Passions — a blog

Nearly 3000 Photos in May

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I’m working furiously to get caught up on captioning after a very busy spring out photographing both gardens and native plants. I think I’ve finished with May and a quick database query shows 2,947 photos captioned for the month. That’s a lot of shooting time, and a lot of time spent in front of the computer figuring out what plants I shot and entering captions in my database and into the digital file metadata fields.

Dwarf Columbine

This little Columbine, Aquilegia bertolonii, was photographed at the end of the month in a garden near Bellingham that has lots of interesting species, including rock garden gems, Rhododendrons, and a large number of dwarf conifers.

In May I photographed in eight private gardens and two public gardens. I visited seventeen locations for native plants across Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. I may not make it to quite as many locations in June as we’ve had some miserable weather early in the month and I’ve been chained to the computer. Most of the native plants are now online at Pacific Northwest Wildflowers and the rest of them will eventually make it into the galleries there. I’m farther behind in getting the gardens online, but the east-side gardens are at Inland Northwest Gardening.

Occasionally I get e-mails from someone who’s seen either my garden or wildflower photography and wants to know what some plant is that they’ve seen. I do my best from the JPEGs they send and sometimes have a good idea what it is they have. Other times I’m completely baffled, particularly when it is something found far from my personal experience. With garden plants it’s particularly hard because there are so many named cultivars besides the species. Sometimes I can only get a plant to family or genus. It’s a lot easier to identify plants in the field when you can see all the pertinent characteristics. Most people don’t photograph plants with an eye to identification later.

Sunshine?

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Sunny Rock RoseThere hasn’t been a lot of sunshine in northwestern Washington for the past several days. In fact, it’s been one of the coolest springs on record around here, with very few days when the temperature even got above 60 degrees F. Plants are running about 2-3 weeks behind normal in their spring growth. This Helianthemum nummularium added a bit of sunny yellow to the garden at Tennant Lake Fragrance Garden in Ferndale late this afternoon. That’s about the only sun we saw today.

I went out to Tennant Lake late in the afternoon after spending much of the day optimizing scans and preparing files for customers. I also worked on our phone lines to solve a recurring problem that turned out to be chewed or frayed insulation on several of the wires going to individual jacks.  I spliced new ends on a couple of the lines and put everything back together and now our phones should be more reliable again.

The Tennant Lake Fragrance Garden has a nice collection of herbs, but is really a mid- and late-summer garden. This early in the season there wasn’t a whole lot blooming yet and some of the plants were still fairly small. I made a few images and came home.

Earlier in the afternoon I visited Big Rock Garden Park in Bellingham, which is a sculpture garden set among Rhododendrons, Japanese Maples, and a variety of northwest natives. I hadn’t photographed in the garden for many years and the trees and shrubs have definitely gotten bigger in the intervening time. Many of the Rhodies were in full bloom so the garden was near its peak. There are both permanent and seasonal collections of sculpture in the park, which is one of Bellingham’s hidden cultural gems.

It was one month ago that we turned on our new rooftop solar array. For a while, we were generating twice as much electricity as we were using. Then it got cloudy and cold again. We turned the furnace back on with its attendant fan and raised our power consumption. Overall, in the last 31 days we generated 503 KW of power and used 271 KW. That’s about 86% more generated than we used. Many people seem to think that solar doesn’t generate power on cloudy days, but even with no sun breaks today our panels put out about 7.5 KW.

Selections for a Wantlist

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I’ve been spending too much time on my butt in front of the computer the last few days, mostly selecting photos to send to magazine editors for upcoming stories. In the end, there should be some sales, but right now I’m tired of sitting. In the old days I got some exercise in the process of pulling slides to send out since my light table is in the next room from the shelves of slides. Now I mostly just sit and wiggle the mouse. I still have to look at a lot of images to select those that best fit the request. Some of these wantlists run two or three single-spaced pages, so it gets tedious. It’s a good job for a rainy and windy day, which we’ve been having several of lately. With luck I’ll get caught up with all the requests before the weather improves and I can get back out shooting again. Requests always seem to bunch up. I’m pulling images for September issues currently, which includes some winter bulbs photographed in February and early March. When the originals are on film then I have to scan and optimize them, add metadata, and file them in my storage directory structure before I can add them to a digital submission. No one seems to want film any more.

Purple Garden

I did enjoy the Saturday afternoon Whatcom Horticultural Society advance tour of the gardens that will be open on June 21 and 22. I shot a few photos for the WHS website and put together a short slideshow that I posted to YouTube. It’s linked on the WHS site. The six gardens are all quite different and worth visiting if you’ll be in Bellingham that weekend. The photo is from one of the tour gardens.

Value of Backups

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I’ve been working this week to prepare optimized high-res files for delivery toGarden Picture Library, one of the stock agencies that represents some of my work. These are garden photos from 2006 (I’m a bit behind) that are stored on an external Netgear NV+ Raid 5 storage device. In the process of working with the files, using Adobe Bridge and Photoshop CS3, a handful of the image files have been corrupted. I don’t know quite why it’s happening, or when, or whether it’s related to the software or the external storage or the network. And since it only affects a few of the files it’s very hard to track down.

Fortunately, I have backup DVDs of all the images and I knew where to find them. I was able to restore the backup of each affected file, put the metadata back in (the backups were made before the images were captioned and keyworded), and resume working. It was frustrating and tedious but at least I didn’t lose anything but a few minutes time. However, I’ve been relying on the RAID to provide some measure of file security and it’s obvious I really need to have it backed up to other storage as well. The box holds 1.5 terabytes so backing it up is not going to be trivial.

Hooker’s Balsamroot on the Wild Horse Wind Farm

I’m pretty sure there’s a high level of redundancy in the operational and control systems for our power company’s generation facilities, including the new Wild Horse Wind Project east of Ellensburg where this photo was made last month. That redundancy helps assure reliability, which is important whether your business is big or small.

Golden Paintbrush

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Golden Paintbrush

Sometimes plants raise many questions when we find them in the field.  Castilleja levisecta, golden paintbrush, is a rare species that is only found in a very small number of places and in some of those there are only a few plants. I visited one of those sites last week to make the photograph above and spent about an hour working with the plants on a windy late afternoon. The location is hazardous and not one I’d recommend visiting as the slope is steep and slippery.  I almost wished for crampons and a belay as I carefully placed my feet to avoid damaging the habitat.

At this particular location golden paintbrush is quite prolific, but only within a small area on the bluff. Go just a short distance north or south and the plant is nowhere to be found. Why does it apparently thrive there and not elsewhere? The slope, which is rather sandy soil, is slowly eroding back away from the beach. How does the paintbrush deal with this natural force? Paintbrushes are hemiparisitic, forming a relationship with a host plant to help them extract nutrients from the soil. But they aren’t super picky about the host, growing with a number of grasses, Artemisia species, and Oregon sunshine. What is their preferred host here? There are both grasses and Oregon sunshine on the slope and I found golden paintbrush among both.  I also found weedy introduced species like Rumex acetosella, sour dock, on the slope.

This area has had human influence a long time, by white settlers and by Native Americans before them. But the bluff is probably infrequently visited.  Work is underway to reestablish golden paintbrush in other locations throughout its former range from seed collected in places like this, propagated in a greenhouse, and then planted out. There’s been some success getting the transplants to grow, but it’s a long slow process.

Compost

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Most everything that comes off our garden ends up in the compost pile until it goes back on to amend the soil.  We have three wire cages that each hold about a cubic yard of material, as well as a periodic pile of stuff that hasn’t been chopped up to speed decomposition.  The pile was getting pretty big, and since it’s right out in the middle of the garden I decided yesterday that it was time to deal with it.

I’ve discovered that our rotary lawnmower does a good job of chopping up most garden debris and does it faster and easier than the chipper-shredder.  The trick is to spread a somewhat thin layer of stuff on the ground and then slowly lower the mower over it a little at a time.  I not too much time after dinner yesterday I reduced the big pile down to a handful of bags that I dumped in a freshly-emptied bin.

When I got to the bottom of the pile I discovered a smaller pile of compost ready to put back on the garden.  This was the remains of a previous round of shredding that was too wet to chop up so I just left it in a pile. After a winter to age and the worms to do their thing it was nice rich soil.  I screen it through 1/2 inch hardware cloth to get out the sticks and anything else that’s too big to go through the holes. Then I spread the stuff on the garden wherever there’s bare soil or I think it would benefit from some compost.  This time around both the flower and veggie beds got some.  There’s still more to spread, which will probably get worked into the vegetable garden as I plant more seeds in the next week or so.

I know there’s a tradeoff using gasoline to chop up my garden waste, but I figure the benefit of returning the nutrients to the soil outweighs the cost of burning fuel.  If I didn’t chop the stuff up we’d probably have to haul it to the clean green site, burning fuel and not getting the benefit of the compost.

Planting Vegetable Seeds

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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.

Blooming Kale

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.

Don’t Get Stuck

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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.

Cactus Garden

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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Pursuit of a Penstemon

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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.

Chelan Penstemon

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.

Office or Field?

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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.

Grape Hyacinths and Tulips

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.