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Happy New Year!!

January 1, 2020, 1:00 am December 31, 2019 8

From Billy and the Minpins by Roald Dahl:

“No child has ever had such an exciting young life as Little Billy, and no child has ever kept such a huge secret so faithfully. He never told a soul about the Minpins.

“I myself have been very careful not to tell you where they live, and I am not about to tell you now. But if by some extraordinary chance you should one day wander into a forest and catch a glimpse of a Minpin, then hold your breath and thank your lucky stars because up to now, so far as I know, no one excepting Little Billy has ever seen one.

“Watch the birds as they fly above your heads and, who knows, you might well spy a tiny creature riding high on the back of a swallow or a raven.

“Watch the robin especially because it always flies low, and you might see a nervous young Minpin perched on the feathers having its first flying lesson.

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places….”

Walk, Work, Discover: Hydrangeas in Winter

December 30, 2019, 9:52 am January 1, 2020 6

From “The Walker’s Waking Dreams — Rousseau” in A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros:

“Rousseau claimed to be incapable of thinking properly, of composing, creating or finding inspiration except when walking…. It was during long walks that the ideas would come, on the road that sentences would spring to his lips, as a light punctuation of the movement; it was paths that stimulated his imagination….

“Walk, work, discover…. Trampling the earth with his heavy shoes, disappearing into the brush, wandering among ancient trees.

“Alone, and surrounded — or rather filled — with the quiet murmur of animals and trees, the sigh of wind through the leaves, the rattle and creak of branches. Alone, and fulfilled. Because now he could breathe, breathe and surrender to a well-being slow as a forest path, without any thrill of pleasure but absolutely peaceful. A lukewarm happiness, persistent as a monotonous day: happiness just to be there, to feel the rays of a winter sun on his face and hear the muffled creaking of the forest.”

I’ve been prowling my neighborhood, hunting for splashes of winter color. I’ve ended out with a large, slightly unwieldy batch of photos that I’m organizing into a half dozen galleries, that I’ll be working on and posting over the next week or so. Unlike summer and spring here in the southeast, green no longer dominates the scenes that become my photographs. Where green is present, it’s typically found in hardy grasses; or more commonly, among the ivy varieties whose color shifts from deep green to a shadow-filled version, where aqua or blue are emphasized by seasonal changes and the softer light of a winter sun. Backgrounds, especially, transition toward muted gray, chocolatey brown, and pastel variations of yellow, orange, and gold. My eye moves toward the surprising shapes and textures of plants in their dormant stages, and how those forms stand out as abstractions of their growing season versions.

The two galleries below include images of hydrangeas — bits of hydrangeas — that I found shaded by the trees of Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The first gallery features those where pink and red was still present on the leaves, after their fall turn and while still barely attached to their stems. The white filaments on some of the leaves — a form of mold or fungus — presented some interesting (that is, frustrating) challenges for the photographer because their contrast with the red shades created a difficult-to-overcome sense that they were out of focus … fuzzy, that is. To (attempt to) improve their appearance, I used radial filters in Lightroom individually over each of the leaves, reducing whites, highlights, and saturation then adding a bit of texture and sharpening to emphasize the veins in the leaves over the cottony fungus.

Except for the last photo below, this second gallery shows side-by-side pairs of the same clumps of spent flower clusters, framed differently. I did very little post-processing on these nine images, mainly some brightness and shadow changes to soften and darken the backgrounds and emphasize the remnants of the buds — which through the zoom lens looked almost like they were suspended in mid-air, held up as they were by tiny threads. Our eyes tend to pass over sights like this; but zoom and macro lenses provide a view of the world that our unaided sight typically misses.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Four Days To Christmas: Winter Solstice

December 21, 2019, 5:00 am December 13, 2020 4

From On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation by Alexandra Horowitz:

“It was December twenty-first, the winter solstice. The business of being a pedestrian in the city had changed: any mosey that crept into people’s summer gait had been replaced by the determined fast stride of the winter walker. It was cold out, and I hunched my shoulders in a futile attempt to warm my ears and bully the chill away.”

From Winter Sunshine by John Burroughs:

“[It] may be later in the season, well into December. The days are equally bright, but a little more rugged. The mornings are ushered in by an immense spectrum thrown upon the eastern sky. A broad bar of red and orange lies along the low horizon, surmounted by an expanse of color in which green struggles with yellow and blue with green half the way to the zenith. By and by the red and orange spread upward and grow dim, the spectrum fades, and the sky becomes suffused with yellow white light…”

Autumn in Atlanta: Photo Mash-Up #9

December 11, 2019, 8:05 pm December 11, 2019 2

From “The Arrival of Fall” by Lauren Springer in The Writer in the Garden by Jane Garmey:

“Autumn is a time when warm color and rustling sounds resonate throughout the plant world….

“The sun arcs lower in the sky, softening and burnishing the light. All colors seem to emanate an inner warmth as if the heat of the summer were stored within them. The most mundane scenes — an empty concrete basketball court alive with whirling, windblown leaves, a chocolate-brown field spiked with tawny corn stubble — take on the qualities of gold leaf, the light of a Venetian Renaissance painting.

“The lower sun also creates lovely lighting effects…. While in summer it would be suppertime before any similar effect might be possible, now mid- and late afternoon becomes a time for backlit drama. Grass panicles glisten and shimmer when touched by the slanted light; foliage reds and golds are intensified as the sun passes through them; fragile petals resemble halos given this autumnal spotlight.”

This is the ninth post in my autumn series of new photos. Seven previous posts showed images from my visits to Oakland Cemetery, and the galleries on this and the eighth post are from Grant Park.

The photos in this first gallery were taken along Cherokee Avenue. In the last four images, a bright mid-day sun had made its appearance, so these and the remaining photos in this post gave me another opportunity to play in the light, like I like to do, and learn more about dealing with brightly lit landscapes.

On the map of the park above, you can see Zoo Atlanta toward the bottom, and just above that a series of connected walking paths in the center. The photos in this next gallery are from that section. With the first three, the sun was behind me and created a lot of shadows in the scene, with additional shadow from a towering tree whose trunk you can see — especially in the first image — on the left. The orange/red maple at the center of the scene was barely visible (from this shaded point of view) yet its color was so nice I wanted to try and capture it anyway. Here’s what the first image looked like out of the camera:

By patiently manipulating shadows, whites, and highlights in Lightroom a bit at a time, I was able to make the hidden tree at the center the main subject of this image and the next two, and add some color to pop both the leaves on that tree and the carpet of leaves in the foreground.

With the remaining images in this gallery, the sun was facing me from behind the trees, creating nice glowing backlighting, adjusted in Lightroom to eliminate excessive highlights and retain detail and color. When viewing these in a slideshow, select “View Full Size” if you want to see the detail I was able to capture and keep.

I took the photos in this last gallery deeper into the park toward Zoo Atlanta. Here again the sun was nearly directly behind the trees (imagine it just outside the frame, to the left of each scene). Of all the photos from this year’s autumn projects, these were the most challenging to adjust in Lightroom, the challenge stemming from the high contrast between dark shadows and very bright backlighting.

I’ve experimented with different kinds of lighting with many of the photos in this series, but with these I had to take frequent breaks during post-processing because the high brightness and contrast would seem to create afterimages in my eyes as I made adjustments. How weird was that! Still, one of my goals was to work with lighting that was a bit extreme — even if I wasn’t successful — to see what I could come up with. I don’t know what technical “rules” photos like this might violate, but in the end I was reasonably satisfied with the results … so here they are! Once again, try viewing the photos at full size from the slideshow so you can see the level of detail I was able to capture and retain.

The trees in this last gallery above, especially with the backlighting, looked very much like they were decorated with Christmas lights. At least it seemed that way as I wandered among the leaves to get to a good vantage point. A fitting end to this series, I think, as we transition from autumn to winter and the holiday season. Stay tuned for photos of shiny objects and glittery whatnots!

My earlier autumn 2019 photo mash-ups, and a few other posts with new fall color photos, are here:

Autumn in Atlanta: Photo Mash-Up #1

Autumn in Atlanta: Photo Mash-Up #2

Autumn in Atlanta: Photo Mash-Up #3

Autumn in Atlanta: Photo Mash-Up #4

Autumn in Atlanta: Photo Mash-Up #5

Autumn in Atlanta: Photo Mash-Up #6

Autumn in Atlanta: Photo Mash-Up #7

Autumn in Atlanta: Photo Mash-Up #8

Four Small Signs of Early Fall

More Small Signs of Early Fall

Even More Small Signs of Early Fall

Autumn Tints at Twilight

Burnt Orange and Singed Pumpkin

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Autumn in Atlanta: Photo Mash-Up #8

December 9, 2019, 11:01 am December 9, 2019 3

From “The Arrival of Fall” by Lauren Springer, in The Writer in the Garden by Jane Garmey:

“Autumn is a time when warm color and rustling sounds resonate throughout the plant world….

“In the deciduous woodlands of the East and Midwest, winter spreads down the land from north to south, from highland to lowland, rolling a carpet of foliage color over the landscape before it. The land, so serenely green for all those months, suddenly looks like an infrared photograph….

“On the grasslands of the prairie and plains, the tired gray-green and buff of late summer take on richer amber, sienna and rust tones as the foliage and seedheads of the grasses ripen. Late-blooming wildflowers, predominantly deep golds and purples, attract sleepy butterflies and bees, while more energetic birds frenetically gorge themselves on seeds before the first snow cover blankets the land.”

This is the eighth post in my autumn series of new photos. The previous seven posts showed images from my visits to Oakland Cemetery, and the galleries on this post (and one more, to follow shortly) are from Grant Park. The park is a 131-acre woodland, established in Atlanta in 1883, near the center of the neighborhood by the same name and a short walk from my home.

I took all the photos in these galleries on the last weekday in November, substituting Black Friday for an Orange-Red-Yellow Friday, shortly before the neighborhood trees shed most of their leaves during three days of high winds. This first gallery includes photos from the north side of the park; on the map above, that’s the corner at the top where Sydney Street and Park Avenue meet, near one of the park’s entrances. The homes slightly-visible over the hill and through the trees (in the first four photos) are on Sydney Street; and the roadway showing in the third, fourth, and hidden in the fifth image leads, all mysterious-like, deeper into a park section darkened by massive elm and oak trees (collectively referred to (by some people) as “elk trees“). I composed most of these images to include the street lamps along the roadway, to help emphasize the height of the trees by comparison. The street lamps, I estimate, are 10 to 12 feet tall; the surrounding trees, therefore, are very very much taller.

I took this series in the section that runs along Cherokee Avenue; on the left side of the map, you can see where Cherokee traces the entire east side of the park. Orange and red leaves were still abundant, even as you can see there’s a thick ground-cover of those already shed.

Further along the Cherokee Avenue side of the park, near an entrance at Georgia Avenue, I found these bright yellow surprises. Most trees with yellow leaves, having turned several weeks earlier, were bare by the end of November, but the one in the first three images “stole the show” framed as it was near the entrance. The last three images show a different tree nearby; still turning from green to orange and yellow.

Since we’re approaching the Christmas holiday, I imagine you’ve probably been wondering where Christmas gnomes come from. I know I have.

Mystery solved. I found this gnome nursery at the bottom of a hill underneath a giant pine tree, where pointy gnome heads were starting to emerge from this thick bed of pine needles. One baby gnome did pop out and scurry up the trunk of a tree; I got a shot but then I accidentally deleted it during post-processing. Sorry about that; you’ll just have to trust me. 🙂