Posts in Category: reflections
6/10/2012: Snowy Against the Sun. Happy Sunday!
I took a late ride on my scooter down to the Kennebunk Bridle Path after supper yesterday to see if there were any dragonflies flying late. I found a Seaside Dragonlet, which is always a treat, but that was about it. However, there was an egret working the marsh pools along the Path, just inside the Rachel Carson National Wildlife boundary. I could not resist a few shots. I was not until I got back to the computer that I saw the effect of the late sun behind the bird and across the water. Ahaaa.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1680mm equivalent field of view (840mm optical zoom plus 2x digital tel-converter function). f5.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 100. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought: I was thinking yesterday on my two photo-prowls about just how aware looking for dragonflies makes you! It pushes the boundaries of what is possible. You have to be tuned to any motion, any fleeting shadow across the marsh grass, any tiny thing that moves. You have to check the likely bushes for dragons to hang up in. You have to scan every pool. You become hyperaware. And because of that you see more of everything. More birds. More flowers. More other bugs. More everything.
I requires constant effort. You drift. Or at lest I do. I catch my self just walking again, watching the trail ahead where my feet will fall and not much else, thinking about…whatever! And then I have to push my awareness back out of my head and start looking again.
And then there is an Egret standing against the low afternoon sun. It is not a reward for your attention. It would have been there whether you saw it or not. And I can’t claim much credit. After all I did not see the miracle of the sun behind the bird until I got home and looked at the image.
I know there is a correspondence to the spirit here…that my spiritual attention is not often at the pitch of my physical attention when looking for dragonflies. What if I looked for angels? What if I looked for miracles? What if I just looked for Christ in everyone I pass, in everyone I touch? What if I pushed by spiritual attention to see the spiritual in the world around me with that same intensity I devote to dragonflies? Is there such a thing as spiritual hyperawareness? Is that what means to be a saint?
Of course, I am cheating on myself here. I know that. I stopped separating the spiritual and the physical, in theory, some time ago. My search for dragonflies is a spiritual search. And I do experience the full impact, now that I have noticed it in the image, of the Egret against the sun on my spirit. Still…I have a feeling I am still missing too much…that my awareness needs to be kicked up a notch or two before I walk the miracle walk all the time. I have a feeling I have failed too often to see Christ in those I touch, just as I must have missed a thousand Egrets against the sun.
4/12/2012: Fishing the Mousam, Kennebunk ME
I made a brief stop at Roger’s Park along the Mousam River on my way back from a hardware store run yesterday afternoon, hoping to catch the towering sky above the run of the river or reflected in the skating pond. What I found there were fishermen. The rapids above the park attract fly-fishers, and the transition water between the rapids and the more open still reach below is a prime area for Alewive traps.
This is a somewhat classic fly-fisher shot, displaying the concentration of the sport. Fly-fishing is closer to fish-hunting than anything short of spear-fishing. It is a strange combination of talents in fact. There is nothing more graceful in sport than a well cast line…and then, once the fly hits the water, there is nothing more intense than the concentration of the play of the fly, hand on line, and eye on the prize.
Nothing could be more different than fishing for alewive (for more on the Alewive see the wiki). You deploy your trap (relatively sophisticated traps these days) and you go home and watch TV (or to your real job) until it is time to go back and check the traps.
Oh, and I did catch some clouds above the skating pond.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1) 190mm equivalent field of view. f4.5 @ 1/100th @ ISO 200. 2) 24mm. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 320. 3) 120mm. f4.5 @ 1/100th @ ISO 125. 4) 24mm. f7.1 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 320.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4/11/2012: Back Creek brim full: panorama
With Back Creek brim full and an amazing sky overhead, who could resist attempting a panorama? I never learn. Panoramas with anything but absolutely still water are always a challenge. Here even the ripples move enough between shots to cause the stiching software (the PhotoMerge module in PhotoShop Elements in this case) some problems. Still it did a good job. I love the sweep of water, with its distorted reflections, under that awesome sky.
Three exposures at 24mm equivalent field of view on the Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and – 1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4/8/2012: Happy Easter! Back Creek under Clouds (again)
There are some scenes I can photograph over and over. In fact, if a scene is worth photographing once, chances are, it is worth photographing again…many times. The basic conformation of the landscape might not change (at least during the reasonable life-time of a tree), but if there is water involved, water is never the same twice, and the sky, of course, is always changing. I was reminded by a TV show I watched this week on Amazon Prime (Inspector Lewis, if you must know), that the painter Constable, during one period of his life, went out daily, to the same spot, and painted the sky…clouds in particular…because he was fascinated by ever changing play of light and form.
Back Creek, about 2 miles from our front door, is such a place for me. The road to our closest beach crosses Back Creek about 400 yards from were it empties into the Mousam River. It is a tidal creek in every sense, and the water is constantly rushing under the bridge in one direction or the other, as the road creates a dam that catches water on the up tide, and releases it on the down. Yesterday, during my Easter Saturday photo-prowl, we had an exceptionally high tide, and I was there just at the crest. I had made a run down for the sky, which promised great things from our doorstep, but when I got there, the marsh on either side of the road was completely under water. That is rare enough to be of note. And the sky lived up to its promise. A front was coming in from the south-west, and the leading edge of the cloud cover, ragged big soft clouds with gaps of blue, was filling the sky in that direction, piling backward more densely over the horizon. It was awesome!
With the water right up against the road, only a foot below the road in fact, I flipped out the LCD on the Canon and got down to ground level to shoot out across the water from a low angle. This shot, on the side of the road away from the sea and sheltered from the wind, the reflections are just as important as the sky.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f4.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 100. I am astounded, and delighted, with this little camera’s ability to capture a scene like this without resorting to any HDR techniques. All it needed was pretty standard processing in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Now it is, of course, Easter Sunday. I live by faith in the risen one. It is a choice I have made, and I know that, but most of the time it feels like I was compelled to that choice. It was always a gentle compulsion…a matter of how I am made and how the world is…in the end an inability to deny the awe I feel in life, in living here and now, every day. I was made to ask why and how…in the end, I found I could not avoid asking who…and the answer, despite every evasion I could come up with, was right there, planted in long ago Sunday and Vacation Bible School encounters, and nurtured over time by a patient spirit revealing wonder at every turn. There are some stories, some truths, you can return to over and over, every day, because they are never the same twice. They are alive, like the land and water scape under clouds, and I come back again and again to see what wonder they display today…how my mind and heart are illuminated, refreshed, reborn in the light of what the risen one has for me today. Happy Easter. He is risen. He is risen indeed.
3/17/2012: Champlain Layers, Burlington VT
Another shot from our short trip to Burlington Vermont this week. Among the attractions of Burlington is a series of beaches and parks in towntown Burlington along the shore of Lake Champlain. This marina would be full in another season…it will in fact fill up quickly over the next 6-8 weeks, but for now it is a study in graphic design, with the lighthouse on its breakwater forming a middle ground and the layered mountains behind. It stretches the eye and challenges our sense of space but I think it works exactly because of that.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and -1/3EV exposure compensation. 90mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 100.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity and sharpness.
3/14/2012: Champlain Blue, Burlington VT
My wife, daughter number 5, and I took a brief overnighter to Burlington Vermont to visit daughter number 3, who attends Burlington College. By the time we got there the weather had closed in, but we still spent a few hours walking along the shore of Lake Champlain. The Adirondacks across the water were faded to blue on blue, or grey on grey, but the light was soft and lovely, and I had fun playing with simplified compositions.
Canon SX40HS at 84mm equivalent field of view. f5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 100. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Lightroom 4 has changed many of the develop tools I used every day, and I am having to relearn to get the same effects.
2/16/2012: Hunting the flats. Great Egret.
A lone egret hunts the flats of the Indian River off Biolab Road at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. Not much more to be said about this shot, except maybe, that it was the only image I got on Biolab Road this year 🙂
Canon SX40HS at 840mm equivalent field of view. f5.8 @ 1/800th @ ISO 100. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
1/20/2012: Venetian Gondola
Continuing with found beauty in Vegas, unlikely as that is…
The Gondolas on the Canal in the Venetian are all ornate, but this one is particularly attractive, especially against the blue water and the red brick. I tried this as an HDR, but I like the untreated image better. Any painterly quality here comes purely from the high ISO…though this is pretty good IQ indeed for 1000 ISO on a small sensor in artificial light.
Canon SX40HS at 100mm equivalent field of view. f4.5 @ 1/20th @ ISO 1000. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
1/19/2012: Vegas HDR (The Venetian)
You have to kind of (or at least I have to kind of) disconnect my sense of reality to enjoy Vegas. If I even for one moment allow myself to see through the incredibly expensive veneer (or to think about where the funds that paid for all this came from, which amounts to the same thing), then…well then I don’t like Vegas much. So on my way from my room to the show floor at SHOT yesterday, I carried my camera in my hand and made myself find some beauty. I was looking for images that I could process in Dynamic Photo HDR for interesting effects. The reflections in the canal were eye-catching, and, as I suspected it responded in interesting ways to DPHDR.
Canon SX40HS at 100mm equivalent field of view. f4.5 @ 1/20th @ ISO 1250. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in DPHDR for a single jpg Tone-mapping. Final processing in Lightroom (Intensity and Sharpness and a bit of noise reduction).
1/11/2012: Back Creek and the Mousam under Skies.
This is another experiment with the Dynamic Photo HDR application and another shot from the gloomy Sunday at the coast. DPHDR gives you all kinds of options for fine tuning the tone mapping, even from a single .jpg…and it produces a well rendered image with very little haloing (halo is the light band where dark sections of the image meet light sections, common in HDR work…or it is a similar light band around individual pixels that limits the smoothness of tones in HDR work.) Final adjustment in Lightroom using a Graduated Filter effect to lighten the sky was required to keep the whole thing from going surreal. As you may have noted, I don’t mind hyper-real images, but I do try to avoid the surreal look of overcooked HDR.
For comparison, here is the pure Lightroom version.
The Lightroom version is perhaps a bit truer to the mood of the day. It was undeniably gloomy. But the DPHDR version has more impact as an image. I am going to have to pay more attention…take some shots intentionally to test and challenge my memory for light values before I can say which one is “truer” to reality…to the naked eye view.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/640th @ ISO 160. Program with iContrast and –1/3 EV exposure compensation.
Processing as above.
And just for fun, here it is rendered as a paining in Dynamic Auto Painter, with the original overlayed in PhotoShop Elements as a grayscale using Vivid Light to bring up more detail.
