Beautiful stream! by the village side; But windest away from haunts of men, To quiet valley and shaded glen; And forest, and meadow, and slope of hill, Around thee, are lonely, lovely, and still. Lonely — save when, by thy rippling tides, From thicket to thicket the angler glides; Or the simpler comes with basket and book, For herbs of power on thy banks to look; Or haply, some idle dreamer, like me, To wander, and muse, and gaze on thee. Still — save the chirp of birds that feed On the river cherry and seedy reed….
Ye may simper, blush, and smile, And perfume the aire a-while: But (sweet things) ye must be gone; Fruit, ye know, is comming on: Then, Ah! Then, where is your grace, When as Cherries come in place?
Hello!
When you live in an area with cherry trees aplenty, and they insist — as trees often do — on being photographed, it seems like your photoshoots need to include those trees. So this post features cherry blossoms from two of my recent trips to Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, toward the end of March.
I selected the first five photos from a batch I took on a seriously brighteous day. That light was a bit too harsh for my personal taste and led to some washed-out colors, though the pinks in the blossoms held up fairly well. I threw out most of the photos I’d taken from that shoot and went back on a second day when the sun was on a break, using the overcast skies and some slightly underexposed camera settings to capture more saturated colors and the level of texture I like to see.
“A faint green mist hangs in the treetops. Then redbud darts into bloom, mauve blossoms on stark black boughs. The petals are pastel but seem shocking amidst gray shadows of winter lingering in the woods.
“The eastern redbud tree may stand up to fifty feet tall, squeezed thin in wooded areas but spreading broad when given space. Its range extends from the central Atlantic coastline into the Midwest. A shrubby cousin grows in California and a larger western redbud graces Texas and New Mexico. All redbuds flower bright and early, before their leaves arrive.
“A branch of redbud offers pleasure to many senses. Clusters of lavender flowers dangle from dark twigs, which curve like Oriental brush strokes. You sense its odor in the air. Draw closer and taste a single bloom, penetrating its inner center of sweetness. That flavor, subtle as spring’s morning light, can adorn this season’s menu.”
“Why is the redbud tree not called a purplebud tree? All the flowers are purple.”
Hello!
The galleries below feature photos of several redbud trees that I took a few weeks ago just as the trees were entering their blooming cycle.
The first three photos are heavily backlit; imagine the sun just above the horizon to the left of where I was standing. The leaves caught my eye, so I tried to capture the scene as I saw it: off in the distance with the background heavily shadowed, the purple-pink blossoms rich with color, and the leaves glowing as if they were individual heart-shaped lightbulbs.
In the middle galleries I focused more closely on individual flowers and leaves. At this stage, the tree produces blooms from surprising places on some of its thick stubs, along with wispy clusters of flower buds running the entire length of thinner branches. And nearly every longer branch is tipped with two or three luminous, yellow-green leaves.
The last gallery shows three images of two of the trees I photographed for some of the closeups in this series.
“One theory holds that the name descends from the Old English word for dagger, the wood being hard enough to fashion into goads and arrows as well as skewers and spindles. It furnished shuttles for the textile industry, which flourished in our village until the Civil War, when, as Kelby Ouchley notes in Flora and Fauna of the Civil War, the wood was used for ‘charcoal, engraving, mallets, tool handles, wedges, plane stock, harrow teeth, hames [the curved pieces of a harness], horse collars, ox yokes, wheel hubs, barrel hoops, machinery bearings, and cogs in various types of gears.’ Also gunpowder and toothpicks….
“There was no connection to dogs in the origin of the name, the canine element emerging only with a change in the language, when the a in dag became an o. Dog-tree, Dog-berry, Dog-timber, Houndberry — these names were coined, possibly because the bark was said to make ‘an excellent wash for mangy dogs,’ or because of the barking sound created by branches rubbing together in the wind.”
I remember, in the week of the dogwoods, why sometimes we give up everything for beauty, lose our sense and our senses, as we do now for these blossoms, sprinkled like salt through the dark woods.…
At the end of this post, I’ve included before-and-after versions of four of these photos. Photographing large, bloom-filled trees can be an interesting challenge: there are often so many flowers in both the foreground and background that you end out with no apparent focal point for the images. I often address that by zooming in on individual branches and their flowers; but sometimes I want to include larger sections of the tree with multiple branches and blooms. Doing that, though, causes the camera to further merge foreground and background elements together, especially since I will likely use a higher f-stop, and that tends to flatten the appearance of the image and reduce any sense of three-dimensional depth. I may see certain branches and flowers as the photograph’s subject, but the camera thinks differently: it includes, at least partially in focus, all the elements of the tree that are within the range of the f-stop I selected.
So to give the image a better focal point — which you will perceive as the image’s subject — I use Lightroom’s masking tool to first select the background, a task it does with remarkable accuracy as long as some elements are in focus and they contrast well with the foreground. I then soften and smooth out the background by reducing texture, sharpness, and noise; followed by adjustments to highlights, brightness, and shadows to darken it just enough to create greater differentiation from the foreground. Since I’m effectively pushing the background farther away from you, I may also reduce saturation, because objects that are farther away from our eyes tend to be perceived as containing less color.
Before proceeding, I’ll turn the mask off and on a few times and verify that I’ve included all the background elements I want, and that unmasked areas represent what I will want in the foreground as the subject. For the last photo of the four, then, the masked background looks like this:
I want this background mask as precise as possible, and may adjust it with a brush if it’s included or excluded unwanted elements. I then duplicate and invert the mask (that’s why I wanted it to be so precise), which flips it from a background mask to a foreground (or subject) mask, to look like this:
I can now adjust the appearance of the image’s subject, which — in the case of these dogwoods — typically consists of decreasing shadows and blacks to subtly brighten the flowers, without making them excessively bright. I am generally doing the opposite of what I did to the background, including adding texture (instead of removing it) to give the flowers some additional detail. And since white flowers tend to reflect colors from their surroundings — typically, yellow and green from nearby tree trunks, branches, and leaves; or blue from the sky — I’ll reduce yellow, green, and/or blue from the image overall to whiten the flowers.
