Archive for May, 2008
We’re a little behind this year on getting the vegetable garden going. Natalie planted peas a while back and they’re doing well along the fence, but they haven’t started to climb yet. She also put broccoli and lettuce seeds in the ground a couple of weeks ago and they’re both up and starting to get their true leaves.
Last weekend I made time to finish spading and tilling most of the rest of the vegetable beds. I pulled out the last of the kale and beets from last fall that had overwintered and were starting to bolt. The kale really looked pretty spectacular blooming bright yellow, but the leaves were tough and it didn’t taste all that good. So out it came.
I’d planted a mix of crimson clover and annual rye in a couple of beds as a cover crop last fall. This was the first time we used a cover crop of any kind, so I wasn’t sure how the soil would be when I spaded it up. Turns out that the beds with the cover crop were drier and in better condition than the beds that were just mulched for the winter. My guess is that the cover crop sucked some of the excess moisture out of the soil. Someone’s probably done research on it but I didn’t bother to look it up.
Anyway, I got all the veggie beds prepped. Natalie planted our tomato starts in two beds: 5 Siletz and 2 each Sungold, Sweet Millions, and Chocolate Cherry. Somehow we failed to start any seeds for paste tomatoes this year. We put a shovelful of compost and a handful of organic fertilizer in the bottom of each hole before planting tomatoes. That’s enough to carry them through the season.
I planted seeds for two hills of cucumbers, a row of carrots, a patch of radishes, a patch of daikon radishes, more lettuce, some spinach, a short row of basil, and a small patch of dill. I covered all the new seed beds with a thin layer of dry grass clippings to help keep the surface of the soil moist. I’ll try to keep it lightly watered nearly every day when it doesn’t rain.
May 29 2008 | Gardens | No Comments »
I had the opportunity in the past few days to help a couple of amateur photographers solve problems related to digital photography. Just like handling cactus, you have to be careful not to get stuck. The photo below is of a portion of Ron McKitrick’s Hillside Desert Botanical Garden in Yakima, Washington. You can see more photos of his remarkable garden on the Inland Northwest Gardening website.
The first problem was one of deleted files on a camera memory card. The photographer had handed her husband the full SD card from her camera to transfer all 180 or so photos to their computer. He uses Picassa to import photos from the card and saw previews of all the photos on his screen. Thinking all the photos had been transferred he handed the card back to his wife. She put the card back in her camera and reformatted it. That’s a good practice — copy everything to the computer and then reformat the card in the camera just before use.
Unfortunately, when he went back to view the photos only the first nine were on the computer. Apparently all the images weren’t transferred when he thought they were. He was seriously in the doghouse now as the photos included several months of skiing and hiking trips that couldn’t be reshot. I asked her whether she’d shot any new photos on the card since reformatting it. She hadn’t, so there was a good chance the missing files could be recovered.
When a memory card (or disk drive) is formatted all the previous data is not erased. Only the directory structure is rewritten. That means that with the right tool you can often recover deleted files. I recommended that my friend download a copy of Photo Rescue software. I had it on my laptop, but had no way to read a SD card. The program is pretty easy to use and will show you whether your files can be recovered before you have to spend money to register the software and save your recovered files. In this case it took over half an hour for it to recover the files and show thumbnails of all 180 missing photos. After paying the registration fee my friend was able to save all his wife’s photos and put a smile back on her face. There are other software tools out there that do the same thing, but this is the one I keep on my laptop in case I do the same thing sometime (and I have).
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May 26 2008 | Gardens and Photography | No Comments »
A fellow wildflower enthusiast told me that one of the penstemons I missed finding for Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest grows at Peshastin Pinnacles State Park near Cashmere in the Wenatchee River valley. Peshastin is a popular rock climbing area and I helped to build the trails there back when it first became a park in the early 1990s. So yesterday I stopped by on a meandering route from Bellingham to Pendleton, Oregon.
The penstemon on this quest is Chelan Penstemon, Penstemon pruinosus. I found what I thought was it not very far up the trail from the gate to the climbing area and stopped and made many photos. But then I found a different penstemon blooming farther along and in a more rocky habitat. I spent time with the key in Hitchcock on both of them and thought the first one I shot was what I was looking for. But then I had doubts.
This morning I drove up river from Wenatchee a short distance and stopped for purple flowers on the rocky slope beside the road. I thought when driving by that they were purple sage, Salvia dorrii, but when I got closer I saw they were penstemons. I pulled the key out again and this time decided I really had found Penstemon pruinosus. That’s the plant in the photo above. I find penstemons hard to key out — the key starts with the way the pollen sacs split open and includes the seeds. I’ve spent a lot of time keying penstemons and still not felt completely confident of the result. Lupines and paintbrushes are also difficult, and let’s not even get started on Astragalus.
In Leavenworth I stopped at the ski hill, which is a wonderful place for flowers in the spring. I found a patch of Trillium petiolatum, roundleaf trillium, along a trail and made some fresh images. Arrowleaf balsamroot and lupines were blooming in the ponderosa forest, and I found a nice patch of star Solomon’s seal with more blossoms that I typically see.
Today was productive with a visit to Ohme Gardens in Wenatchee, then a stop along the Goldendale-Lyle highway to photograph Lomatium suksdorfii, which I’d misidentified a few years back. Finally, a stop by Roland Lake in the Columbia Gorge for some fresh images of the endemic Barrett’s penstemon which blooms on the basalt cliffs beside the old highway. It’s going to take a while back in the office to get everything edited and captioned.
Last night I slept in the back of my truck up a forest service road near Leavenworth. I had peanut butter & jelly sandwiches for lunch and dinner today, but treated myself to a motel room in The Dalles tonight so I could get clean and charge batteries before visiting with a garden club group in Pendleton on Monday.
May 18 2008 | Gardens and Native Plants and Photography | No Comments »
The hard reality of my independent photography business is that I have to do everything. Like most photographers, I’d much rather spend the majority of my time behind the camera creating new images. Working in the office is a necessary part of the job, otherwise there would be no customers and no income. Sometimes the concept of being retired and just shooting for fun sounds very appealing.
There always seems to be too much to do in the office and not enough hours in the day. After every shoot I copy the digital files to my computer, add basic location and contact metadata, then back up the camera raw files to DVD. Then I go through the files and edit the take, deleting the poor exposures from bracketed sets, excising the ones where the wind blew the subject around and blurred the image, and getting rid of anything else I don’t like. Next step is captioning, which almost always includes Latin and common names for the plants and a short description. I often have to look up names, check identifications, or verify spelling. Sometimes it takes almost as long to caption as it does to shoot. So I get behind. These grape hyacinths and tulips were photographed in our garden on April 29 and captioned on May 15. I still have five days of garden photography to caption.
The other office task that can be very time-consuming is selecting photos in response to an editor’s request. Last week I spent the better part of two days assembling private web galleries of images for a garden magazine. The wantlist, single-spaced, ran to more than four pages of plant names for several stories. I had a lot of the species on the list, and for many of them I had many choices. The process is simple, but tedious. I look up the plants in my database, look at the photos on my computer screen, select the ones I think are appropriate, and add them to a gallery. Repeat until done. Sometimes the photos are in my slide collection and I’ll have to scan and optimize them. I store my scans on a networked drive and it’s slower than internal computer drives so I wait for the computer. When I’ve finished selecting photos I generate a web gallery, upload it to my server, preview it to make sure there aren’t any problems, and then send a link to the editor that requested the images.
Often, editors don’t even acknowledge that they’re received the e-mail link. I only hear from them when and if they’ve selected one or two photos and need a high-res file ASAP. That’s another office task that can’t be automated.
Enough of this, it’s time to go find some fresh flowers in bloom. I’m off in search of a penstemon at Peshastin, a biscuit root at Goldendale, and gardens in Pendleton and Yakima. Who knows what else I’ll find along the way.
May 17 2008 | Photography | No Comments »
Photographers often bracket exposures, shooting what the meter says and then a little overexposed and a little underexposed to make sure they get one that is perfect. It’s just as important with digital as with film as digital sensors are prone to blowing out overexposed highlights and shadows can get noisy. But there’s another bracketing technique that I also find useful.
I photographed these Bog Laurel, Kalmia microphylla, blossoms yesterday afternoon at Burns Bog in Delta, British Columbia. I like to separate the main subject from the background, and one of the effective ways to do that is to that is to shoot at a relatively wide aperture to the plane of focus from front to back is shallow. The background goes soft. In the photo above I used f/5 with my 100mm macro lens. I like the soft background, but only the buds and the blossom on the right are truly sharp.
Then I stopped down just over a stop to f/8 and made another exposure. You can see that the background is not as soft in this one, but more of the blossoms are sharp. I used my camera’s depth of field preview before I shot, checking smaller apertures as well. By the time I got to f/11 the background was too busy and I didn’t waste time shooting that one. I still haven’t decided whether I like the softer background or the sharper flowers better. With Photoshop I could combine the two and I think it would still look natural, but that’s a fair amount of work. In any case it’s all about choices, and sometimes it’s easier to shoot several variations and make the discriminating decisions later.
Burns Bog is a unique and disappearing ecosystem in southern British Columbia. It’s being pushed in from all sides by farming, development, and highways. As I was working along the boardwalk through the Delta Nature Preserve, the only part of the bog currently open to the public, my ears were constantly assaulted by the sound of traffic on nearby highway 91 at the south end of the Alex Fraser bridge over the Fraser River. On my visit yesterday the shrub thicket of Labrador Tea and Bog Laurel was just beginning to bloom. I’ll go back in a week or so when there should be more blossoms. See more of yesterday’s photos at Pacific Northwest Wildflowers.
May 16 2008 | Native Plants and Photography | No Comments »
