something different

Recently I’ve been looking at the local landscape a little differently…  looking for a new project or focus to spark some new energy and creativity.  It’s so easy for me to find macro images, very intimate landscapes, in the suburbs of Philadelphia.  But it’s harder to find something different: different than a broad garden shot describing the planting scheme or layout of the land, different than a plant combination emphasizing texture or color contrasts, different than the soft play of light I so easily seem to find. Today I found very harsh light and remembered the possibilities of using harsh light in the stark landscapes of Death Valley.  I was fortunate to have learned some of these ways of seeing from some of the best black and white photographers of the west last fall.  And today those teachings came back to me as I was looking at this tree against the strong architecture of a campus building.  Maybe not a project, but definitely a lesson worth remembering and practicing for future possibilities.

shadows

I’ve been unable to make new images for several weeks.  Not for a lack of motivation…  tonight was a beautiful sunset with bright purple, orange and red and we’ve had several amazing ice and snow events.  No, the reason I’ve not been able to photograph is I’ve been waiting on my new eyeglasses; the toric lenses are giving the optician some troubles and I’m getting a lesson in patience.  When I photograph up close, I focus manually.  And since I’ve been in the suburbs of Philadelphia this winter, I’ve been limited to the more intimate landscape.  The image for this post was made last year after an epic snowfall.  I really like the contrast of the tree trunk with the tree’s shadows on the snow.  The way the snow melts around the tree trunk is also an amazing piece of science in the wonders of nature.  As the temperatures start to nudge well above freezing this week I am promised those eyeglasses… just in time to see some signs of late winter flowers?

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

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.

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!

abandoned

I’ve been watching this location for quite some time… the graphics and colors of the light blue striped metal building with a line of dying trees.  But the light has not been right until this past weekend after the late morning clearing of heavy cloud cover.  The sky revealed just enough bright light to add the needed contrast and same hue as the building.  But something also told me this needed to be a black and white image.  A feeling of abandonment was emanating from this place and I think the black and white conversion helps with this translation.

after the storm

I just had to post an image from this morning… the day after the great February snow storm in Philadelphia 2010.  Unofficially I measured 23 inches outside my back door.  This is an amazingly architectural crabapple tree, Malus zumi, in a forgotten courtyard at the Scott Arboretum of Swarthmore College.  There was evidence that students had played during the snowstorm… campus looked like a thousand people had trodden through the snow by 7am today.  The sky after one of these storms is always the brightest blue and the trees were still full of snow, outlining their bare forms.

The way I see trees

This morning, William Neil had a great link to Rich Seilling’s blog post “The formula for making great photographs” at  http://craftingphotographs.com/2009/08/21/the-formula-for-making-great-photographs/. In a nutshell I found myself coming full circle to my experience at Bruce Barnbaum’s “Art of Seeing” workshop this summer… The artist is the most important element of a great photograph; their vision and what they bring to the photograph.  So I wonder if I can put into words… what is it about trees that I find so intriguing?  Aesthetically I find their bare forms mesmerizing.  They seem like dancers who are stuck with their feet in the earth, yet they are able to move and express their joy for life through their forms.