so there was no temptation to keep it in the image any more than was necessary to provide scale. I like the somewhat radiating lines of the pebbles, combed by the tide, and the lone lady in the camp-chair on the right. (This was very early on a Saturday morning. Even by the time I left, the beach was a lot more populated than it is here.)
The second view features one of the larger pebbles…a rock by almost anyone’s standards…in an even tighter crop.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view. f4.5 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160. Program with Active D-Lighting. Shot with the flip out LCD out, from a few inches above the pebbles and sand. Both shots.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
{_;_;_;_}
7/10/2011: Happy Sunday Morning Backyard Sky
I was half way through writing this morning’s post…on a shot of Burdock flowers (which you will now see later this week)…when I went to the kitchen to pour hot water over my tea and was caught by the sky above the back yard. It sucked me right out the sliding doors on to the deck, camera in hand, to catch it before it passed. A moments work to pop the card into the laptop and do a bit of process in Lightroom, press publish to put it on the web, and a moment more to copy it in here. So this is really a pic 4 today…a pic of today…of this morning, a few (not more than 15) moments ago as I begin to write this.
As to why…well we have the framing trees with the early sun just hitting the tops of the tallest, and spread of the wispy clouds out over the blue of the sky…the suggestion that this is, somehow, a swirl of motion frozen…it just draws me into the image…up and out of my self a bit.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view, f4.5 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160. Program with Active D-Lighting.
Processed for Clarity and Sharpness in Lightroom. A touch of Fill Light and cropped slightly from the bottom for composition.
So, for a Sunday morning, a spontaneous composition leading to a spontaneous capture and what I hope is a spontaneous response. Spontaneous has come to mean “natural, unforced, impulsive, without forethought, in and of the moment” and I hope it applies to this image in all those ways…but a little research yields the fact that the word spontaneous entered the English language from late Latin in 1653, derived from sponte…meaning ”of one’s free will.”
I like that.
I like that spontaneous should mean an act of will…not just something that happens unexpectedly and without forethought…but an active response, a willed response, to whatever comes, to whatever happened. There is a sense in which I was compelled to capture an image of the sky over the back yard this morning, but there was also a moment when I willed myself to do it. It would have been so easy to let the moment pass…not to go find the camera…not to frame the sky with trees…not to juggle camera settings (minimal as I keep them) in my head…not to press the shutter release…not process the image…not to post it here. So much easier really, not to respond to the spontaneous sight of clouds against the morning sky. So much hangs on the gap between vision and image…on the acts of will inspired by the spontaneous display of beauty, pathos, or power that always catches the eye and mind.
And yet, it all feels spontaneous…unforced, natural…of my own free will…because, at the root, it is just the way I am made. Learned skills and camera technique aside, that impulse to participate in the acts of creation around me by recording and sharing them is just part of who I am…my own creative impulse…and I recognize it as a gift from the same oh so very free will that spontaneously arranged the sun and clouds and trees this morning above my backyard. Happy Sunday.
7/5/2011: Foxglove in the morning.
According to wikipedia, there are many theories as to where the name foxglove comes from, but the one that makes most sense to me is that it is a corruption of folk’s glove or fairies glove. (Perhaps combined with the fact that they were also called Fuchs’ Glove, in honor of the man who first gave them their scientific name…digitalis.) In fact, according to the same source, they are still called folk-fairies-glove in Wales. Children in Wales, apparently, still clip a stalk and strike the blooms against the hand to hear the fairy thunder as the wee folk who hide inside the bells escape in a huff. Such strange things you can find on wiki. 🙂
This is an early morning shot, and, in addition to the beauty of the blooms with their beads of dew, I really like what the sun was doing with the out-of-focus background. Great bokeh. To achieve that effect I set the camera to Close Up Mode to engage macro, and then over-road the 32mm equivalent setting, zooming up to 435mm equivalent so that I could back well away from the plant and still achieve a macro effect.
Nikon Coolpix P500. f5.6 @ 1/125th @ ISO 160. Close Up Mode.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
This is, by the way, another shot from my The Yard collection on WideEyedInWonder, all shots taken in our small yard in Kennebunk Maine.
4/21/2011: Light, line, texture and angle
I have actually attempted this shot several times over the past few years. I see it every time I go to Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge early in the morning…or at least some variation of it. This line of trees which are slowly slipping with the land under them, further down the steep cutting of the Merriland river. They are well rooted and the slant is all the landslide has achieved so far. But of course, it is as much about the light as the slant…the way the light, strikes down just here and illuminates the trunks, bring out both line (modeling) and the contrasting textures of the bark. I shot this twice, but this tighter crop using more of the zoom works better for me…and this is the best of my many tries over the years. I think that is a matter of the particular character of the early spring, early morning light of this particular day.
Canon SX20IS at 70mm equivalent field of view, f3.5 @ 1/100th @ ISO 160. Program Mode.
Processed for intensity and clarity in Lightroom, with special attention to the balance of highlight and shadow and a bit of color adjustment.
And, since someone else is probably already thinking it, this is an image that might work well in Black and White. So, with some judicious conversion in Lightroom, this is my attempt at the B&W version. I was surprised by the different B&W effects I could produce by altering the color temperature of the original.
4/13/2011: Sandhill take off, Wings on Wednesday
For Wings on Wednesday: If you are trying to capture a Sandhill Crane taking off, this is what you look for…the bird stretches in the direction of take off, and assumes what can only be called an intent posture. Then…
the head drops and you might be fooled into thinking the bird has thought better of it…but…
the next second, with run and a flapping of those huge wings, the bird is in the air. These three shots were taken with a small digital camera behind the eyepiece of a ZEISS DiaScope spotting scope, at the equivalent field of view of about 1800mm on a conventional full frame DSLR so tracking the bird was not easy. The final shot is at the limits of the auto focus of the camera through the scope.
Canon SD4000IS and ZEISS DiaScope 65FL. Kids and Pets mode for higher shutter speeds (1/1000th) which pushed the ISO up to 160. An effective aperture of about f5.0.
Processed for clarity and sharpness in Lightroom.
And here, from the same morning, is the video that shows a similar sequence. Also taken with the SD4000IS behind the eyepiece of the ZEISS DiaScope. You can see some heat shimmer in the air, even though this was just after dawn. The rapidly warming water gives off a lot of vapor in the dry upland desert air.
3/27/2011: Spring Snow Morning
Happy Sunday!
Before the season slips behind us and is forgotten…here is a shot from just a week ago, when we woke to fresh spring snow. We might yet see another storm. We have had snow in April within my memory of this place…quite a few times at that. This snow was typical of spring, with big furry flakes, but exaggerated enough to be interesting, as chronicled on 3/20 and 21.
This is Back Creek where it crosses Route 9 just before the end of Brown Street, and is always a pleasant view, even here where the snow is doing its best to obscure it. I actually took the shot out the window of the car, keeping the camera dry. Moderate telephoto zoom framed the little curve in the creek and the gap in the trees, and emphasized the falling snow.
Canon SX20IS at 60mm equivalent field of view, f4.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Sports Mode to catch the falling flakes in mid-air.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity and clarity.
When picking a shot for Sunday, I always look for something that speaks, however faintly, to the spiritual side of things. I am a firm believer that the spiritual is in everything…that it underpins everything and every moment…and that we can (and should) see it wherever we look. I am not talking about a Platonic reality here, where the eternal cast a shadow that is the temporal reality we experience, but a world of experience that is, moment by moment, and second by second, the living expression of the creative spirit of all. This instance of spring snow is a single character in a single word in a single sentence of one paragraph of a chapter of one volume of the endless story that is being told. It is being spoken. Here I have written that character down, caught it in a pictograph, and it has meaning beyond me, only because we are all part of that same story being told. Spring Snow Morning. From my piece of the story…now into yours.
12/4/2010: Bosque morning
Time for some straight up Bosque del Apache scenery. Mid-morning layered landscape HDR. The temporarily flooded fields are a Bosque feature, a way of managing where the geese and cranes feed. The geese, in particular, love to feed on the seeds and roots that flooding makes available. In this case either the field was newly flooded and the geese had not discovered it yet, or it was flooded long enough already that the geese had eaten everything they could find. Still…it adds the mirror layer to the landscape.
Three exposure HDR, Canon SX20IS at about 70mm equivalent, autobracketed around –2/3 EV exposure compensation, assembled in Photomatix Pro using the Lightroom plugin and final processed in Lightroom.
11/26/2010: Watchers under Bosque sky
A frosty morning at Bosque del Apache NWR, with amazing clouds. This is a three exposure HDR, only possible with people in it because these folks were so intent on photographing the geese and cranes in the field in front of them that they did not move at all.
One of my commenters on a listserve (yahoogroups) that I post to objected to my leaving the photographers in what is obviously a picture of the sky. I think the tension in the photo, and what caught my eye as much as the clouds, is the fact that the watchers are so intent on the geese and crane show in front of them that they are totally oblivious to the show happing overhead!
Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent. Three exposures auto bracketed at –2/3 EV, ISO 160, assembled and tone-mapped in Photomatix, processed for intensity in Lightroom. (I actually had to tone it down a bit by increasing exposure as the clouds were, imho, over-dramatic.)
11/7/2010: in the frame now, happy Sunday!
I woke this Sunday morning from a dream of worship…that in itself is odd…though I do have a few of those dreams each year, and I suppose Sunday morning is appropriate for one…but before I was fully awake this post formed, and now, up and at the computer, all I have to do is build what I saw.
At my best as a photographer I am only a frame and an instant.
I am a frame. All I do is point the frame of the camera’s rectangular view at the world. Today I use the zoom on the camera to change the size of the frame…make it bigger and more inclusive, more grand…or smaller and more particular, more intimate. I can move in close for a true macro of lichen, or add magnification by shooting through a spotting scope for portraits of sparrows. I can zoom out to wide-angle for the sunrise. I can even stitch frames together into the larger frame of a panorama. But whatever I do, it is still a frame…a little rectangle imposed on reality. The frame says “This is what I see. Look!” I am a frame.
I am an instant. I control when I push the shutter button. I choose the instant, and it is only an instant…a fraction of a second, when the camera records, for better or worse, whatever is in the frame. Even if I shoot a burst of images, as I often do when digiscoping birds, I still have to pick the one instant out of all those instants that I want to show the world. The instant says “This is what I see now. Look” I am an instant.
I do not fill the frame, I can only point it. I do not create the instant. I can only choose it. But in those two choices is all the power of photography.
The rest is just technique.
This is what I see now. Look!
I don’t of course, know what you see when you look at one of my photographs. I can hope that if I have done my job, you will see something that captures your attention…maybe even something that stirs your soul, that moves within you and touches places that need touching. At best, looking at what I see might open your eyes to something you would not otherwise have seen. It might change the way you see the world. That is the power of photography at its best.
I took pictures for a long time before I knew what I was looking for…what fills my frames and draws me to the instants I choose. Interestingly enough, the actual photographs did not change much, if at all. One day I knew why as well as what and when.
And that brings us full circle. As I have said, I am sure, on more than one Sunday in the past, my why is worship. What fills my frame in the ever-changing now is always some aspect of the beauty…the awe-full beauty, the intimate splendor, the wonderful power, the amazing compassion…of the Creator God displayed in the creation. Every picture is a celebration of that in God and that in me that brings the world to being through love. I frame those instants, from macro to panorama, when I am most aware of God. That is worship. That is my why.
So, this is what I see, now. Look.
10/31/2010: Cape May Sunrise hdr Panorama
Happy Sunday!
Looking east from the sundeck of the Montreal Inn in Cape May a few moments before sunrise, yesterday.
Sunrises, I think, touch a special place in the soul, and, of course there is noting like a sunrise over the ocean where you can see right out to the edge of the world. On a morning like this, even if just for a second there, it takes a hard heart indeed…or one deeply troubled, beaten well down…not to embrace the cliché: every new day is a miracle. It is easy for the hopeful to take such beauty at the beginning as a promise of the potential of the day. And, of course, part of the wonder comes from the fact that every sunrise is not so spectacular. Our lives don’t always allow us to see the sunrise at all, and there are days when the sun just sneaks up behind clouds (literal or figurative) with no display (or none we can see). So we have reason to celebrate the moments like this one. The moment itself is a gift from the creator, and so is the ability to appreciate it.
On the technical side, this is a 9 exposure HDR panorama: 3 sets of 3 exposures blended and tone-mapped in Photomatix, the results stitched in PhotoShop Elements, and the the panorama final processed in Lightroom. Best viewed as large as your monitor will take it.