Monthly Archives: April 2013
Fallen Glory
I still have a lot of images from my trip to Arcata California and the Godwit Days Spring Migration Festival that I could share. This is one of my deep HDR experiments at Founder’s Grove in Humboldt Redwoods State Park. I like the way the Richardson’s Geraniums and a variety of ferns are growing on this fallen Redwood trunk. My guess, given the legendary durability of Redwood, is that this trunk has been down for well over 1000 years, to reach the stage of decomposition where it now supports it’s own micro-habitat. And I suspect it will be another 1000 years (or more) before all trace of the tree is gone. That is a long time!
It takes at least a 3 exposure HDR, with the highlight (dark) shot at least at -3EV, and the exposures well separated, to capture the range of light on the floor of Founder’s Grove. Canon SX50HS. 24mm equivalent field of view. From a tripod. Exposures blended and the HDR file tone mapped in Dynamic Photo HDR. Final processing for my usual intensity, clarity, and sharpness in Lightroom. Auto Color Balance to correct a yellow bias introduce in the HDR process.
Trout Lily
Last spring I was amazed at the big patches of Trout Lily leaves (aka Dogtooth Violet or Adder’s Tongue) that I found at Emmon’s Preserve in Kennebunkport and along the trails at the Wonderbrook Preserve in Kennebunk in early April. Though I went back several times I missed the bloom at both locations. Last year was a particularly early spring, a full 4 weeks ahead of this year’s late spring, and I now have to wonder if I had already missed the bloom the very first time I saw adder’s tongue on April 9th. Yesterday, my Sunday Photo-prowl took me back to Emmon’s Preserve (to try some deep HDR’s of the falls) and I was delighted to find large patches of Trout Lily in bloom! It is such a beautiful plant.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. -1/3 and -2/3 EV exposure compensation. Various macros from 1200mm tel, to 34mm wide. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Old Falls Maple Red: Happy Sunday!
One of the reasons I invested in a gas powered scooter this year (as opposed to the electric scooter I had last year) was to have the range to reach Old Falls on a regular basis this summer. I want to be able to check this stretch of water at least once a week for dragonflies. I found two unique ones there last fall and I suspect there will be more that I have not seen this summer. Of course, I enjoy photographing the falls in all its seasons. They are not much in the way of waterfalls by any imaginable scale…but they are one of the few falls within a day’s drive of my home in Kennebunk. Southern Maine is worn pretty flat.
I like the way this HDR treatment brings out the red of the maple blossoms, and the intense greens of the young pines and spruces…against the dark water, and under this intense sky, with the boiling white of the falls in the foreground.
Canon SX50HS. Three exposure HDR at -2 1/3, -1/3 and + 2/3s EV. Blended and Tone Mapped in Dynamic Photo HDR. Final processing in Lightroom.
And for the Sunday Thought. It is the red of the maple blossoms that really makes this image stand out for me…it is also what I was trying to catch. Most people don’t realize, or don’t really notice, that Red Maples are red twice a year…not just in the fall but in the spring as well. I will include a shot from a few days ago in our back yard which shows where the red in the Old Falls shot is coming from.
Our back yard maple flowers are a bit more advanced that the ones on the trees at Old Falls, but you get the idea. The Maples of New England are fire in the fall and fire in the spring. And all summer that fire burns in them, obscured by the green of the busy leaves making food for a season’s growth, for a crop of winged maple seeds to sow the future, and to survive another winter. It is easy to miss the fire in the summer, but it is there.
I would like to think our lives are like that. Fire in the bud, fire in the flower, and fire at last in the fall. If the fire in us is obscured in the summers of our lives by the busy green of making a living, of raising children, of laying up our stores, surely it will rise up in us once more before the final winter. As the world dies out of us, so the spirit should show through more and more. Perhaps that is what we are really seeing when we say a man is in his second childhood. Red in the bud, red in the flower, red in the end. That’s what I hope.
Sir Song: Arcata Marsh
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There is just no place like Arcata Marsh for Marsh Wrens and Song Sparrows. This year the Song Sparrows were there in greater abundance than I have seen them before, and more vocal. And certainly easier. They were popping up and singing all along the trails. This gentleman popped up right beside me, maybe 10 feet away, on a misty, almost raining morning, and sat and sang while I snapped a series of images at point blank range. This is 1200mm optical zoom.
I like the subtle, overcast day, light in the eye, and the deep bokeh,
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. -1/3EV exposure compensation. f6.5 @ 1/400th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Redwood Lupine
I associate Lupine with Maine, mainly because of the children’s book, The Lupine Lady (one of my children’s favorites), and because of the magnificent spring displays of Lupine along I95 from Freeport north, and all over Mt. Desert Island and Acadia National Park. I have made several trips to Acadia during Lupine season, and photographed it there with some success. But, of course, it is native to the Pacific Northwest as well. I found this stand between the parking for the Trillium Falls Trail and the trail itself in Redwoods National Park north of Orick California. And yes, the color was this intense.
I have more conventional, and wider, shots, but I found this tel-macro composition compelling. The selective focus and the placement of the plants are intentional, and I think it works well (though I did have to fip it horizontally to accommodate my dominant eye :). Somehow this goes a bit beyond a photograph. It is almost the flower itself!
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/320th @ ISO 100. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Shouted down by a Wren
The Marsh Wrens of Arcata Marsh, in Arcata CA, were in good form this trip. There is nothing like standing in the marsh being shouted down by a wren!
Wrens sing with everything they have…sometimes it seems they will turn themselves inside out with song. These “down the hatch” shots attest to the unfettered expression of the wren.
Comparatively speaking, the Song Sparrow is just not in the same class, though it is in a class of its own, and a more musical class at that. Note that the wren aims its song directly at another male (or me if I am in the way), while the Song Sparrow tips its head back and sends its song to the sky!
🙂
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. 1800mm equivalent field of view. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Sir Elk
I have only ever visited the Roosevelt Elk herds of the Redwoods National and State parks during April, so I always catch the males at that awkward stage when the new antlers are just beginning to bud, and they are still shedding the double winter coat, and looking very scruffy. That did not stop this younger male from facing off, or attempting to face of, with a more senior adult, putting on a bit of aggression, protecting his harem. This was taken in the big fields just at the entrance to Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, on the Drury Scenic Parkway.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. -1/3EV exposure compensation. 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 320. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. .
Redwoods Realized
As I have mentioned, it is difficult to capture the Redwood forest in any kind of image. Part of the difficulty is simply the unbelievable scale, but most of it has to do with the range of light. It is relatively dark under the canopy, and yet the sun breaks through in brilliant shafts and patches. That is part of the magic. It is a world of light and shadow, populated by giants. On my up up through the Avenue of the Giants I tired the in-camera HDR on the SX50HS, hoping it would do a better job with the range of light. It did, but the lights, those sun shafts and patches, were still beyond the camera’s ability to render. On my last morning in Acadia, as I was waking up, I began to think about what is, to me, deep HDR. HDR works, if you are wondering, by taking three or more exposures at a range of values and combining them in software after the fact to produce an extended range image. Generally you have one normal exposure, one underexposed (dark) and one overexposed (too light). The software takes the highlights from the dark exposure and the shadows from the light exposure and combines them with the mid-ranges of the normal exposure. It can be over done, and too often is, producing scenes with skies that the eye has never beheld, or landscapes that look almost etched. The Redwood forest is, however, a classic case for HDR. I wondered if I could get better results than the in-Camera HDR provided by bracketing three exposures myself.
It turns out that such bracketing is really easy on the Canon SX50HS. I had planed to use the Exposure Compensation settings to dial down the exposure until I could see detail on the LCD in the highlights. That would give me my underexposure and then I could work from there. I determined that I needed at lest -3 EV (three stops) of underexposure for the highlights. However when doing that, I noticed that there was little symbol in LCD display that I had never paid any attention to. DISP. That generally means there are settings accessible by pressing the Display button. When I pressed it, up came an autobracketing setting that allowed me to set how far apart three autobracketed exposures are. You spin the control dial and two little pointers spread out across the Exposure Compensation scale. Alright! And, they spread from the point where you have Exposure Compensation set on the main scale. I was able to set Exposure Compensation to -1 and the autobracketing control to its widest spread and get three exposures at -3, -1 and +1. I did a few test shots and it seemed like it might give me the raw materials for some interesting HDRs of the Redwoods.
Of course for three exposures to be in perfect registration, so you can combine them in software, you have to use a tripod. My trusty Fat Gecko, shock corded, carbon fiber tripod was just the ticket. It weights under a pound but supports the Canon SX50HS like tripod weighing 10 times as much.
So I spent a couple of hours in Founder’s Grove taking HDR exposures. When I got back to San Francisco and my hotel for the night, I tried a couple of different HDR software solutions. PhotoMerge in PhotoShop Elements has an Exposure module that works okay, to produce the raw HDR image, but then you have to do the Tone Mapping using standard PSE tools. Tone Mapping? Just as the scene contained a wider range of tones than the sensor could capture, your HDR image contains a wider range of tones than a computer screen can display, or a printer print.Tone Mapping is the process of taking your extended range image, which generally looks pretty flat and uninteresting on the computer screen, and mapping the tones so that they look natural when displayed or printed. It is overcooked Tone Mapping that gives HDR a bad name, and produces those surreal effects. The goal, or at least my goal, when Tone Mapping is to produce as natural a look as possible. My preferred HDR software, Dynamic Photo HDR, gives you lots of very intuitive control over how the tones are mapped.
And even then, I take the images into Lightroom for final processing. Did it work. You can be the judge, based on the image above, and others that I will post over the next days, but I am pretty satisfied. The images I got from Founder’s Grove go further toward capturing the reality of the place than any I have managed before. They are not perfect by any means, but they are satisfying!
Song among flowers
Arcata Marsh is really one of my favorite places to photograph birds. The variety is not great. Mostly Marsh Wrens and Song Sparrows, with a few Golden and White Crowned mixed in, and least in April when I visit. But the views of wrens and sparrows you can get are spectacular! I know of no other place where the sparrows and wrens are so oblivious of human presence.
This Song Sparrow made an easy target on its bare berry whip among the flowers. The subdued light of a cloudy morning made for an excellent, full toned, portrait. Enough light to bring out the feather detail, but no so much as to overpower the lighter tones. And, of course, this shot is also about composition. The bird occupies a rule-of-thirds power-point, balanced by the white flowers…and the strong diagonal of the berry whip leads the eye. There is also a nice separation between the focused bird and the out of focus background. I could not have done better if I had actually been thinking about it. 🙂
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/500th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Awe among the Redwoods: Happy Sunday!
Every time I come to the Redwood forests of Northern California I am struck anew by how impossible it is to catch even a hint of the impact of these giant trees, this amazing forest, in any kind of image. And yet I am compelled, year after year, to try. Standing among the redwoods, hiking the groves, just breathing the air of the redwood forest, is an experience I want to share. And yet I am never satisfied with the images I bring back.
Some come close. I found this view of The Big Tree from which The Big Tree Wayside in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park gets its name, out away from the tree on one of the trails. It is rare to see a mature redwood so exposed. Most of the trees this size are in dense groves where any sun that penetrates just makes photography harder! Big Tree is over 300 feet tall and 22 feet through the base. Figuring a generous 20 feet per story, that makes this tree as tall as a 15 story building. And 22 feet in diameter means I could fit two of the hotel rooms I am writing in inside it (or close to it). That is huge!
And Big Tree would undoubtedly be taller if it had not, perhaps before any human every laid eyes on it, lost its top. The main trunk ends at maybe 250 feet, and the rest of the height is from a secondary trunk growing out from the side of the stump, well over 200 feet up the side.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. -2/3 EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/250th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought: well surely you can already tell from the title and the text where I am going with this…where I am driven to go with this. Redwoods give you a sense of the kind of awe that a person of faith experiences in every encounter with God…the kind of awe that runs under all experience for the people of faith. I am not talking about religious people, or people who put their trust in any organization or creed…I am talking about people who have direct experience of God, and whose faith is the inevitable result of such an encounter. I believe in Redwoods because I have stood among them and experienced the simultaneous uplifting and humbling of my spirit that is called awe. I know what I am trying to capture in my images. Just so, I have stood in the presence of God, known the love of God in Jesus Christ…just as real and vital as a grove of redwoods and astoundingly, astonishingly more. But I can no more convey the experience of my faith than I can capture the awesomeness of the redwoods. That does not mean I will ever stop trying!