hot papaya

With tomorrow’s solstice and the official beginning of summer, I thought I would post this image of a relatively new coneflower introduced by my friends at Plants Nouveau, Echinacea ‘Hot Papaya’.  I found it blooming last night in the entrance garden of the Scott Arboretum.  And although I took the typical portrait shot with as much detail as my 105mm macro lens could capture at f/45, I quickly found the sultry petals luring me in for a closer look.  So I recomposed and found f/7.1 to capture enough detail that you can still infer it’s a flower, yet with a shallow enough depth of field to soften the flow… an image more reflective of the plant’s name!

spring in a parking lot

After spending much of my time in my home garden this spring cultivating new ground for a vegetable garden and building a protective fence of harvested bamboo from the edge of the property, I am getting back to posting new images taken this spring. Although it doesn’t feel much like spring today in Pennsylvania with temperatures reaching 91F today.  But the tomatoes are enjoying the heat and I am hoping for a nice crop of heirlooms later this summer.

I’ve seen several posts from fellow photographers on the west coast of dogwoods in bloom, so I thought I might also post a dogwood I found this spring, Cornus florida ‘Cherokee Chief’ in a parking lot.  The amazing red bracts caught my attention from over 200ft away as they popped against the fresh green lawn on the hill behind it.  This was one of those moments when I know I’ve found something special. Maybe not a spectacular image, but something that resonates with my creative spirit that will influence my life and my art.

finding beauty

Today I decided to revisit a plant I photographed last week; the turkish filbert had the female flowers out today along with the male catkins!  I have a few good captures I’ll post later on my website.  But close by another plant caught my attention… not because it was in spring bloom, but because all the ingredients to capture a fleeting moment were just right.  Needles on a dead branch of Pinus uncinata, damaged from the difficult winter we had here in Philadelphia, were radiating a warm glow against the blue sky.  Other branches were also broken, needles past this stage of luminosity and a much drabber brown.  But this branch was at just the right phase of compartmentalizing off, giving me the opportunity to capture the fleeting beautiful burnt orange color… finding beauty in this moment of a conifer’s decline.

looking again

Over and over again I am surprised at what I learn during the editing process.  I see new possibilities and missed opportunities that I’ll hopefully see more clearly next time I’m in the field.  So as much work as going through your images is… and it certainly is a lot of work for me since I don’t usually have large blocks of time to devote to the digital darkroom, organizing, processing and exporting… the self critique is invaluable to my education as a photographer.  I see how I framed the original image and can still see how I might have framed it differently, remembering the light and other elements I intentionally removed from the frame.  I can often still feel the temperature, the wind and sounds at the time I pressed the shutter.  Revisiting and looking again brings back those memories, often focusing my intent, but timing is everything for me.  I need to be away from the images and the experiences just long enough so the experience does not prejudice my ranking of those images in the grander scheme of my work.

Image of pine forest rebirth in Yosemite National Park, November 2010

December

With the winter solstice, full moon, lunar eclipse last night, and a cold running through the office… no wonder I’m feeling under the weather today.  Sorry I didn’t get any photographs of the big event, but it was amazing to see none the less.  I hope you too woke up long enough to witness one of nature’s wonders last night.  I’m hoping we get some snowfall soon so I’m able to add to my winter images… it’s harder to find exciting material to photograph in the ‘brown’ of winter in Pennsylvania.  December has always been the hardest month for me to be inspired by the season… no ice, no water, always overcast, no contrasts… just shades of brown.

Yes, the mahonia are in bloom and some of the other winter bloomers are hoping for warmer days and sunshine.  But as a photographer, this is the time of year I find new trees, new forms and dances among the bare branches.  I add them to my mental database, watch and ponder the best conditions to capture their grace.  The only thing keeping me inside lately is the strong winds we’ve had almost every day this month.  But with the shortest day of the year now behind us, we have longer days, brighter light and maybe a little snow to look forward to for the rest of the winter.  December is restorative…  time to enjoy the quietness of this time of year and let the creative process slow and wander.  For it’s during these times we can more easily reflect and embrace what is truly important to each of us as human beings and as artists.

being a photographer

I am thinking tonight about how lucky we all are to have our sight.  Photographers use more than just their physical sight to “see” a photograph.  But tonight I am thinking about this because my father is having eye surgery Tuesday to correct a blown retina after cataract surgery.  A visual artist who may or may not get his full sight back.

It takes a lot of emotional courage to be an artist. Remembering this, I picked up a favorite book again tonight, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland, and found this quote to share… “In the ideal – that is to say, real – artist, fears not only continue to exist, they exist side by side with the desires that complement them, perhaps drive them, certainly feed them.  Naive passion, which promotes work done in ignorance of obstacles, becomes – with courage – informed passion, which promotes work done in full acceptance of those obstacles.”

The photo above is of aspen trees on the shore of Grant Lake in the Eastern Sierras. Clicking the thumbnail will bring up a larger image for closer viewing.

editing skills

I was going through my images from the trip west ranking them for processing and realized the best images are from when I was allowing myself to trust what I saw rather than trying to make an image of something I thought might be interesting.  I guess this is one of the lessons of editing, a task I rather dislike but am beginning to value.  I’ve certainly taken images and not known how to process them until later; I needed some additional digital darkroom skills. But I’ve come to realize that if I keep my mind open during the editing process, and take time to look at past images, patterns and concepts appear and sometimes I see something I couldn’t quite understand earlier.  What continues to surprise me is that I need some time away from the actual image making in the field to be able to really edit well.

The image of the cottonwood above is from Bishop, CA when I was scouting for petroglyphs before sunset.  But this tree and its pattern caught my attention and I’m glad I stopped to photograph it!  Be certain to click on the image above to view it larger.  This blog template does not allow very large thumbnails.

reflections

Reflections… a good metaphor for the writing I’ve been working on lately and for thinking about how photography fits into life!  I’ve been organizing images from my trip west and realized just how many panorama and reflection images I have.  But this has to be one of my favorite of the reflections… the Merced River in Yosemite National Park.  Enjoy!

Image capture with Nikon D700 camera and 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VRII AF-S Nikkor Zoomm Lens

aging gracefully

I’ve just started going through my images from my trip west to Death Valley, the Eastern Sierras, and Yosemite.  So I’ll have lots of images to share in the coming weeks and on my website which I plan to update by the end of the year.  But out of the many amazing experiences I had during this photographic journey, one of the highlights for me was visiting the ancient Great Basin Bristlecone Pines  (Pinus longaeva) protected in the Inyo National Forest growing on dolomitic soils in the White Mountains of California.

In 1957, Dr. Edmund P. Schulman dated the oldest tree in the grove to be 4,723 years old; “Methuselah” remains today the world’s oldest known living tree.  It was discovered later that another tree had reached 4,950 years; but unfortunately, its age was discovered only after it was cut by a student as a research object.  Today all the trees in the two groves are protected and the identity of the oldest tree is kept a secret.

Our GPS located us at 10,500ft when we stopped at the side of the road between the Schulman and Patriarch Groves; the altitude was giving me a massive headache and our small group of photographers decided not to push ourselves to the 11,500+ elevation since we started the morning at only 4,000ft.  So we lugged our gear and our oxygen deprived bodies up a 45 degree slope to a small group of ancient bristlecones where we spent the remaining 2.5+ hours photographing well into the twilight hours.

The light at that altitude is something to experience.  For this image I used some newly acquired skills that I learned from Jack Dykinga at the Barnbaum, Dusard, Dykinga Death Valley Photographic Workshop.  I used my Nikon 24mm f/3.5 PC-E lens to capture 5 vertical images that I later stitched together in Photoshop CS5.  This technique allowed me to get below this twisted giant and share what I saw from a different perspective.

I’ve always admired trees… just the nature of being in one place their whole life, exposed to whatever nature throws at them.  And these ancient trees have certainly aged gracefully.

fall colors

In preparations for my trip to Death Valley, I was playing with (learning the functions of) a rented 70-200mm lens so that I was not fumbling too much in the field with it.  I’ve been watching the transformation of the Rhus typhina colors near the underpass on route 320 and captured this abstract that represents more of what I saw than a fully focused image of this planting and cars.  I’ll be back in a couple of weeks and hope to have some beautiful images of the western part of our beautiful country to share!