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Garden iPhoneography

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On the Birchwood Garden Club summer members tour last Wednesday several of my gardening friends asked where my camera was. I wasn’t carrying my usual monster, tripod, and pack full of goodies. I reached in my pocket and pulled out my iPhone.

Sometimes it’s nice to wander around unencumbered by a big load, to be able to socialize with friends while enjoying a nice garden, and to play with the creative aspects of a camera that has certain limitations. In photo classes one of the standard assignments is to shoot a series with only one lens (zooms don’t count).

This was an evening tour and I was running late. I didn’t get to the first garden until about 6:30 and by the time we finished visiting the last garden it was 8:30 on an overcast evening. That was darn near dark, but the last garden made good use of light colored foliage to brighten up a couple of beds that probably looked their best in the evening instead of during the middle of the day.

We had fun, and I got to see a couple of gardens that were new to me. I’d like to go back to some of the gardens with my full toolkit, but it won’t be the same experience as it was on Wednesday night.

Moss Campion

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Moss Campion HabitatHere’s one of my favorite true alpine plants from the North Cascades. It’s called Moss Campion, Silene acaulis, and you’ll only find it at high elevations in the mountains. Here it’s growing among the rocks on the shoulder of Mount Larrabee with one of the summits of The Pleides in the background.

Moss Campion grows as a ground-hugging little bun, often appearing as a soft mound among the rocks. Its roots seek out cracks in the rocks, penetrating deep to find pockets of lingering moisture and nutrients. It blooms soon after the snow melts and once the flowers fade all you’ll see is a pale green lump. But when it’s in full bloom it can be spectacular.

Sometimes I’ve seen it high on a cliff, the bright pink flowers calling attention to it and presumably attracting the bees that pollinate the blossoms. In those instances it is so far out of reach as to be impossible to photograph. Even if I were to rappel down to it how would I set up my tripod while dangling in space?

I found this clump, as well as several others that had finished blooming, on a day hike of the High Pass trail Saturday. The weather had cooled off a bit and the bugs weren’t too bad. Starting at Twin Lakes the trail rises a little, then descends a couple hundred feet through moist flower-filled meadows before contouring around the hill and ascending a series of switchbacks to Low Pass. Then it continues climbing to High Pass and a well-worn boot track gains another 500 or so feet to the shoulder of Mount Larrabee. I only met a couple of other people on the trail, and they were on their way back to the lakes from bear hunting. They said it was the first day of bear season but they didn’t see any bears.
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Think Cool

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Floating Bridge in WinterAccording to Weather Underground, it’s 96° at the Bellingham airport this afternoon. That’s four degrees warmer than the previous record, set in 1960.

I’ve been optimizing a group of images for Garden Picture Library this afternoon. This one, of the floating bridge at VanDusen Botanical Garden, was made around Christmas last winter when we had serious snowfall and cold temperatures. For all my northwest friends who are sweltering today, maybe this will help you “think cool.”

I know that about 6 months from now when we’re suffering under dreary drizzly skies we’ll think back on these hot summer days and wish we could have saved a little of the heat for winter. Is some researcher working on a “heat battery” we could charge in the summer and use in the winter? I guess a ground source heat pump is the closest thing available.

In olden days they’d cut blocks of ice from ponds in the winter, pack it in sawdust in an insulated shed, and haul it out in the summer when it was needed.

Think cool!

Deming Glacier

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Davidson's Penstemon and Deming GlacierYou can’t get much more alpine than this!

The Deming Glacier flows south off of Mt. Baker, bending around beneath the steep cliffs of the Black Buttes before flowing out into the Middle Fork Nooksack River. It’s the most dramatic example of glaciation in Washington’s North Cascades that I know of. I’m always impressed when I get up on the side of Mt. Baker to look down on the Deming.

Saturday I got there pretty much by accident. I started out to scout a route into the Twin Sisters range, but there was a “road closed” sign blocking my way. Since I was already on the south side of Baker I decided to head up to Schreiber’s Meadows and hike the Scott Paul trail on Baker’s south flank. I’d never hiked it, but heard the views were great and I knew it would take me to the edge of the glaciers.
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Purple

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Liatris spicataHere’s a great midwest and eastern prairie plant, Liatris spicata, blooming exuberantly today at VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver, British Columbia. It also goes by the common names of Gayfeather or Blazing Star. I believe this is the variety ‘Kobold’ ‘Floristan’ based on the plant tag in this bed in years past.

The species is native to every state east of the Mississippi River, as well as Missouri, Arkansa, and Louisiana. According to the USDA PLANTS database there are a large number of species of Liatris native to various parts of North America. I’ve seen the genus in the wild in Nebraska and New Mexico but there are none native to Washington.

Today was the first time I’ve been up to VanDusen since May. It turned out to be a full-sun blue sky day by the time I got there about 2 pm. Bright midday sunshine doesn’t make for my favorite conditions to photograph gardens or plants, but I made the best of it. Sometimes it’s nice to work with more challenging light and to show sunloving plants under their preferred growing conditions.

This plant portrait was made with my 24-105 zoomed full wide and with a polarizer to cut the glare on the foliage. The other trick I use in full sun is to try to keep the light coming from the side or toward the camera. Here it’s sidelight. I made several compositions from this patch of gayfeathers since it was at peak bloom, working both wide and tele lenses and both side and backlight.

It got warm during the day and I didn’t feel particularly inspired as I wandered around the garden, but I ended up with over 200 exposures for the afternoon. Sometimes its just a matter of keeping going and continuing to look and observe. I didn’t have any preset ideas of what I was looking for in the garden today, which is really a nice way to work.

Glacier Lilies

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Glacier Lily blooming through snowI’d heard for years that glacier lilies (Erythronium grandiflorum) will bloom through the snow, but I’d never caught one in the act until this past weekend. This fine example was at the edge of the receding snow pack in the meadow below Copper Pass in the Okanogan National Forest. Many more of the lilies were pushing their way up through the snow and showing their bright yellow buds.

Apparently glacier lilies, and other members of the species, generate enough heat as they sprout from their corms to melt the surrounding snow. This extends their growing season by a few days, which can be critically important in the high altitude meadows where they are prolific in the summer. In just a few short days these beautiful lilies will push up at the edge of the melting snow, flower, and set seed.

Not far from where I photographed this flower were other glacier lily plants that had already set seed and their leaves nearly withered away to nothingness.
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Horticulture Cover

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August 2009 Horticulture coverI got an e-mail this afternoon from a gardener in Ontario, Oregon that I’d visited last month. She’d just received her Horticulture magazine for August. Jean wrote, “Got my issue of Horticulture yesterday and was reading it this afternoon and just now noticed your photo MADE THE COVER!!! Fantastic!! It’s a beauty too with the sweetbriar rose. … Congratulations on a lovely piece of photography with great distribution!”

I always like covers. They pay better than inside and are great showcases for my work. In this case, the photo was made in June 2004 while I was working on the wildflowers book. I found this sweetbriar rose along the road in the small town of Richland, Oregon. Richland is about halfway between Baker City and Halfway. The cover photo was the first frame I shot when I found the specimen plant. I continued shooting, and ultimately chose another version for my book.

When I’m photographing plants I almost always look for several different ways to see them. I aim to blend the art of photography with my knowledge of plants. Some photos lean more toward the art side and some more to the science, but I usually have both elements in mind while I’m working.

This is a mid-day photo. That’s not when I usually like to work, but the clear blue sky makes a nice clean background for the blossom. I shot with a 100mm macro lens on a Canon D60 digital camera. Its 6 megapixels were plenty for a full-page magazine reproduction.

If you’ve got the magazine, you’ll find more of my work filling pages 25 (gas plant) and 56 (Acer carpinifolium).

Fresh!

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Raspberries with Blue GlassThis is about as fresh as you can get. Natalie picked a large bowl of red raspberries in our garden after dinner tonight. As she brought them in I thought they’d make a nice still life.

I chose an antique pressed-glass bowl from the family heirlooms and carefully poured some raspberries in. I placed it on our white UK pvc tablecloths and added some of our collection of blue glass in the background for contrast.

I cleared a space to work on the table and played with placements until I got something I liked. This frame was made with my 100mm macro lens, set pretty wide open. I also shot a few frames with my 90mm tilt-shift lens to control depth of field. Since the photo was made after 8 pm on a cloudy evening, I did a custom white balance on the tablecloth. I used a handheld small reflector to add a little fill light on the bowl of berries, but this is basically just very soft window light exposed for about 4 seconds.
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Award Winners

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This is the first year I’ve entered the Professional Photographers of America International Print Competition. I came away from the very competitive judging with two award-winning prints that will join the PPA General Collection and be exhibited at Imaging USA in Nashville, Tennessee next January.

Forest Primeval“Forest Primeval” was photographed on an ethereal misty morning visit to the Whatcom Land Trust’s Stimpson Family Nature Preserve near Lake Whatcom. It depicts a majestic old-growth western red cedar surrounded by skunk cabbage and ferns in a lush forest scene. Fog in the background gives the landscape a sense of mystery and depth.

A light rainy was falling on this moody day. The rain helps to saturate the colors and the overcast sky creates a very large soft light source. That helps to open up the shadows and reveal detail that would be obscured on a sunny day. While sunshine and warm air certainly make for pleasant hiking, our northwest rain forests don’t look quite right unless it’s a rainy day.

I’ve been a supporter of WLT for a long time and contributed photos for both the original Whatcom Places book in 1997 and the revised Whatcom Places II book ten years later in 2007. In preparation for the second book I visited several Land Trust preserves to photograph. It was on one of those visits that I found this wetland forest below the loop trail. I made several variations on the theme, but ultimately chose this one as my favorite.
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Gardens Galore

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Lilies on Patio
June is a spectacular time in northwest gardens. Many communities schedule garden tours during the month, often as a fundraiser for a local non-profit organization. These lilies, in large containers flanking the entrance to a nice home outside Mount Vernon, Washington were among the sights to delight the senses on the Skagit Symphony’s Gardens of Note tour on Sunday, June 28.

The week before, Whatcom Horticultural Society held their tour in Bellingham with six wonderful gardens. June 13 and 14 I toured gardens in Washington’s tri-cities of Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco for the Academy of Children’s Theater. The Boise, Idaho tour was the same weekend, supporting the Idaho Botanical Garden. I missed the Yakima tour, which supports the Yakima Area Arboretum.
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