Monthly Archives: October 2012
Fall Fog, Fall Color: Happy Sunday!
Yesterday was one of those rainy, misty, foggy late fall days, when everything is wet, and the last colors of the season excel in depth, rather than brilliance. It brings out the colors of oak and elm and understory shrubs much better than a sunny day could, while the fog softens distance and keeps your eye in close.
Once the rain had stopped, I got out for a loop on the trail at the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge headquarters down the road, just into Wells. I got there between banks of heavy fog, when the conditions were just right to capture the mood of the day.
Everything was still dripping wet, and any color burned against the foggy background.
With the fog-bound focus of my vision, details dominated, and foregrounds became the focus.
The maples with their sunlit brilliance had had their day…now the understory and oaks held sway.
I was experimenting with the Vivid setting on the Canon SX50HS, and, for this kind of day, it was perfect. It gave just enough extra emphasis to the colors so that I could produce an accurate visual effect in Lightroom…or maybe just do so with less processing.
All shots Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast. Vivid Color Space. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness, with my hyper-real preset.
And for the Sunday Thought. Of course when fall comes we miss the high bright days of summer. Even in fall, the days we generally treasure, in New England, are the days of wide vistas, bright sun, blue skies with puffy white clouds, and the brilliant reds and oranges and yellows of the Maples. But a day like yesterday teaches that there is a different beauty in the fogs of later fall. There are fewer and less brilliant colors, but every color deepens and draws the eye, and smaller and more subtle details take on life.
It is good to remember that the same thing can happen in the spirit. We treasure the peek experiences…the days of wonderful light and high spiritual skies when we see the brilliance of truth spread round us as bright as autumn Maples. But there is something to be said for those days when a spiritual fog softens and deepens the light…forces us to look close and look deep, to see the patterns of truth and beauty in the foreground of our lives.
Those are good days too. I expect we just have to find our own “vivid” setting…which I suspect must be there, somewhere in our spiritual menus, for just such days. I found mine yesterday. I only hope I remember where it is the next time the fog rolls in.
The Phoebe and the Bokeh
I am still learning the virtues (and limitations) of my new Canon SX50HS. It is not that much different than the SX40HS it is replacing, but there are some added features that are worth exploring. Like framing lock. There is a button on the left side of the lens near the body which, when pressed, turns on optimized image stabilization while you are framing the image. At extreme telephoto, where even the steadiest hand can have difficulty holding the camera still enough for effective framing, it is a really a helpful feature.
Last week I went out to look for some cooperative birds to try it on. As it happens all I found were a few Eastern Phoebes along the Kennebunk Bridle path, and, wouldn’t you know it, they were between me and the low fall sun.
Still, I really like the way the bird is framed here, against the sunlit marsh grasses, and what the longer focal length is doing to the grasses behind.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1800mm equivalent field of view (1200mm optical plus 1.5x digital tel-converter function). f6.5 @ 1/200th @ ISO 100. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Kennebunk Plains Sunset HDRs
Nothing is harder than capturing a “natural” looking sunset. If you expose for the drama in the sky then the foreground goes unnaturally dark (to total black), and every allowance you make for the foreground robs the sky of drama. I think sunsets were the original inspiration for HDR. HDR is a technique where three or more images captured at different exposures are combined in software to extend the range of the resulting image…so that, for instance, you take the foreground from the lightest sunset exposure, and the sky from the darkest, and the in-between stuff from the middle exposures. It can be quite effective given the right scene, the right set of exposures, the right software, and a delicate hand with the processing.
HDR can also be way overdone…producing an image that is either flat…with all values given equal weight…so that it looks like an etching, or an image that is so intense and unnatural that it looks like a surreal painting.
With each generation of cameras more and more come with HDR built in. One of the benefits of the fast CMOS sensors today is that these kinds of multiple exposure tricks are much easier. My new Canon SX50HS has the HDR mode right on the main control dial, and the software to combine the images built right into the processing engine. Making an HDR is as easy as setting the dial, holding the camera really still (it is taking three exposures), and pressing the button. The three images are combined before being written to the card.
I have tired auto HDR on other brands of cameras I have owned and found it pretty useless. All the software in the camera could manage was one of those flat, etched, images…and no amount of processing in Lightroom could redeem them.
Canon, however, got it right. The three images are intelligently combined to lighten the dark parts and darken the light parts to produce a very natural and pleasing range of light. With no more than my normal processing in Lightroom, the Canon auto HDRs produce excellent images. Even of sunsets.
If you want a more vivid, over the top, eye-popping sunset, you can turn on both HDR and the Vivid color effect.
Having stood there only last night, I can tell you that the first shot is more natural than the second, but there is no denying that the second version has more impact.
Both shots Canon SX50HS, HDR mode. 24mm equivalent. ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Oak’s Autumn Song
Much as I like the boisterous autumn symphony of the maples as they turn, I find myself giving ear to the more subtle melodies of the oaks that follow. Oak leaves mostly never make it to the deep reds and bright yellows of the maples. You see the reddest color in leaves just as they begin to turn, while still mottled green. From there to a solid more-brown-than-orange is a short step…and they are very soon a deep old-brass brown. Even then, in the right light, they show a touch of warmth under the darker skin.
And of course, when the light is behind, as here, you do see (or hear, to extend the metaphor of the title) what the leaf is really capable of. The orange rings like a bell, a single clear note in the autumn air.
I stood well away from the leaf and famed tight with a longish zoom…gotta love that bokeh.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. About 700mm equivalent field of view. f5.8 @ 1/160th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Squirrel Economy
Sunday was a drizzly, darkish fall day, but that seemed to be perfect acorn harvesting weather, as far as our backyard squirrels were concerned. Three or four of them spent the afternoon finding acorns and burying them. The finding was not hard. We have the heaviest crop of acorns I can ever remember. Backing out of the drive way all you hear is the crunch and pop of acorns under the tires. We have drifts of them in front yard. But to the squirrels it seemed to be business as usual. Locate an acorn, run out into the middle of they yard well away from the trees, sniff the acorn well, and bury with a few swipes of the front paws. Over and over.
This is, in may ways, a quintessential fall shot. It was taken from the back door, inside, sheltered from the drizzle, at 1800mm equivalent field of view (1200mm optical plus 1.5x digital tel-converter). Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f6.5 @ 1/160th @ ISO 320. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And, just for fun, here is what aught to be the quintessential shot of a fall squirrel.
White River (really)
On the way out from Seattle to Mt Rainier National Park and Sunrise, I drove for miles along the White River. There were precious few spots where it was safe to stop for a view of the river, but there were pull-outs at both ends of Federation Forest State Park. This shot looks vaguely east toward Chinook Pass.
The “white” in White River, and the odd look to the river in the image, comes from fine particles of clay suspended in the rushing water. It makes a difference from the tannin tea colored brook waters and crystal clear mountain streams of the east (and the Rockies for that matter).
There was no avoiding the haze in the air, which solidified almost to mist over the darker trees up river, but it is still, as I see it, a wonderful mountain scene.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. About 58mm equivalent field of view. f4.5 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. I also used a Graduated Filter Effect from the top to increase clarity in the mountains slightly.
Busy Bee: Seattle Washington
The small demonstration garden at the Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle, the first week in October, was definitely in Northwest Autumn mode. There were actually a surprising number of flowers still in bloom. I am sure the layout of the sunny courtyard with its stone flagging and walls help create a kind of micro climate that prolongs the blooming season. And the bees were certainly taking advantage…busy putting up the last of the season’s pollen to be made into honey for the winter hive.
This telephoto macro was taken at 1800mm equivalent from about 5 feet…that is the full optical zoom of the new Canon SX50HS plus the 1.5x digital tel-converter function. The optical image stabilization of the SX50HS allows for this kind of hand-held extreme telephoto macro.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f6.5 @ 1/160th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Little Blue Butterfly. Happy Sunday!
I am just back from a week in Virginia at our corporate offices. We moved recently, to an upscale business park west of Richmond, and our building is right next to the last in an extensive system of landscape and drainage ponds that run the length of the park. There is a surprising amount of wildlife around those ponds…from Canada Geese, by way of Belted Kingfisher, to Dragon and Butterflies. I always try to spend a lunch hour or two, or some time right after work, around the ponds on every office visit.
This is an Eastern Blue butterfly, and it is really tiny…less than a half inch wing tip to wing tip, so looking at it on the lcd of my 14 inch laptop it is about 2x life size. The little tails make the identification easy as the other Blues common to VA do not have them.
I like how the butterfly floats above the out of focus busy background and how the powdery blue stands out against the light tans of the fallen reeds.
The image was taken from about 5 feet, at about 1800mm equivalent field of view (1200mm optical zoom plus 1.5x digital tel-converter function). Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f6.5 @ 1/640th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought: I always find a week in the corporate office twice as tiring as week working from my office at home (more tiring even than a week of back to back birding festivals where I am out early and in late, and spend hours at day talking to birders 🙂 I don’t work any harder in the corporate office than I do at home, and I certainly don’t get any more done (generally not as much), but it takes more out of me. And it is not that I get less rest, living in a hotel. My evening routine processing images if I have any, then watching a few Hulu or Amazon Prime shows is the same, and I get to bed at the same time. ?? Though I talk to my wife less, we do talk at least twice a day, and often longer at a stretch than when talk at home some days.
Partially I think it is the lack of natural light. At home I work in front of a window and can look up and out anytime. In the office I am buried in the back of a maze of hall ways, with no view to the outside.
Then too, at home I can walk to the kitchen and make a cup of tea when ever I want to. We have a kitchen, and when I remember to bring it, tea at the office too…but it is not the same. At the office I have to go out to eat for lunch…find a restaurant, and generally since I am eating with colleagues, talk a good deal of business over our enchiladas or pizza. At home I eat at my desk, and spend most of an hour outside about 3 days a week. Even if I don’t get outside, I read or watch something from Amazon and do not think about business at all for an hour.
Of course, the only connection to this picture is that it was taken on a day at the office when I ate alone and got back in time to spend a half hour outside.
The truth is, the weariness I feel after a week in the office, is not a physical weariness at all. It is a soul weariness. The soul (our inner self and the self we present to the world) is, or should be, the physical, temporal manifestation of the spirit, in all times and in all places. It should be the spirit at work in the world. The energy and life of the spirit fill the soul like rising waters fill a spring, like sunlight through a window fills a room with light, like the air I breath fills my body with oxygen, like electricity turns a lump of plastic or metal and silicon and copper (my laptop or my Kindle Fire) into a universe of music and images and ideas…into whatever I want or need from the world around me.
When I am in the office my soul is so focused (necessarily) on getting the job done and making the business work for all my colleagues, that the flow of life from the spirit is pinched, constricted. It is not that I stop breathing the life of the spirit, it is that my breathing becomes shallow, and sometimes it is too long between breaths. It is like I am trying to run my laptop on batteries without ever plugging in long enough to fully recharge, or like the electricity that the wall plugs supply simply does not have the amps to get the job done.
I don’t know that there is any cure for it. I suppose I would get used to it if I worked in the office full time. Or then again, I might just get used to being that tired all the time.
I know that when I have to spend a week in the office, it is the little blue butterflies at lunch time that help to get me through it.
Song in the Brush
The song birds were not as cooperative as they might have been on my brief visit to Seattle, but I did encounter a few of the large west coast Song Sparrows. They are indeed a bit bigger overall but what I noted most was how chunky the were. The ones I saw closest were, unfortunately, deep in brush. They were singing loudly but they seemed to feel no need for an exposed perch for their song. That’s different too. I was impressed by the new cameras ability to focus in the deep brush. Canon SX50HS in Program mode with – 1 /3EV exposure compensation. f6.5 @ 1 /160th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Form and Light (otherwise Flower)
Sometimes it really is about form and light and how they interact more than about the subject itself. Abstract is too angular a word, too, well, abstract, to describe the pure play of light we occasionally see and catch in nature, but I can not, off hand, come up with a better.
What I like here are the big bold colors obviously, orange on green with spikes of red…but it is more about the range of the orange, the shadings and shadowings, the texture of the orange surface, the burning translucency, contrasted with the solid points of the furled petals. And running through it, the single filament of spider web, catching the sun. (If you look closely you can see the author of that thread on the third spike from the left 🙂
This is, I believe, some sort of giant exotic iris from the demonstration gardens at the Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle Washington. It is part of at least 3 blooms, stacked by the telephoto perspective.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view, taken from about 15 feet. f6.5 @ 1/640th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.