Monthly Archives: July 2011
7/11/2011: Chipmunk Defense Posture
A mammal for Monday.
There were lots of chipmunks on the grounds of the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. This one was along the path below the Hillside Gardens, between the gardens and the river. He ran across in front of us and then kept just out of sight, or just too fast to catch, as we walked on…until, quite by accident, my wife Carol got ahead of him. Then he didn’t know what to do, so he just froze in this pose long enough for me to work as close as the macro telephoto setting on my camera would allow. The pose, I suspect, is the traditional freeze posture…an instinctive defensive mechanism based on the quite reasonable (considering likely prey) “if I don’t move they can’t see me” premise…since I have other images of chipmunks in this same pose in similar situations.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 700mm equivalent field of view, f5.7 @ 1/50th @ ISO 200. Close Up mode.
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.
7/9/2011: Summer Evening 2, Kennebunk ME
The most hardy of tourists and summer folk, with a scattering of locals down to the beach late in the day. You really have to view this as large as your monitor will allow. (Just click the image) This is Gooch’s Beach in Kennebunk ME (most tourists think it is in Kennebunkport, and the point on the right, beyond the Kennebunk River, is…but the beach is solidly in Kennebunk :). This matters to summer folk with houses there and to us locals).
Not an easy pano…four shots using the Nikon’s Assisted Panorama Mode so the second shot is laid over the first, etc. I tried to work as quickly as possible to minimize movement of people and boats…not to mention the ocean…but it works for the most part.
Four 32mm equivalent field of view exposures @ f3.7 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160, stitched in PhotoMerge in PhotoShop Elements 9 using manual positioning. Final processing in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness. It is cropped from the bottom as there was a family in beach chairs in the shade of the wall that drew the eye down from the horizon.
This is a huge sweep. When taking the left-most exposure my back was pretty much completely to the exposure on the far right.
7/8/2011: Summer Evening 1, Kennebunk ME
Kennebunk happens to be where I live…but for some Kennebunk is summer…beaches, boats, the ocean, the taste of salt in your hair, bare feet on wood floors, and the breeze through summer home, or grand hotel, window screens. It is not a world I am part of, but it is one I see all around me. We locals don’t go to the beach during the day, but come evening we are apt to wander down to see if there is any parking along the beach yet, to enjoy, if we can, the late light and see the most hardy of the tourists and summer folk still out, making the absolute most of a day in Kennebunk.
I like the way these girls stand on their shadow/reflections and the quality of the light and the modeling.
Nikon P500 at 215mm equivalent field of view, f5.6 @ 1/500th @ ISO 160. Programmed auto with Active D-Lighting.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness. Cropped top and bottom for composition.
7/7/2011: Storm over Mothers’ Beach
My daughter and a friend like to walk in the evening. They got ambitious last might and walked the 2 miles or so to the ocean. Unfortunately when they turned to come home, this is what they saw bearing down on them, complete with flashes of lightning. I was called to the rescue with the car, and, while there, of course, had to try to capture the sky. It is really more impressive (even more impressive :)) in the enlarged view available by clicking the image.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view, f3.4 @ 1/125th @ ISO 200. Programmed auto with Active-D Lighting.
This took more than my usual processing in Lightroom. I did not think to switch the White Balance to Cloudy, and the auto WB did not respond well…the clouds were blue, blue, blue. Auto WB in Lightroom took care of most of it, but I also had to selectively reduce the saturation of the blue and aqua bands, using the color selection tool in the HSL panel. To capture the visual effect, I also had to reduce overall brightness. Though it still looks a bit strange…it did in fact look a bit strange in reality. Very weird light!
A little luminance noise reduction smoothed the dark sections of the clouds.
Finally, since I had the camera tipped up a sharp angle, and the zoom set to 23mm, the wide-angle distortion was very visible in the houses and beach structures, especially on the right. Lightroom’s lens and vertical distortion tools restored correct perspective, at the cost of minor cropping of the top right and left.
7/6/2011: Song Sparrow Sings
They don’t call it a Song Sparrow for nothing! Few birds I know of sing with such absolute energy as the Song Sparrow. He tips back his head, opens his beak, and launches the song toward the sky. I know the dangers and failings of anthropomorphizing, but the Song Sparrow certainly appears to take joy in singing…and pride in being the loudest male on the patch.
Song Sparrows are everywhere this time of year within a mile of the coast, wherever there is a patch of Beach Rose clinging to the dune or the rock.
Canon SD4000IS behind the 20-75x Vario Eyepiece on the ZEISS DiaScope 85FL for the equivalent field of view of a 1700mm lens on a full frame DSLR, 1/640th @ ISO 125, f4 effective.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
And here is a bonus pose at about 3500mm equivalent field of view. Followed by a snippet of video of this and a second bird.
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.
7/4/2011: Tide’s Out. Happy July 4th
Okay…except for its quintessential summerness, this shot has noting to do with July 4th. It is another from my late evening loop down by the ocean Saturday, which happened to be at extreme low tide. You can see, from the anchor cable on the boat on the right, just how deep the water is in this little cove at high tide.
Though deceptively simple, there is actually lots going on in this shot. It is mostly about layers, lines, and light…with the bright yellow of the center boat anchoring it. To really see the textures that form the lines you need to view it lager in the Smugmug lightbox by clicking it.
Nikon Coolpix P500 @ 130mm equivalent field of view, f5 @ 1/320th @ ISO 160. Programmed auto, with Active D-Lighting and Normal Image Optimization.
I experimented with the Nikon’s in camera post processing on this image…applying Quick Retouch…which apparently adds some dynamic range (D-Lighting), sharpens, and adjusts the blackpoint or contrast slightly…before taking it into Lightroom for final processing. I have been surprised to find that on some shots the Nikon’s in camera post processing can improve the result while introducing less noise than achieving the same effects in Lightroom. Not all images…but some.
And I pray that your July 4th (whether it is a holiday for you or not) will be blessed.
7/3/2011: Sunset over Back Creek, Happy Sunday!
I happened to look out the window at about 7:30 last evening, and the light across the yard sucked me out and sent me down to the ocean. I did a loop around the Kennebunk beaches, and found myself at the confluence of the Mousam and Back Creek just at sunset. The holiday weekend folk were packing and leaving the beach, so I was actually able to park and watch the sunset.
It was not dark enough for the Nikon’s Night Landscape mode to work, but this shot uses the Backlight/HDR mode…it is three shots assembled in camera for extended dynamic range. I have been disappointed with the effect during daylight, but here it was just the thing to capture a relatively natural balance between the bright colored sky and the landscape. Too often sunset images catch the spectacular sky against a dark, or even completely black, foreground…which is never the way we actually see it in nature. In reality there is always considerable light on the foreground until well after the sun is completely set. Trying to bring up the foreground in post processing sometimes helps, but at the cost of considerable noise in the image, and effort with the software.
This is a closer shot from the same location, a few moments later, using a longer zoom setting for framing.
I love it that the camera was able to maintain detail even in the trees against the sun. Both of these will benefit from a larger view by clicking the image to open the Smugmug lightboox.
I will admit to being (maybe too) interested in the technique and technology that make such shots possible with the cameras we have today…but, of course, the hardware and software only have value for the results they produce. That more natural balance of light over the landscape, with the full intensity of the sunset sky above, is worth capturing because it makes the image more than sunset shot…it makes it, as I see it, an opportunity for the viewer to more completely participate in the event itself…to be there, where the photographer stood…and experience the sunset as the photographer experienced it. And this is, again, I think, a good thing…a value…and what photography can, at its best, accomplish.
These images are not photography at its best, of course, but they are satisfying attempts to capture the feeling of the place and time. I think. Sunset over Back Creek, July 2nd, 2011.
We are, perhaps, already in Sunday territory in that discussion, but one of the things I love most about photography is that opportunity to share each other’s vision and experience…to share worlds…and what I see most clearly, as I experience the growing community of photography on flickr and facebook and everywhere on the web today, is that the sense of what is beautiful, admirable, interesting, sad, touching, valuable, and even humorous…what is worth taking a picture of…extends across all cultures and races…is something we, as children of the creator…share, no matter where we were born or how we were raised. Oh, I do occasionally find a photographer who is into a slice of the world I don’t particularly want to look at, but it is rare, and even so, I can generally see the value he or she saw, even if it is not my value. And, many times, I am simply stunned by what others see and capture, because it could so easily have been what I saw, if I had been there. I so I would like to think anyway.
Nikon Coolpix P500 in Backlight/HDR mode. Nominal exposure info: 1) 53mm equivalent field of view, f4.4 @ 1/250 @ ISO 160, 2) 175mm @ f5.4 @ 1/160th @ ISO 160.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity, Sharpness, and intensity. 1) was cropped slightly for composition.
7/2/2011: Scarborough Marsh, ME
I spent 5 hours yesterday on Scarborough Marsh in Southern Maine looking for a Little Egert…an old world species seen only a handful of times in North America, and never in before in Maine. Though it had been seen by any number of people the past two days, it was not seen yesterday, despite the fact that there were 100s of pairs of eyes looking. That does not mean it is not still there…there are 3000 acres of marsh on both sides of the Scarborough river, and that is a lot of space for lone egret not to be seen in.
Still, while there, I was reminded that Maine has skies too, as high cumulous clouds built in from the west and south. This is a view of the a feeder stream for the high tide Scarborough from East Trail (an old rail bed) where it crosses the marsh, looking, as near as I can tell, just about north.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 32mm equivalent, f7.1 @ i/640th @ ISO 160. Programmed auto with Active D-Lighting and Vivid Image Optimization.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.