Monthly Archives: December 2011
12/31/2011: Cape Porpoise Harbor in Green
The final pictures for 2011.
When I was about to leave Cape Porpoise the other day on my Snowy Owl prowl, I turned to see that a shaft of sun had come in under the cloud over to light up the harbor and the town. It was not the usual warm low sun shaft that sometimes leaks under the cloud cover at sunset, but a shaft of mid-day winter light…it turned the water of the harbor bright green, and picked out every detail in the boats and houses of the village. It was stunning. I hurried across the parking lot and out on to the deck at the (closed for the winter) clam shack to catch a few shots before the clouds closed in and shut off the light. This shot is zoomed in to frame the village and the church.
Canon SX40HS at 112mm equivalent field of view. f4.5 @ 1/500th @ ISO 160. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
And here is the side shot (24mm equivalent).
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness. Auto color temperature adjustment to match the green in the two shots. Some extra Recovery and some exposure and brightness adjustment in the second shot to tame the highlights.
12/30/2011: Cape Porpoise Light
After my fruitless search for a Snowy Owl at East Point yesterday (see previous post), I continued down the coast with, as they say, one eye pealed for anything white on the rocks of Fortune’s Beach. Nothing. The amazing clouds were still happening though, so when I got to Cape Porpoise I swung out to the fishing peer that overlooks the harbor and the Light. As I got out of the car, the sun broke through and spotlighted the little island with the Lighthouse under the dark sky. I had just time to grab a couple of shots before the clouds moved and it went back into shadow.
These two, at 285 and 100mm equivalent fields of view, catch the effect well.
Though the sun was pretty much obscured by the cloud mass, I was shooting into the sun, as you can see in this full harbor shot at 24mm equivalent. This was a tricky exposure and required some work with the Graduated Filter effect in Lightroom to balance the foreground and the sky.
1) f5 @ 1/400th @ ISO 100. 2) f4.5 @ 1/640th @ ISO 100. 3) f5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 250. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness. Some tampering with the color temperature was needed, as well as cropping on the second shot for composition.
12/29/2011: East Point and Wood Island Light
Yesterday was a good day to look for Snowy Owls. I had to go north on a shopping expedition so on my way back I worked my way out to East Point Sanctuary at the tip of Biddeford Pool. I have seen Snowys before on the the rocks and stony beaches of the point, as well as on Wood Island, which is visible from the point across the Saco River channel. In fact I saw my very first Snowy there.
As it turns out, yesterday was a very good day to look for Snowy Owls…it just was not a very good day for finding them. 🙁
The goodness of the day is due to the weather. There was a front passing and the clouds and the sea and the light all along the coast south from Casco Bay was spectacular. This is the view across the channel to Wood Island Light. I love the hammered steal of the sea, and that mass of cloud slanting in over Wood Island, with the Lighthouse standing against the ranked clouds out over Cape Elizabeth and the far shore of Saco Bay.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/800th @ ISO 100. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
The seas coming into Saco Bay were huge. In this second shot, I zoomed in for more detail on the Lighthouse, but also to catch one of those breaking swells. Coming in against the wind, when the swells broke on the underwater ledges between the Point and the Light, the spray made for some fantastic shows.
Canon SX40HS at 77mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/640th @ ISO 125. Program with iContrast and -1/3EV exposure compensation. To capture this shot I took a burst of images at 4 fps when the wave began to break and selected the best of them.
The final shot is from a bit further down the channel, looking past the light and out to sea, at an intermediate zoom between the first two. Again, I was after the braking wave in front of the Light.
Canon SX40HS at 30mm equivalent. f4 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. Program with iContrast and -1/3EV exposure compensation.
All processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness. I used Graduated Filter effects to balance exposure on the sea and sky, and adjusted color temperature to warm the sea to its visual gray, rather than the blue-grey the the camera rendered.
12/28/2011: Dragon in Ice
I have no idea how the ice in this image got to be the way it is. It was raised above the relatively flat background ice by a half inch and was about 9 inches long. ?? The ice had formed on a deeper channel cut some time, a long time ago, in the marsh beside the Kennebunk Bridle Path to drain it for hay production. There were extended pine branches over it, so it is remotely possible that this is a blop of snow that feel on the ice and became one with it overnight…but, and this is very likely a fatal but…there had not been any snow heavy enough to have burdened the branches. ?? I got nothing else.
I do know that, in random testing (myself and two daughters who happened to be home while I was processing the image), 2/3rs of human beings immediately see it as a Chinese Dragon, while 1/3rd of human beings get stuck on the man carrying a flag that makes up the hind end and tail of the dragon, and have some difficulty refocusing on the whole shape. Perhaps that can be explained by how recently each individual has been to a Chinese restaurant, but that would require further study.
Canon SX40HS at 290mm equivalent field of view. f5 @ 1/125th @ ISO 200. Program with iContrast and –1/3rd EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
12/27/2011: Winter Pond with Self Portrait (3)
We had a dusting of snow Christmas night, so I was up early and out to try to catch some of it on the ground before it melted. These shots are of what I call Back Creek Pond #2 (since between this and Back Creek Pond #1 they form the headwaters of Back Creek). There was no way to avoid getting my shadow in while maintaining the sweep of the tree shadows across the pond toward the receding end…so I decided to play with it a bit, shooting from my general three levels…standing, ground level using the flip out LCD, and mid-level. Each one is, I think, a striking image on its own, but taken together they make an interesting self-portrait of the photographer at work. 🙂
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. Interestingly enough I got three different exposures out of Program and iContrast at –1/3EV for the three images. 1) f4 @ 1/640th @ ISO 100. 2) f2.7 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 200, and 3) f4 @ 1/500th @ ISO 100. I suspect the short shutter speed on the second shot was because I had the LCD display flipped out. Canon engineers know that using the LCD is inherently less stable than using the eye-level finder, so they bump up the shutter speed for better chances at a sharp shot. I suspect.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness. I also used Auto color temperature to tame the blue in the shadows somewhat, but backed off on the too warm hue that resulted.
12/26/2011: Winter Still-life
A vernal pool in the woods of Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, fallen oak leaves of several shades of warm brown, and just cold enough to freeze the surface into crazy patterns which catch the light in interesting ways. It must be that the patterns are caused by variations in surface tension (or perhaps even water temperature) due to the barely submerged leaves. I am sure there is science behind it, but the effect is, at least to me, captivating, especially when it is contrasted with the shapes of the leaves themselves.
This is a long zoom shot, at 520mm equivalent field of view, to provide just enough isolation to emphasize the patterns, and just enough magnification to clearly delineate them. Canon SX40HS in Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f5.8 @ 1/160th @ ISO 500. It is so nice to be able to leave the Canon in Program, with auto ISO, and just shoot, with confidence that the results will be excellent no matter how high the ISO goes to maintain decent shutter speed for handholding long zoom shots! If I had had to dance around ISO and shutter speed considerations for this shot, it would have difficult to impossible, and the result would not, certainly, have been either so sharp or so vibrant.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
12/25/2011: Merry Christmas. Happy Sunday.
Christmas on a Sunday is, in fact, not all that rare an event. There is a 28 year cycle and the gap between Sunday Christmas’ varies (due to leap years) from 11 to 5 years in a predictable way. The next one will be in 2016 and the one after in 2022. (I did not do the math myself. Check with Ask.com.) Still…
It feels just slightly more special. In some ways (purely temporal) it complicates the day. In some (mostly spiritual) it elevates it. But of course I profess to believe that for people of faith there is, or should be, no such dichotomy. The spiritual finds expression in the temporal or it does not exist at all. When all our moments are moments in eternity, in the presence of the divine, then we are living our faith.
And, in that spirit, I am not exactly certain why this is my Christmas Sunday pic. It was taken yesterday, on Christmas Eve Saturday, along my little stretch of the Kennebunk Bridle Trail where so many of my local pics are taken. We had an unusually high tide which flooded the marsh with salt water, so that the fresh water spread thin on the surface and froze to an icy lace. As the tide fell, the fragile skin of ice bent and broke around things as delicate as individual grass stalks, creating impromptu sculptures to catch the clear December light. I attempted to memorialize the effect in frames of various sizes. This one, at full zoom, is one of my favorites.
Maybe that is it. If light is spiritual and water temporal (as we often draw the lines), this image represents the fusion of the two, and just how fragile and fleeting our attempts to see them so too often are. Rare as a Sunday Christmas…but beautiful enough for memory…and frequent enough, the sweep of time, for hope.
Today I celebrate the birth of Jesus, Son of God, God with us, God in us, who through life and death and life beyond death, gives us life…today and forever…like, in some way, the clear light of December caught in fragments of ice on a falling tide. A thing of beauty and wonder worth celebrating.
Merry Christmas. Happy Sunday.
12/24/2011: Kennebunk Plains, Christmas Snow?
The great Christmas Snow Storm of 2011 has come and gone. Of course, it fell mostly as rain. If it had been a few degrees colder, we would have had a good foot and a half of snow cover today…but, alas, it was not to be. I went out in the late afternoon when the setting sun was trying to get out from under the cloud cover in the west to see if there was more snow inland, but evidently it turned to rain at least an hour before the storm passed there too. There were only remnants. Still, the light in the sky on the retreating cloud mass was worth the trip.
This first shot is the view north and east. Turning right around and facing south west, we have the horizon view.
And finally a zoomed in shot of the same horizon.
Canon SX40HS in Program with iContrast. -1/3EV exposure compensation. 1) 24mm equivalent field of view, f4 @ 1/200th @ ISO 160. 2) 50mm equivalent, f4 @ 1/200th @ ISO 200. 3) 173mm equivalent, f4.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 250.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness. All received some color temperature adjustment as well as dueling Graduated Filter Effects to lighten the foreground and darken the sky.
12/23/2011: Kennebunkport Sky
This year Southern Maine does not seem to be able to decide what season it is in. This morning we are having freezing rain just thinking about turning to snow. This on the 23rd of December. November I could understand. But December?
The overcast was beginning to blow over in this shot from a few days ago across the mouth of the Kennebunk river in Kennebunkport Maine. I like the leading lines of the clouds and that patch of blue, and the roughness of the sea rolling in.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/800th @ ISO 100. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
12/22/2011: Winter and Water, Emmons Preserve
Winter is coming late to southern Maine this year. The ground is still bare here a few days before Christmas. We have had temperatures in the single digits at dawn this week…but the days warmed into the mid 30s. Not your grandfather’s December at all. (Though we still have time. They are predicting a few inches tonight into Friday. We shall see. Almost 40 degrees on Christmas??).
Anyway, I took a drive out to Emmons Preserve, figuring the cold would have at least created some ice sculpture and lace along the Batson River where it tumbles down over the ledges there. And it had. Except for the first shot, which had enough sun on it to light the moss within the shell of ice, I was shooting at ISO 800 along the late-afternoon shadowed rapids. Quality like this at high ISOs was simply not possible until this latest generation of super=zoom Point & Shoots.
Canon SX40HS in Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1) 147mm equivalent field of view, f4.5 @ 1/80th @ ISO 250. 2) 462mm equivalent, f5 @ 1/60th @ ISO 800. 3) 190mm equivalent, f4.5 @ 1/80th @ ISO 800.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.