Archive for the 'Photography' Category
Back in 2003 and 2004 I spent the entire growing season searching for wildflowers to include in Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest. By the time the season ended, there were about 40 plants that Phyllis and I thought ought to be included in the book that I was never in the right place at the right time to find. Now that some time has passed, I’ve decided to try to find and photograph all those I missed, as well as the handful that I messed up the ID.
The first really showy plant I’ve found this spring is the Black Lily, Fritillaria camschatcensis, also known as Kamchatka fritillary. It’s widespread in British Columbia, but on the state sensitive list in Washington where it is found in only a few places. I connected with someone who knows where it grows near the mouth of the Fraser River at the edge of Richmond, BC and made a trip to see and photograph it this week. See more photos on the Finn Slough page of Pacific Northwest Wildflowers, my newest website.
Not nearly as much fun, but also missing from the first go-round, is one that turned out to be a common weed in my front lawn. I don’t know how I missed Cerastium fontanum ssp. vulgare, large mouse ear chickweed. I photographed it in the parking strip along Cornwall Avenue just down the street from our house during 5 o’clock traffic while construction was going on in the street. I shot more weeds that afternoon. Those photos are at Bellingham Weeds on the Pacific Northwest Wildflowers site.
I have about 40 plants on my list. One that we decided not to include in the book (because it is a tree) is Pacific crabapple, Malus fusca. I put out the word and several people told me where to find it locally. Some of the plants turned out to be escaped cultivated apples (they have 5 pistals) instead of native crabapples (with 3 pistals). The cultivated apples are in bloom now, but the crabapples are still in bud. I’ve found several specimens, and tore open a bud this afternoon to confirm the pistal count. At least I haven’t missed the bloom, and I’ve enjoyed getting out and looking for plants.
One of the places I looked for the crabapple was in the Connelly Creek Nature Area on Bellingham’s south side. It’s a mixed woodland and wetland area, with a lot of non-natives as well as native species.
May 09 2008 | Weeds and Photography and Native Plants | No Comments »
This diminutive very early-blooming plant eluded me when I was chasing flowers to include in Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest. I spent many hours searching for it, in locations where reliable sources said I would find it, all to no avail. In the end, we left it out of the book. But it’s been nagging at me, or calling to me, or something like that ever since.
When I received my Native Plant Society of Oregon February newsletter which announced an Emerald Chapter field trip to Mount Pisgah Arboretum to see Enemion stipitatum I decided I just had to drive down. Since it’s about 400 miles from Bellingham to Eugene I inquired a few days in advance whether the flowers had started to bloom. So last Friday I tossed my sleeping bag in the back of the truck, loaded up the camera gear, and headed south. I stopped briefly at the Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle to photograph Witchhazels and then got back into the nasty Friday afternoon Puget Sound traffic on I-5. I slept in the back of my truck at a rest stop just north of Eugene.
I got to Mt. Pisgah early, so got a little exercise by hiking the 1000 feet vertical to the top of the mountain, climbing out of the valley fog into glorious warm sunshine. I ran most of the way back down so I wouldn’t miss the group.
Thirty people showed up for the field trip, which is a large number for a native plant outing. There were concerns expressed about the big group doing damage to the plant we’d all come to see, but as far as I could tell everyone was very respectful of the resource and no little flowers got trampled.
I had expected a small flower, but not quite as small as it turned out to be. Plants were scattered among grasses, fallen leaves, and the foliage of a weedy geranium so you really had to look to find them. The habitat is near the river, where it floods periodically, in open forest of Oregon White Oak (Quercus garryana).
With my tripod as low as it would go, I photographed two specimens of the Enemion, working with a 100mm macro lens and then with an extension tube as well. For some photos I had the camera right on the ground to look the blossoms in the eye. As the fog lifted, I pulled out my diffuser to soften the bright sunlight. You can see all the variations, as well as the two other plants in bloom on Saturday, at Mt. Pisgah on my web pages.
Am I certifiably crazy to drive 800 miles round trip to see one tiny plant? Perhaps. But I read about birders flying across the country to see some rare bird. At least plants don’t take wing before you get there.
February 18 2008 | Photography and Native Plants | 1 Comment »
We’re in a period of what passes for miserably uncomfortable weather on the northwest coast. It’s about 38 degrees, windy, and periods of rain. It feels a lot colder than it really is, colder even than standing around in the snow in the mid-twenties. Days like this seem made for staying inside, which wrecks havoc with any outdoor exercise plan. I did get out three times today, once in the morning for a brisk walk around Cornwall Park while my scanner was busy digitizing slides, then to the post office and an evening meeting downtown.
The weather certainly hasn’t been conducive to photography this week. Not bad enough to look dramatic and not good enough to make beautiful images. Fortunately, the winter blooming shrubs last a rather long time in the cool and damp conditions so there isn’t much that’s pressing in the garden anyway.
While it’s been raining I’ve been busy selecting images for several magazine customers to choose from for future issues. I think my transition to all-digital submissions is nearly complete. Since if one editor is looking for a subject another is sure to seek the same thing in the future, I’m scanning everything that isn’t already digital that needs to go out. That seems easier for an editor than having to look through both slides and web previews for one story or one issue.
February 06 2008 | Gardens and Photography | No Comments »
Without deadlines would I get anything done? Probably, but deadlines sure provide a little extra motivation to move a task to the top of the priority heap.
I committed several months ago to give a slide show based on my Bellingham Impressions
book, which was published last August. The show dates are this Monday and Tuesday, so today I finally made time to select the photos and sequence them. The show will be all digital, created in Open Office Impress. I already had digital files for everything that’s in the book, as well as a number of other photos I wanted to include in the show, so that part was easy.
For me, the hard part of building a slide show is deciding how to arrange the images so it makes sense and has a nice flow. I didn’t want to mimic the book, which has a color-based design that looks good as 2-page spreads. Print and screen are two very different media. To put the show in sequence I used what seems like an anachronistic technique — I printed thumbnails of every image I might want to include and cut them apart so I had dozens of little squares of paper. Then I started playing with the order, moving pictures around until I was happy. I numbered each photo, then picked up the thumbnails and carried them to my computer so I could page through them as I entered photo file names and built my show. I made a couple of minor revisions to the order and I was done.
Finally, I previewed the entire show and thought about what I wanted to say when each slide was on the screen. I’ll run through the show again on Sunday after I transfer it to my laptop. If you’re in Bellingham Tuesday, come to the Whatcom Museum at 12:30 for the brown bag series in the Rotunda Room and see the show. I’ll have autographed books for sale, too.
February 01 2008 | Photography and Human Nature | No Comments »
This time of year, especially following several days of heavy snowfall, the color palette is essentially monochromatic. Bare branches exhibit varying shades of gray and muted brown. Snow is bluish-white under cloudy skies and in the shade, or hues of gold under low-angle sunshine. Even the foliage that peeks through the snow is muted in tone — deep green cold-curled Rhododendron leaves, soft brown dry grasses that haven’t yet been buried, and almost-black conifer needles.
I photographed in Coeur d’Alene today, again under gray skies and intermittent heavy snowfall. I revisited a handful of gardens that were riots of color last summer or autumn. Today, I concentrated on shapes and patterns in the structures and bare trees or shrubs. The photo is of a small Japanese Maple.
Tonight, the wind picked up so the trees may be mostly bare on Wednesday morning. A little sun is predicted, with more snow on the way for the Spokane area. I’m heading home if I can get across the pass, which was closed all day today due to high avalanche danger. It’s been a productive three days of snowy photography.
January 29 2008 | Gardens and Photography | No Comments »
The storm cell that brought deep snow to the area sat over Spokane for nearly 30 hours and dumped a couple of feet of snow. That’s more than people here can remember in many, many years. Schools, many government offices, and some businesses were closed today.
Fresh snow doesn’t look good for very long, so I headed out in the brilliant morning sunshine to visit three more gardens today. The greenhouse in the photo was just added to Sherrie & Ron Guiles’ garden last summer. The tree in the foreground is a cutleaf Japanese Maple, which maintains its characteristic shape even under the thick snow cover.
Walking around in the garden where Ron & Sherrie hadn’t used their snowblower to create paths was challenging because the snow came up to my knees. As before, I had to plan my route to keep my footprints out of future photos.
In one area of the garden the outline of a boxwood parterre was barely visible as a soft raised swirl of snow. Everywhere I looked, the contours and textures that had been so prominent and colorful during the growing season and into autumn were soft, flattened, and muted into shades of blue shadows and golden highlights.
The second garden I visited today is a wildlife garden, and in the winter it is a haven for nuthatches, chickadees, pine siskins, house finches, flickers, mourning doves, and dozens of California quail. Bird feeders hang from many trees, and a large covered ground feeder gives a sheltered place to feed near thick shrubs which offer protection.
I shared lunch with Eva & Del Lusk, enjoying the view out the large windows overlooking the garden and watching the birds. Unfortunately, the birds aren’t nearly as comfortable with a photographer wandering around with a long lens and a tripod. I set up several shots and stood very still and waited for the birds to return, but mostly came up empty-handed. My feet eventually got cold and I gave up.
January 28 2008 | Gardens and Photography | No Comments »
I’ve been waiting all winter for the conditions to be right to visit several eastern Washington gardens when there’s lots of fresh snow. Today (January 27) I hit the jackpot as Spokane received near-record snowfall of up to 12 inches while I was out photographing. It would have been better if the temperature had been a few degrees colder and snow a little drier, but it was still a fantastic day.
The garden shed shown here is in Cathi and Dave Lamoreux’s back yard on the far south edge of Spokane. The snow in their yard was over a foot deep and getting deeper seemingly by the minute.
Photographing in the snow presents some challenges that don’t exist in warmer conditions. First, I had to keep my camera covered to keep it dry. I used a cheap plastic rain cover that cinches down around the lens and allows me to see the LCD on the back through the plastic. There’s a little hole for the viewfinder, and I operate the controls through the plastic. It’s a bit awkward, but workable.
The biggest challenge is one of planning. With no snow on the ground it doesn’t matter much where the photographer walks, as no evidence remains. But when there is snow, every footstep has to be planned so they don’t show up in some future shot. I find myself spending extra time thinking ahead to what other angles I’m going to want to capture before I start walking around.
When the weather is as warm as it was in Spokane today — right around freezing, staying warm while working really wasn’t much of an issue. Long underwear, rain pants, and a waterproof parka did the trick to stay warm and dry. Basically it’s just like dressing for any other winter outdoor activity in snow country.
I plan to spend another couple of days photographing Spokane gardens before heading back across the mountains. It’s predicted to get colder and maybe a little more snow, so conditions should remain favorable. But the only way to know for sure is to look out the window in the morning.
January 28 2008 | Gardens and Photography | No Comments »
This is the dark and rainy season in the Northwest, so it’s a good time to get caught up on captioning. That’s a good thing since I have a backlog of around 5,000 images to edit and caption from mid-September to now. I didn’t have time after my Kelowna trip in September before going to Oklahoma and then immediately to Spokane and Coeur d’Alene.
Captioning is a somewhat tedious process that requires identifying as many of the plants in each photo as possible, checking proper names and spelling, and entering the data both in my master database and in the metadata fields associated with the digital image files themselves. My record for number of photos captioned in a day is around 600, but most days I don’t hit that figure.
One of the challenges is simply forcing myself to stay in my seat in front of the computer. Sitting for long periods is tiring and definitely isn’t good for my body. But there’s no way to get captions written without sitting and concentrating on the task.
November 16 2007 | Gardens and Photography | No Comments »
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 »
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