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

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.

Cycles

So autumn days are here and the visual signs of summer’s end have dotted the landscape with yellow, orange and red.  In the life cycle of plants, most people believe that autumn is the end of a growing season, the beginning of death, harvest time, and closing the garden for winter hibernation.  But if you look close enough and really observe what is going on… it’s a beginning.  The male cones of Cedrus atlantica (Glauca Group), or true cedars are growing full of pollen.  Berries on viburnum, dogwoods, and hollies are ripening and falling to the ground; much plant life is starting new life in autumn.