Archive for October, 2007
Rainy days in the garden can yield intensely rich and saturated colors. Last Friday I went up to VanDusen Garden in Vancouver, BC, which is one of my favorite public gardens. After a lengthy strike which closed the garden (as well as libraries and halting garbage service) for 12 weeks, the garden was once again open. The weather forecast for the day was mixed and I hesitated about going out. But I checked the weather radar and it looked like the biggest part of the rainstorm had already moved through.
Soon after I arrived in the garden it started to rain, so I pulled out a plastic rain cover for my camera and continued working. Some of the fall foliage was past its prime, but there was enough lingering to make it worth my time to explore and photograph.
The photo above was made during a break in the rain, but under heavily overcast skies. It’s one of my favorite Japanese maples in a grove along the shore of one of the ponds in the park. I’ve photographed it many times, in most seasons, and under many weather conditions.
Working in the rain is certainly more challenging than photographing in “better” weather. Keeping the camera dry is the big issue. An umbrella works, but can be hard to hold while setting up the shot. I’ve used a cheap plastic grocery bag, but inevitably the camera still gets wet. Currently I use inexpensive rain covers from Optechs. My camera still gets a little damp, and changing lenses is slightly inconvenient, but overall this clear plastic cover works pretty well. I hang it up on a doorknob to dry when I get home.
Besides keeping the camera dry, another issue in the rain is low light levels and moving subjects. Raindrops make plants shake, and rain is often accompanied by wind. Like any windy situation, there’s often a brief pause between puffs of wind so I set up and wait. I think the results are worthwhile.
October 22 2007 | Gardens and Photography | No Comments »
I finished backing up the last week’s camera raw files this afternoon. It’s a process that takes the better part of a day to make DVDs. In this case, twelve nearly-full disks of data. Then after I edit and caption the photos I need to back them up again. That’s one of the downsides of the digital photography revolution.
I’ve also completely filled two 200GB hard drives with raw images in 2007. I think it’s time to shop for bigger replacement drives so I can keep working. At least with increasing drive capacities and falling costs per megabyte of storage it’s not an unreasonable prospect.
When I was shooting film I began running out of shelf space to store notebooks full of slides. Every wall of my office that doesn’t have a window or a door is covered with shelving. I don’t know where I would have expanded my slide storage if I hadn’t gone digital.
In the last 30 days I’ve been shooting more days than not and now have over 5,000 frames to edit and caption. That means looking forward to a lot of hours in front of the computer screen in the coming weeks.
October 17 2007 | Photography and Technology | No Comments »
I’m not sure why I never thought about it before, but I realized the other day that autumn is our shortest season. Not according to the calendar, but in the way we perceive it. When we think of fall, the thing that comes to mind is brilliantly colored foliage, like the burning bush in the photograph above. However, the time span when any individual tree or shrub is in its colorful glory is disgustingly short — often measured in mere days and almost never more than a couple of weeks.
For the serious leaf-peepers who make the pilgrimage to catch the best color in New England, the Appalachian hardwood forests, or the aspens in the Sierras there are websites that track the color change. The timing of the season depends on several factors, including recent rains and whether there’s been a frost. It’s hard to predict far in advance.
I am in Spokane and vicinity for a few days to catch what I hope will be the peak of color in gardens on the east side of the Cascades. This afternoon I stopped at Finch Arboretum on my way into town and photographed a handful of specimen trees in the low sunlight. Golden rain tree, catalpa, honey locust, crab apples, and some of the maples were all putting on a fine show.
Tomorrow is predicted to be cloudy and possibly rainy, which will give a very different feel to the gardens I plan to visit and photograph. I actually hope there is a little light rain, but no wind, to accentuate the colors.
October 09 2007 | Gardens and Photography | No Comments »
What a difference a couple of days and half a continent distance makes! I left Oklahoma City Friday afternoon, where it was a humid 88°F, and returned to Bellingham where it had been 37°F that morning. My body still hasn’t completely adjusted, but I’m back to wearing a wool sweater.
Yesterday I tackled a long-delayed gardening task — digging up a crowded clump of Crocosmia and the mass of large yellow daffodils that were mixed in. I ended up with a large pile of Crocosmia corms and a big bucket of daffodil bulbs. Today I dug out a clump of Miscanthus that was too close to a big variegated Ceanothus. I divided the grass and Natalie replanted the bed. We put half of the Miscanthus back in, but with better spacing. Then she planted lots of daffodils where they’ll once again make a brilliant show in the spring. We decided there wasn’t really room for the Crocosmia so we put it in the back of the car to take to her mother’s garden.
After lunch we headed up the street to do more planting. By then it had started raining lightly, so we donned raingear. In addition to the plants we divided from our garden, I also had several pots of plants I hauled home from Garden Writers. These are mostly new introductions that we’ll test to see how they do in our climate and whether the deer like them.
I planted a ‘Pinky Winky’ Hydrangea in the back bed, a couple of clumps of Miscanthus toward the back of the garden, a ‘Rozeanne’ Geranium near the front of the wide border, and a couple of new cultivars of Baptisia on top of the berm. I put a clump of little bluestem grass nearby. Natalie planted two big clumps of Crocosmia near the back near a big rhododendron and I put in a couple of clumps of Amorphophallus that I’d dug from our garden a couple of weeks ago.
By this time the rain had really started coming down, no longer a mere drizzle but a real soaking rain. We were getting rather damp so we decided the daffodil bulbs could wait for another day. Gardening in the rain is OK, but keeping at it until completely soaked just seemed foolish.
October 07 2007 | Gardens | No Comments »
There’s a lot of talk about garden rooms, meaning separate areas within a garden. Another concept that isn’t seen nearly as much is a garden that is specifically constructed to be enjoyed from inside the house. In this Oklahoma City home and garden, owned by the Bolens, there are several courtyards which merge the boundary between inside and outside. Floor to ceiling windows are the only divider between the interior room and the outdoor garden.
Many rooms of this contemporary home, built in the early 1970s, extend visually into the outdoor garden beyond the windows. The small courtyard pictured above is outside the dining area. The kitchen garden, with a series of tiered raised beds, is framed by the kitchen windows on either side of the sink. The back yard, with a swimming pool and soft foliage beyond, is just beyond the living room window wall. This is truly an inside-outside home and garden.
October 01 2007 | Gardens | No Comments »
