Posts in Category: reflections
Trees Softly Dreaming in Water
This is another shot I went, for better or for worse, out looking for. I needed a “Trees on Tuesday” entry for Google+ and this kind of shot seemed about the best I could do in this season between leaves and snow. Besides, I had not done on like this in a while.
So this is Old Falls Pond on the Mousam River in late afternoon on a November day. I took quite a few shots from this spot, with different effects in the gently moving water, before a gust of wind completely fractured the surface and I lost the reflections.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 250mm equivalent field of veiw. f8 @ 1/40th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Some color adjustment to taste.
Yellow Fisherman in the Fall
It has rained every day for the past 4 days. We got a glimpse of the sun yesterday before it socked back in, but it has been pretty dreary. We are approaching what should be the height of fall color, but the weather is just not cooperating. On Sunday afternoon, I grabbed my camera and an umbrella and drove out to Old Falls on Mousam River, pretty much in desperation. It looks like the milder rainy weather is actually delaying the full turn of the leaves. I would say Old Falls has another two weeks of color to show, at least. Unfortunately I leave on Friday for a 9 day trip to the west coast and Virginia. :( (Of course I will make the most of the trip…but I do hate to miss peak colors in New England.)
On Sunday, in very subdued late afternoon light, I found this fisherman all in yellow raingear along the Mousam above the falls. It started to rain as soon as I pressed the shutter…and I was wet before I got back to the car. Still it is, I think, an interesting shot. This is one that will benefit from a lager view. Click the image to open it on SmugMug in the light box.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. About 130mm equivalent field of view. f4.5 @ 1/80th @ ISO 320. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Back Creek Pond #2, First Fall Color
This shot was taken the same day as the Tall Fall Pond shot, just a few hundred yards down the road at the second of the ponds that feed Back Creek. For this one I got down as low as possible to use the rushes in the foreground as a frame. I actually sat down on the edge of the pond since I wanted to use Program Shift to select a smaller aperture for depth of field, and every time I use PS, since I use it so rarely and it involves a combination of buttons, I have to figure it out all over again. Which two buttons?
I found it eventually (you half press the shutter and then press the control wheel as though turning on exposure compensation…logical in its own way), and shifted the Program to get an aperture of f7.1, which looked, on the LCD, to be enough to bring the foreground rushes into focus. Then I framed and shot.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view. f7.1 @ 1/640th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness, using my HyperReal preset.
Tall Fall Pond Shot
We are still at least a week, maybe two, from full colors here in Southern Maine, but the curtain is up and the show has certainly begun! A couple of days ago I set out on my scooter at lunch time, thinking I would go hunt the last of the dragonflies, but this sky immediately caught my attention, and I turned around to head for the coast and the Back Creek ponds and the Mousam river crossing, where I could catch the sky over a landscape. I took several conventional wide angle views of Pond #1, but as I am always just a little disturbed by having to cut to top off the tall pine on the right, I tried a two shot vertical panorama. This is two 24mm views stitched one above the other to catch more of the tree and more of the sky. When you do vertical panos the perspective issues with a wide angle lens are dramatic. Even if you hold the camera out and try to keep the image plane parallel to the scene you end up with a lot of vertical perspective distortion. Looking at the two images your immediate thought it that there is no way you are going to be able to stitch them into one. I am always amazed at how well PhotoMerge in PhotoShop Elements does the job. I know it is all math, but most of time it makes very intelligent decisions about which parts of each image to retain and which to let go, and how to blend the two. The layer maps before blending look like jigsaw puzzle pieces…but when it works (and it does not always work) it produces a seamless image. Like this one. 🙂
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. Two 24mm shots. f5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 160. Stitched in PhotoMerge in PhotoShop Elements. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. I used my HyperReal preset…which is designed for scenes like this with maximum tonal range and bright colors.
Dog on the edge of Autumn. Happy Sunday!
Despite the weather app, which called for a partially sunny day all yesterday, it rained in the morning and we did not see any sun at all until after 2 in the afternoon. Even then, the coast was still under the cloud layer, so I headed inland to Old Falls on the Mousam River…hoping for dragonflies and maybe a touch of fall color.
Old Falls is my classic Autumn shot…with the rushing white water in the foreground and generally a smooth expanse of reflective water behind, receding into the flaming maples and the dark green pines. With the right sky, it is spectacular, and I will certainly get back the over the next few weeks to try to catch the colors at their peek (and the right sky :).
Yesterday though was special in its own way. Though the trees are just beginning to turn, there was enough color to make it interesting. I parked and walked across the road to stand at the rail of the bridge over the Mousam for a picture, and there was this dog there, swimming in the water. As I watched, it climbed out and walked to the end of a point of rock and stood, or eventually sat, and watched the river flowing by. It must live in the house above the river on that side. It looked perfectly at home, and it was certainly unattended. No one was throwing sticks in the water for it to fetch. It was just there, right were it needed to be for my images.
I have several different shots, with alternative framing. You will probably see at least one more as the week goes on.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. About 280mm equivalent field of view. f5 @ 1/200th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. More than usual work on balancing the light for best effect. Cropped slightly at the bottom for composition.
And for the Sunday Thought.
A couple of things actually. Shots like this continuously remind me of how dependent I am, as a photographer, on circumstance for my best images. I don’t say chance. I don’t believe in chance. If such encounters, such circumstances, are intended, then certainly our response must be thankfulness…even as we enjoy them. I nearly laughed out loud when I saw the dog there, framed in the first reflections of autumn foliage, perfect on his rock. I mean, what a gift!
I feel it every time I go out to take pictures, but, of course, the intention behind my photographic encounters must operate in every circumstance of my life. Sometimes that is harder to remember (and harder to appreciate).
Then too, I think that each photographic encounter, intentional as it is, is only as good as I make it. The dog, the foliage, the flowing water, the rock were all a gift. The images I made of them, and my sharing them with you, are my gift back…the tangible expression of my appreciation. The images depend on how well I respond to the circumstance. When I do well, and that is affirmed by the response of others to the images, then that just increases my thankfulness. It is a privilege to part of the intention…for in the end…the intention was not to show me the dog on the rock in the river framed in fall reflections…but to show how I saw it to you. It is all the gift. It is all a single flowing act of creation.
And now I am thinking how it might change my life if I could see every circumstance that way…if my first thought was, “What can I do with this to show my appreciation and make it a gift to others?” What if every interaction with the world around me were as intentionally creative as my photography? Words spoken at the checkout at the grocers. Every conversation on every car ride. Every trip to the post office or the mail box. Every phone call received and every ppt written for work. What if I could see every circumstance of my life as part of the flow of creation: see the gift in every encounter, turn it to gift of my own, and pass it on.
I think that might be what it means to be a saint. I have a ways to go yet, myself, but I see the possibility, in a dog on a rock in the river surrounded by autumn color and light.
Back Deck Geraniums
Sunday morning, when I went to the kitchen for tea, the sun was coming in over the deck rail at just the right angle to reflect back from the windows of the sliding doors and strongly illuminate the large pots of Geraniums my wife had placed on the deck. It was portrait quality lighting, with the mix of direct sun and reflected sun, and the Geraniums glowed with life. I could not resist. And when I got the camera and got out there, I found that the plants were still beaded with drops from the overnight rain. Could not have been better if I had created the whole thing in the studio (if I had a studio :).
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm macro mode, plus 1.5x digital tel-converter for scale and working distance. f4 @ 1/500th @ ISO 100. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Another Wide on the Mousam.
A three shot panorama looking up the Mousam from the bridge on Route 9 in Kennebunk. Again. I have been compelled to take this view before. It is one of the few spots in our flat forested county were you can get a mostly unobstructed view of the horizon to the west. East is easy. We have the ocean on that side. West, well you can go here, or you can go to the Kennebunk Plains, but that is about it. And here you have the river to catch the sky. 🙂 We are coming up on some of the best skies of the summer, as fronts pass in late August and early September. This is certainly one of them. (For the best view, click the image and it will open at the full width of your monitor.)
I thought about cloning out the bit of telephone pole on the left and the wires on the right, but decided they add to the framing and don’t distract too much. Besides I like the bobber and bit of ribbon caught on the wire 🙂
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. Three 24mm equivalent shots. f5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 125. Stitched in PhotoShop Elements’ PhotoMerge tool. Final processing in Lightroom.
Is it Love? Northern Spreadwings on a Pond. Happy Sunday!
Down at the ponds on Back Creek yesterday on my photoprowl, there were lots of Northern Spreadwings, and several mating pairs. It was a still day, with subdued light..patches of sun but mostly clouds…waiting for a font to arrive…and the reflections on the pond were lovely. There is a lot going on in this image. The surface tension dimples around the stems of the delicate yellow flowers are fascinating. I think the deep one under the damselflies is caused by the weight of the flies on the adjacent stem. Their weight is pushing water “up” the stem and it is flowing into the dimple next to it, forming a small vortex with is pulling the dimple deeper. That is my theory anyway. Whatever is causing the effect, it adds visual interest and beauty to the image.
Then, of course, you have the damselflies themselves, perfectly mirrored in the still water for a shape that is simple in its apparent complexity…once the eye sorts it out. Finally you have the surface of the water, laced with what might be spider webs, or lines of pollen, or underwater vegetation…whatever…they add texture to pale silver-blue and delight the eye. All in all, this is an image I could look at a long time.
It is not perfect. It was taken at the full reach of my SX40HS…1680mm equivalent, with the digital assist of the 2x tel-converter function. The digital tel-converter works really well on highly detailed subjects like birds or close-ups of dragonflies…but when, as here, you have large areas with little detail, the digital artifacts are fairly apparent. I used some noise reduction in Lightroom, but if you were to blow the image up too large it would basically fall apart. Too large is say, to fill a 24 inch screen or larger, or to make a print at 11×14 or larger. I know the limits of my camera…but still…I would not have gotten the image at all with any other rig (can you see me on my electric scooter with DSLR and enough lens to reach this shot?). I might have come close with a very heavy crop, but that would have left me with about the same image quality. So I am happy to view the image at “regular” sizes and enjoy.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1680mm equivalent. f5.8 @ 1/640th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. And I did crop it for composition and apply the noise reduction.
And for the Sunday thought:
I never took as many local images as I have since starting my Pic 4 Today blog, can it be…four and a half years ago…and I have never worked my local patch as hard as I have these past months when I am on “travel restriction” in my job…all my summer trips are canceled. If I want to take pics, it has to be fairly close to home. And on my electric scooter (my primary photoprowl transport in this summer of car complications) with its range of 10-12 miles round-trip, and I find myself visiting a few local locations over and over…and enjoying it. It is surprising the range of photographic interest such a small radius around my home can provide. I am loving it.
My fairly recent interest in photographing Odonata has helped, of course. It gives me motivation to go back to the ponds today, since there may be new dragonflies and damseflies that were just not there yesterday. But the real delight is finding images like this one…that transcend the subject to create a thing of beauty in itself. It might be the grand landscape of the Kennebunk Plains under stacked cumulous clouds, or it might be the patterns the high tide as made of the tall marsh grass, or it might be a Song Sparrow on a branch with a bug…or it could be pair of mating spreadwing damselflies reflected in a pond…but just about every day I find one image that makes me say “I love that!” That image touches my center of delight. You see there, I have just defined at least the surface level of love. We love what delights us.
Of course, we know that beyond delight, love must move us to commitment…to commitment to the good of what delights us. Love that does not move us to serve and preserve what delights us, is not love. Ultimately love that does not move us to delight even in the unlovely is not love, according to the best example we have been set in God. Hence the question mark in the title today. It is a challenge as much to me as anyone else, and, honestly, an open question in my life. Is it love? Is that what I see in Northern Spreadwings reflected in a pond. Is that what I am finding as I work my local patch these days?
Time will tell.
Evening Light on Back Creek Pond #1
This is one of those “magical moments” shots were the light is just amazing, and almost totally beyond the ability of the camera to capture the effect. Early evening, about 6PM, in southern Maine in July…with the sun still well up, but with a slant to the light that casts long shadows, and a color that is just warm enough to caress and draw up all the warm detail, without, as yet, any touch of orange. Clear blue sky. Very English light! The contrast between sunlight and shadow is what catches the eye…and what confuses the sensor.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 200.
Way more than my usual processing in Lightroom. Full shadow fill, black point well left, added clarity and just a touch of vibrance for a start. Then a Graduated Filter effect from the top left to darken the sky slightly, a GFE from the bottom to lighten the foreground and add clarity and warmth, and a GFE from the right to left to remove a bit of warmth from the sunlit trees. Close 🙂
Close enough, I hope, to convey what I saw in the scene.
7/5/2012: Mousam at High Tide, Kennebunk ME
On my way to the Dragon Ponds the other day I had to pull over where the fishermen park by the Route 9 bridge over the Mousam River to catch this view. That is one of the unforeseen advantages of Froggy the Scoot (the electric scooter I bought for my local summer photoprowls, in case you have not been keeping up). You can stop on a dime on a whim on a view, anywhere there is sufficient shoulder to prop a kickstand. No excuses for missing any photo-op. On this day, a storm front was coming over, the clouds were spectacular, the river was brim full and just rippled enough for interest, there was this enticing little island of grass, and, on closer inspection, a rose in foreground. What could be better?
I framed this scene twice, once with more sky for drama and once with the rose. Only in looking at the two this morning, trying to decide which one to post, did I realize that what I really wanted was both…rose and sky. The two frames did not line up perfectly, as, of course, I was not thinking of a vertical panorama when I took them, but they were close enough to give it a try in PhotoShop Elements 10’s PhotoMerge tool. I expected to loose a lot on both edges where the images did not overlap, but PSE’s auto fill did an excellent job of projecting the content to fill the corners. If you want the challenge, try to see what is real and what is generated in the top left and bottom right corners. Amazing software. And I ended up with the image I wanted, even when I didn’t know what I wanted until too late. 🙂
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view. f5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 200.
Two frames merged vertically as above. Final processing in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.