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.

sunset over the city

I’ve been in a state of emotional limbo this past week loosing some motivation to go out and shoot.  I know this happens on occasion to every artist, but I just cannot seem to find that spark in my usual subject matter.  So I’ve started playing with the camera… not trying to really capture anything in particular, but rather trying to capture how my spirit is feeling in my images.  This image is close to reflecting that state of conflict and retrospection that I am feeling right now.  Who knows, this might be a new body of work?

serpentine barren

This past weekend I visited a serpentine barren only 13.8 miles from home at the Willisbrook Preserve managed and protected by the Natural Lands Trust organization.  I’ve only been to a few serpentine barrens on the west coast of North America, but it always amazes me the flora that grows on these soils in comparison with nearby plant communities.

From Wikipedia, “Serpentine barrens are a unique ecosystem found in parts of the United States in small but widely-distributed areas of the Appalachians and the Coast Ranges of California, Oregon and Washington. The barrens occur on outcrops of altered ultramafic ophiolites.  They are named for minerals of the serpentine group, resulting in serpentine soils, with unusually high concentrations of iron, chromium, nickel and cobalt. Serpentine barrens often consist of grassland or savannas in areas where the climate would normally lead to the growth of forests.^“

In the case of this particular serpentine barren in Pennsylvania, there would be a hardwood forest of maples, hickory, beech, and ash if not for the limiting soil factors as evidenced by the nearby woods.  Instead, lots of pines, grasses and a few oaks seem to dominate the landscape here.

My graduated ND filter was not enough for this scene and I had to make some adjustments in Photoshop.  I failed miserably with blending two exposures, so this is one exposure adjusted the best I currently know how… guess it’s time for some software learning work!

moon set

Last week I was busy in Champaign-Urbana, Ilinois attending an AERGC (Association of Education and Research Greenhouse Curators) meeting.  But when I arrived at the small 4 gate airport on Sunday the sky was blazing for a beautiful sunset.  I was in the heartland and the summer storms were at their peak.  It was all I could do to get checked into the hotel room and grab the camera from my bag to shoot out the 5th floor hotel room!  The next morning something woke me up quite early and I saw this amazing moon in the still cloudy sky.  I knew there would be another great opportunity in about 30 minutes for a moon set as the sunrise came into play.

The next 3 days were full of great lectures and meeting fellow greenhouse managers.  But after dinner the second night I was able to witness another wonderful display of light.  I cannot decide which of these images is my favorite, so please comment!  Darn that I packed light because my focus was the conference and didn’t bring the wide-angle… lesson learned!