"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Tag: autumn

Ten Wildflowers and Three Butterflies

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From “Wild Flowers” in Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden by Eleanor Perenyi:

“Study a book on wild flowers… or for that matter walk out into the woods and fields, and you wonder why you go to the trouble of sowing seed, ordering plants, when the countryside is alive with flowers that are identical with or sometimes superior to their domesticated cousins.

“Wild flowers are never vulgar. [They] have an elegance and restraint to their design that ought to give the hybridists pause as they go about their work….”

Hello!

So I went exploring for a little fall color yesterday, but unsurprisingly found that it’s way too early for any of the trees to have started that transition here. Yet I was just as happy to come across a nice big batch of late-summer/early-fall blooming wildflowers … all busy attending to bees and butterflies going about their pollinating business. The galleries below include the images I took, a variety of different colored blooms followed by pictures of a particular butterfly that seemed to like posing (though not sitting still!) for the camera.

Thanks for taking a look!

Happy Thanksgiving!

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From World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down by Christian McEwen:

“The more one can disengage from one’s own self-centered myopia, the more the world, in all its glory, rushes in to fill the gap. Gratitude creates a space in which nothing is not welcome: the fog, the hummingbirds, the blue sea and the sails….

“In the I Ching, when a line of the oracle reaches its most extreme, expansive state, it swings back, like a pendulum, into its own opposite…. It seems possible to me that our culture of speed and confusion, busyness and overwhelm, has reached just such a state, and that the time has come for the quick double-flip of transformation, from greed to gratitude, from isolation and depression to community and calm.“

From President-elect Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden Pen Thanksgiving Op-Ed for CNN:

“We are grateful for the frontline workers who have never stopped showing up over these long and confusing months, making sure our food is harvested and shipped, keeping our grocery stores stocked, picking up our trash, and keeping our cities and towns safe.

“We are grateful for the health care workers who put in long shifts and isolate themselves from their loved ones, the nurses who comfort and help people say one last goodbye, and the doctors who fight for every breath.

“We are grateful for the educators who learned to teach in virtual classrooms almost overnight, who did extra work to reach families without technology, or who took late-night phone calls from parents on the verge of tears.

“We are grateful for the parents who have carried their families through the chaos, working or searching for a job, navigating childcare and remote learning.

“We are grateful for the researchers and scientists who have spent this year learning everything they can to understand how to fight this pandemic and working tirelessly to find a vaccine and therapeutics.

“We are grateful for the American spirit that does not cower in the face of crisis and hardships but instead comes together to lift up one another. All those who lost jobs but not heart, who donated to food banks or asked their neighbors, What can I do? How can I help?

“We’re grateful for everyone who reminded us that we are bigger than the challenges we face.“

Autumn in Atlanta: Photo Mash-Up #9

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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!