Monthly Archives: July 2011
7/21/2011: Black-eyed in the Sun (Susan)
We have a vigorous stand of Black-eyed Susans in the yard this year. I went out after supper to catch the late light on the flowers in the front yard and got down under this beauty to put it between the camera and the sun. Between the Active-D Lighting on the camera and some Fill Light in Lightroom, I was able to catch a fairly natural balance between the shadowed stem and the highlighted petals.
Nikon Coolpix P500 in Close Up mode (macro) at 32mm equivalent field of view, f3.7 @ 1/640th @ ISO 160.
Processed for Clarity and Sharpness (and that extra bit of Fill Light) in Lightroom.
7/20/2011: Eastern Tiger Swallowtail on Milkweed
As I mentioned yesterday, the Milkweed was in bloom at Laudholm Farm over the weekend, and it had attracted a variety of butterflies…well beyond the Monarchs you expect to see there. Many of them, like this Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, were rather travel worn. This specimen looks like it might have had an encounter with a bird who went away with a large chunk of its right wing. I am often amazed at how damaged a butterfly can be and still manage to fly just fine.
I was also amazed by the smell of the Milkweed bloom…in a mass as it is at Laudholm, it is very sweet indeed! No wonder it attracts insects of all kinds.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 810mm equivalent field of view, f5.7 @ 1/500th @ ISO 160. Program with Active D-Lighting.
Processed for Clarity and Sharpness in Lightroom.
7/19/2011: With bugs on…
On a visit to Laudholm Farms and the Wells National Estuarine Research Center last Saturday there were bugs everywhere. (Birds were few…but lots of bugs.) Butterflies of several varieties in the Milkweed flowers and the forest, moths, dragonflies, and, of course, bees.
After a valiant search through all my references and on the internet, this appears to be Meadow Rue. It is common at the edges of woods and in hedges within sight of the sea here in Kennebunk, and appears particularly lush this season. The bees certainly find it attractive.
The Queen Ann’s Lace, Yarrow on the other hand, attracted these very small Yellow-Jackets Hoverflies (thanks Judy).
Nikon Coolpix P500 in Close Up mode. 1) 100mm equivalent field of view, f4.6 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. Cropped from full frame. 2) 260mm equivalent, f7.1 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
7/18/2011: Baby Chipper in Evening Sun
A little mammal for Monday.
Walking one evening last week, along what is called Parson’s Way in Kennebunkport, a path along the cliff-top of Old Fort Point, between St. Anne’s and the Bush compound on Walker’s Point, we came upon this baby Chipmunk on the sidewalk. He was somewhat alarmed to be caught out in the open and froze. We were able to get close enough for this shot with the long end of the zoom on the Coolpix, before he decided the safer course was flight. The late sun of an Maine evening picks out the detail and color.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 810mm equivalent field of view, f5.7 @ 1/200th @ ISO 120. Program with Active D-Lighting.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
7/17/2011: Whimsy, The Children’s Garden. Happy Sunday!
The Child’s Garden only opened a year ago the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden, after at least 2 years of development. It is hard to imagine a more whimsical place. White bordered yards with cat picket fences, grass roofed Victorian sheds, tall hollyhocks and red roses, giant sunflowers, old fashioned water pumps, a windmill, a pond with the boats from Wind in the Willows and a life sized brass statue of the bear from Blueberries for Sal, William Carlos William’s Red Wheelbarrow (an actual red wheelbarrow with the poem on the side), a tiny bog with carnivorous plants, a tree house and a wigwam, a bear cave, a windmill, Farmer Macgregor’s vegetable patch and the first annual gourd Olympics. And that is without mentioning the Gnome Shed with its rounded door and a roof of blueberry plants. Whimsy, pure and simple.
Like most attempts at whimsy, this is a very adult production. The attention to detail, the hyper-inventiveness, the elaboration is very unchildlike. It is not simple, not innocent, but very calculated…calculated to appeal to a child.
It certainly appeals to the child in me. I love it! I appreciate the whimsy and admire the inventiveness. I have no real idea, though, how a child would see it. If the children in attendance on a Friday in July were any evidence, then it certainly has at least a quiet appeal…but then I suspect that the children in attendance were already a select group…as in the children of parents who would appreciate a day at the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden and expect their children will enjoy it too. Children who have been read Wind in the Willows and Peter Rabbit, Peter Pan, and Blueberries for Sal. Children with lovingly fed imaginations. Rare children, I suspect, these days. Then too, it is hard to say how much of the children’s enjoyment of this truly magical place is a simple reflection of the obvious joy their parents take in it.
Ah…but it does not really matter, in the end. Certainly part of our love of whimsy is spiritual, and was succulently captured by Jesus when he told us that it is the children, and those who have (as we say it today) maintained their inner child, who will inherit the kingdom of heaven. Not a childish faith, but a childlike faith is what we all need. And adult whimsy is certainly one of the best approaches to that inner child, and to that faith.
The whimsical Children’s Garden at the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden succeeds, largely, because its creators believed that if they could touch the inner child in themselves, then true children would enjoy it. And that is indeed a childlike faith, and that puts the Children’s Garden half way to heaven as far as I am concerned.
Happy Sunday.
7/16/2011: Pool of Clouds in Evening Sun
The pool behind the bridge on Back Creek near where it flows into the Mousam River in Kennebunk, on a summer evening with the late sun across the marsh and the clouds caught.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 31mm equivalent field of view. Backlight/HDR mode. Nominal exposure f3.7 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. Quick Retouch applied in camera.
Processed for Clarity, Sharpness, and Contrast in Lightroom.
7/15/2011: New mown hay. HDR
I wish, of course, that there was some way to capture the smell of new mown hay…but I will have to rely on your memory for that. There was a bit of summer evening haze rising off the marsh and forest beyond the field, but I like the evening light, the sky, the tree in the foreground, the texture of the shadowed bark, and the light coming through the leaves. I like the fine un-mown grass in the foreground and the texture of the stubble field. And I like the way the hanging branches frame the pines in the middle distance.
Because of the wide range of tones, from bright sky and sun-lit field to the tree trunk in full shadow (the sun is directly behind the tree trunk) and the bushes at the bottom in deep shadow…this shot is only possible via HDR: in this case the in-camera HDR on the Nikon Coolpix P500. When set to Backlight/HDR mode the camera takes a number of images very rapidly (almost instantaneously), and then combines them in-camera for extended dynamic range before writing them to the card as a jpeg. In most cases, the result is way too flat, but it can be processed to good effect in Lightroom with a combination of Recovery, Fill Light, Blackpoint adjustment, and Contrast to produce a result very like you would get from 3 or more exposures processed in Photomatix or other HDR software. I find that they process better in Lightroom if I apply another layer of in-camera processing…in this case, a low level of Quick Retouch…before I upload the image to my laptop.
This particular image is, after all that, very close to a natural eye view of the scene, with what amounts to a dynamic range at least beginning to approach what the eye can see. Of course, your monitor (or mine for that matter) can’t reproduce the range of the human eye either, so clearly the results are only an approximation of nature…but satisfying, imho, all the same.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 31mm equivalent, f4.5 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160 (nominal exposure…but of course there was the in-camera processing on top of that).
Processed as above in Lightroom.
7/14/2011: Coreopsis, Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens
Since our visit to the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay Maine almost a week ago, I have avoided the temptation to bombard you with flower shots (okay…except for the experience and photo technique piece on Point & Shoot 4 Landscape, here). You will, however, see some shots from the trip over the next week or so.
This is Coreopsis, according to the helpful sign in the bed, but it is not like any Coreopsis I have ever seen. We have Coreopsis of the normal yellow variety in our yard (see right). This isn’t it. I can only assume that the CMBG variety is a cultivar of someone’s invention.
Ah, but it certainly is a striking flower!
Nikon Coolpix p500 in Close Up scene mode, 32mm equivalent field of view, f3.7 @ 1/400th @ ISO 160.
(The shot from the yard is also Close Up mode, as above, but 1/200.)
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
7/13/2011: Odonata. A different Wings on Wednesday.
There are a lot of dragonflies at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens when we visited last Friday. I used to think anything that looked like a dragonfly was a dragonfly…but I am learning, slowly, about damsels, darners, spreadwings, skimmers, and emeralds. As near as I can tell, the critter above is a Twelve Spotted Skimmer, though it lacks the cloudy blue patches on the wings of the other 12 Spots I photographed that day, and certainly has some extra color in the tail.
I found images on the internet of both these types, all labeled 12 Spotted Skimmer…so we will go with that until someone who really knows their Odonata sets me right 😉
I also found this Emerald Spreadwing resting on a leaf (for about a second) where it is somewhat difficult to see. The best part of photographing Odonata at a place like the CMBG, is the backgrounds!
And this Blue Darner resting on rock where it is really hard to see (the wings at least)…and, as you may notice, very hard for the camera to focus on. It was pretty still so I wish I had taken the time to check focus after the shot…but there it is! Just a “for the record” shot.
Nikon Coolpix P500 in (except for the Darner) Close Up scene mode, with the zoom setting over-ridden. 1) 499mm equivalent field of view, f5.7 @ 1/320th @ ISO 160. 2) 468mm @ f5.7 @ 1/200th @ ISO 160. 3) 435mm @ F5.6 @ 1/250th @ ISO 160. 4) 578mm @ f5.7 @ 1/200th @ ISO 160. 5) 810mm @ f5.7 @ 1/320th @ ISO 160.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
7/12/2011: Burdock Flowers
The other evening while walking the beaches in Kennebunk we came across this fine specimen of Burdock in flower growing at the head of Oaks Neck, the point of rock between Middle and Gooch’s Beach. The Narragansett (four and half story 1930s beach hotel now converted to condos) across the way provided open shade in the low evening sun, and Close Up mode (macro) on the Coolpix caught all the vivid color and detail of the flower. As a boy we thought of these as particularly vicious weeds, but, in trendy Kennebunk today I would be surprised if some health food aficionado does not harvest this plant before it has a chance to make burrs :).
The Burdock flower is certainly striking…if not quite beautiful. It is kind of the Americanized version (cliché warning!) of the Scottish Thistle. In lots of ways it could be our national flower too. I certainly would not object. 🙂
Nikon Coolpix P500 in Close Up Scene mode, 32mm equivalent field of view, f3.7 @ 1/60th @ ISO 160.
Processed for Clarity and Sharpness in Lightroom.