Monthly Archives: April 2012
4/10/2012: Brim full on Back Creek, Kennebunk ME
This another image from my Saturday photo-prowl. As I mentioned on Sunday, the tide was abnormally high over the weekend and Back Creek was brim full, right up to within a foot of the road. Getting dowm low and using the flip out LCD I was able to catch the clarity of the sea water standing over the normally dry marsh. And of course the drama of the sky and the finely detailed line…thin line…of the landscape across the frame as a divider. Normally I would not have put the horizon so near the center of the frame, but I think it works here. I find that I am unwilling to lose enough of the detail of the clear water at the bottom or the drama of the sky at the top to make a difference in where the horizon cuts the frame.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 100. Program with iContrast and -1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4/9/2012: Trout Lily? Emmon’s Preserve, Kennebunkport ME
My Saturday photo-prowl took me to Emmon’s Preserve, a Kennebunkport Land Trust property along the banks of the Batson River, with a couple of loop trails through forest and along the stream. Though our season is advanced, due to the abnormally mild winter, things were still pretty quiet in the forest along the Batson. Which is why these small green and brown mottled leaves, in colonies, caught the eye. Now, I am not absolutely sure, but this looks like the beginnings of Trout Lily or Adder’s Tongue Violet (the same plant). If so we are going to have a lot of Trout Lily in southern Maine this year, if the deer don’t eat them all before they flower. Though I may have seen individual plants in Maine in the past, this kind of abundance is unique. They bloom early, so I will have to get back to Emmon’s soon to find out if these really are Adder’s Tongue. Any of the spreads of new leaves I saw, if matured to full bloom, would be quite a sight!
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view, and macro. Program with iContrast and -1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity and sharpness.
As you see, I was right down on the ground for this shot, and only centimeters from the leaf. I focused on the leaf and then reframed to put it off center in the image.
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.
4/7/2012: Self-portrait with Forsythia
This is a shot from last Saturday. The Forsythia are in full bloom this morning. What a difference a week makes. Last Saturday the only fully open blooms were low on the bush and hanging down toward the ground. As an experiment I flipped the LCD on the Canon right over so it pointed toward the front of the camera and put the camera under the bush pointing up. Nice shot of the flowers, but there was no way to get out of my own shot. I took it anyway, as a kind of self-portrait of the artist, with Forsythia. 🙂
Canon SX40HS at 24mm macro equivalent field of view (the flowers are almost touching the lens). Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f6.3 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 250.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4/6/2012: Early Daffodils, The Yard, Kennebunk ME
My mother-in-law gave my wife some daffodil plants last fall, when she was thinning her patch, and my wife planted a few up close to the foundation of the house in a sunny spot under windows. We had a 3 days of unseasonable 80 degree weather last month, and those daffodils have been trying to bloom ever since. They made it on Wednesday. I waited until afternoon, when the sun was full on them, and went out for some daffodil macros. It was a really challenge…as the wind was blowing, and daffodils are notorious, famous in song and poem in fact, for bouncing around even in a light breeze. And they do “nod”…the blooms hang down so all the action is facing the ground. I swung the lcd on the Canon SX40HS out to the side and faced it forward on the camera to get under the flowers, and set the camera to macro and 2x digital tel-extender for scale. I used aperture preferred exposure. so I could lock in f8 for maximum depth of field. The rest was just patience (and 4 frames per second burst mode :). The angle of the light could not have been better…a combination of direct light on the petals and back light coming through the petals.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm macro equivalent, plus 2x digital tel-extender function. Aperture preferred. f8 @ 1/160th @ ISO 100.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4/5/2012: An abstract found among the fallen leaves
When I go out on a photo-prowl, I look for the obvious photo-ops: birds, butterflies, dragonflies, landscapes with clouds, the play of the light on water or leaves…but I also look for little details along the trail that might make an interesting abstract. This pile of fallen leaves caught my eye mainly because of the color and the twisted shapes of the leaves, but when I zoomed out and framed it, I saw the pale weathered lines of the pine needles radiating from the corner. The pine needles make the image for me.
Canon SX40HS at 840mm equivalent field of view. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f5.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 400.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Cropped from the left to eliminate distracting out of focus elements and to emphasize the radiating needles.
4/4/2012: Ghost Seal, etc., La Jolla CA
Seals look so sleek when they are wet that it is easy to forget that what we are seeing is fine fur covering their bodies. This seal has been out of the water long enough for the fur to dry. This is, perhaps, a particularly light colored seal, and quite striking among its fellows.
Taken at The Children’s Pool in La Jolla California. When I visit in early March, the Children’s Pool beach is always closed to humans while hundreds of seals use the sheltered cove and the beach to pup.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3 EV exposure compensation. 1) 1150mm equivalent field of view, f5.8 @ 1/400th @ ISO 100. 2) 60mm equivalent, f4 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 100. 3) 1150mm equivalent, f5.8 @ 1/320th @ ISO 100. 4) 840mm equivalent, f5.8 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4/3/2012: Marsh Grass, Kennebunk ME
I am a sucker for shots like this…winter bleached marsh grass shaped by the wind and water, in the even light of an overcast day. Or the harsh shadows of a sunny day. Or with a bit of snow on. Or in the rain. I just like the patterns grass, especially dry grass, gets into…and I like the textures and the lines. If I can’t find anything else to photograph in the marsh, I always take pictures of the grass.
This clump, set off as it is by an area of flattened grasses brings the textures and lines to the forefront. I zoomed in to 350mm equivalent field of view to further isolate the clump. The result is almost abstract…almost. The grass is too clearly grass for line and color and texture to totally dominate. This is still a picture of grass.
Canon SX40HS at 350mm field of view. f5 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4/2/2012: False Turkey Tail and Turkey Tail Mushrooms
I mentioned in yesterday’s post that my Saturday morning photo-prowl, despite the unpromising weather and season, turned up a few good shots. For one thing I came across a pile of rotting logs beside the Kennebunk Bridle Path that were covered in interesting fungi. I have been experimenting with using the digital tel-extender function with macro at the wide end of the zoom, which gives me considerably larger than life size views. The light was actually pretty ideal for this kind of macro work…even and diffused, with very little shadow to deal with.
The first image is, after some research this morning, False Turkey Tail Mushroom. You can tell by the smooth, creamy, undersurface.
Growing right next to it…actually over one log…was a nice patch of real Turkey Tail Mushroom.
Though I did not know it until my research this morning (aimed mostly at putting a name to the mushrooms) Turkey Tail Mushroom is the center of a lot of medical research today. You can even buy Turkey Tail Mushroom extract on-line. Apparently there is evidence that compounds in the Turkey Tail kill cancer cells, or at least support the immune system in doing so, and it has been used for cancers from breast to prostrate. Interesting.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view and macro…plus 2x digital tel-extender function. Both shots were from less than a centimeter away from the closest fungi. 1) f4 @ 1/80th @ ISO 200. 2) f4 @ 1/160th @ ISO 160.
And just for fun, two more shots without the dte function kicked in, which perhaps show the growth habit a bit more clearly.
4/1/2012: Tree Tops and Self Portraits. Happy Sunday!
And a happy April Fools Day to you too!
Yesterday I set out in the morning for a photo-prowl, trying to fill my out my diminishing stock of images for this column, and, you know, just poking around to see what I might be missing. It was a dull day, with heavy overcast, and, since it is also that dull season between winter and the real onset of spring in southern Maine, I did not have high hopes. I was pleasantly surprised to find a few early birds (Song Sparrow and Eastern Phoebe) already on territory and setting up for nesting, as well as a rich variety of fungi along the trails. I will feature a few fungi for tomorrow’s Macro Monday post.
I was called back early by a daughter needing the car and retired to my computer to do the post-processing, and when I looked up, the sun had broken through and what had been overcast was now a smattering of clouds adding interest to the sky. So back out I went for a loop around the trail at the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge headquarters.
It was not spring there either but the forest without leaves was full of geometry, texture, and light…the clear crystalline light of a late March afternoon. There was beauty there. The super rough bark of a tree caught my eye as that light picked out every intricate detail I and began to think about how to capture the effect. I had been messing, earlier, in the Yard, with the swivel LCD on the Canon SX40HS…pointing it forward on the camera and getting down under Forsythia flowers to shoot up. I decided to try it there in forest, on that tree. Wooo. Strange geometries. And that lead to a whole series of tree top images, taken with the camera at waist level, looking straight up. Notice the red maple flowers in the second tree top shot.
I had to keep leaning back out of the image to keep my hat from getting in…and that made we wonder if I was missing a self-portrait/profile pic opportunity. Mostly my face was completely in shadow, but I noticed that if I stood in an open area of the path, enough light reflected from the ground to make an interesting effect. So in the spirit of April Fools Day, here I am, framed against the tree tops.
My wife Carol says it is frightening and my daughter Kelia says it is somewhat disturbing. I just think it is funny. When I posted it as my profile pic on Google+ someone commented that it made them think of Tolkien 🙂 My response was that I am already bigger than a hobbit, and even than most dwarfs, and not near wise enough to be a wizard. April Fools.
And for the Sunday thought. Self portraits. Well, I am thinking that we are defined more by the things we look at than we are by how we look. This series of images that I post here every day, taken as a whole, is my best self portrait. It is a record of the things, over time, that I find beautiful, interesting, worthy of celebration and sharing. That is much more me than the shape of my nose or the luxury of my beard.
Paul said, in his chapter on love, that today we see only dimly as in a darkened mirror…we see and know only in part…but that a day will come when we will see clearly…when we will know in full, even as we are known. And that day is linked, inescapably, with the persistence of love…a love that is not defined by our ability to love, but by the perfection of the Creator’s ability to love. I have said many times that these images are one way I express the love of creation and the Creator that is working its way out in me, day to day. I would like to think they provide a glimpse of the me you now see only dimly, and know only in part. Of, in fact, the me I only see dimly, and know only in part. The me that is capable of the enduring love which we celebrate this Easter season.
And that is a lot, for an April Fool, or otherwise, to say.