Tag: happy new year!

From “A Way to a Happy New Year” by Robert Brewster Beattie in Poems for Special Days and Occasions, compiled by Thomas Curtis Clark:

To leave the old with a burst of song,
To recall the right and forgive the wrong;
To forget the thing that binds you fast
To the vain regrets of the year that’s past;
To have the strength to let go your hold
Of the not worth while of the days grown old,
To dare go forth with a purpose true,
To the unknown task of the year that’s new;
To help your brother along the road
To do his work and lift his load;
To add your gift to the world’s good cheer,
Is to have and to give a Happy New Year.

From “The Snowman’s Resolution” by Aileen Fisher in More Poetry for the Holidays, selected by Nancy Larrick:

The snowman’s hat was crooked
and his nose was out of place
and several of his whiskers
had fallen from his face,

But the snowman didn’t notice
for he was trying to think
of a New Year’s resolution
that wouldn’t melt or shrink.

He thought and planned and pondered
with his little snowball head
till his eyes began to glisten
and his toes began to spread;

At last he said, “I’ve got it!
I’ll make a firm resolve
that no matter WHAT the weather
my smile will not dissolve.”

Now the snowman acted wisely
and his resolution won,
for his splinter smile was WOODEN
and it didn’t mind the sun.

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Hello!

While I’ve been taking photographs regularly at Oakland Cemetery for about six years now, it wasn’t until 2022 that I discovered the large volume of late-blooming asters and mums that are featured throughout the property. Most of them initially flower from late October through late November, include a wide variety of species and colors, and persist into early December if we don’t have too much cold weather. They tend to fill the gap between the emergence of fall color among trees and shrubs in autumn, and those plants — mostly flowering shrubs and trees like quince and plums — that are capable of producing blooms as early as January or February. As these asters and mums put on their best shows just before the holidays — and just before I start my annual Christmas project posts, I tend to accumulate several hundred photos that I don’t work on until after the holiday project, and the holidays themselves, are in the rearview mirror.

So this is the first post (of a presently unknown number) of some of those asters and mums, and I picked the white ones to share today since I’ve gotten in the habit of associating white flowers with New Year’s Day. Subsequent posts will bring in rainbows of hues, including some rather amazing mums where the single stems of individual plants produce three to five flowers, each one a different color.

While members of these plant families are highly resistant to cold weather — which is of course what makes them so suitable for late autumn and early winter growth spurts — we’d had several days below freezing right around the time many of the plants were starting to bloom. You’ll see the effects of those freezing temperatures in three ways: some of the flowers formed non-traditional shapes that reminded me of what coastline trees look like when blown by wind off the water for decades or centuries; some of the blossoms (especially at the tips of their petals) had their colors shift from white to light pink or light red; and many of the stems and leaves froze to the point where they produced swatches of yellow or turned completely brown. The leaf color change is similar to what happens to many plants as autumn approaches, where a plant’s ability to produce chlorophyll (and stay green) is reduced by the cold and its leaves eventually desiccate, detach, and fall to the ground. The shape-shifting is a chemical reaction to reduction in water fluidity that contracts cells and collapses the flower structure; and the color-shift is a reminder that few flowers are actually pure white but instead are suppressing the appearance of alternate colors when they’re at optimal blooming stages.

All this means that this year I accumulated hundreds of aster and mum photos that are not entirely photogenic. Naturally, I was aware of that when I took the photos (how could I not be?), but took lots of them anyway, in part because I wanted to see what I could create from them once I had time to spend editing in Lightroom. While I’ve long been accustomed to using Lightroom’s healing tools to remove spots, pollen, bits of debris, or unfocused photobombing bugs from my images, the kind of repair and reconstruction needed for heavily damaged plants is beyond the capabilities of those tools.

Such reconstruction is not, however, beyond the capabilities of Lightroom’s Generative AI Remove tool, which was added to the software in mid-2024 and I’ve been experimenting with it since. Simply put, this tool lets you select parts of an image that you want to replace, and it fetches three potential replacements you can pick from to let you properly match colors and textures. It lets me think of an image’s creative reconstruction like this: what might have been in the photo if the damaged flower, broken leaf, or dead stem wasn’t there?

Here are some examples to help illustrate that thinking, three photos showing how the image looked before I selected elements to remove and replace (sometimes dozens of individual selections), and after. Select the first image and page through all six if you’d like to see how the changes worked out. Note, especially, how the tool generated new leaves for the plants that are botanically accurate: they not only match the colors and textures present in other parts of the photo I didn’t change, but are correctly rendered not as some generic leaf shape, but with the distinct appearance of chrysanthemum leaves.

Of course, the end result departs significantly from what I photographed, which generates all sorts of interesting questions at the intersections of photography, creativity, image manipulation, and even artificial intelligence. A photography theorist bound to originalist or documentary conceptions might think this distance between what I photographed and what I chose as an end result violates some picture-taking laws, but I’m not one of those theorists. I do, however, try to approach these changes intentionally, with the idea in mind that we — as humans who observe plants and flowers in real life — tend to focus on parts of a scene we consider the subject and worth contemplating, while disregarding those parts of that scene that we consider irrelevant. To the camera, everything it captures is equally significant or insignificant, though it may help us with subject isolation when we vary focal lengths, apertures, and other settings — so it’s up to us and our discretion, not the technology, to decide what matters.

If you’ve been following me here for a while, you’ll likely recall that I have in the past often produced galleries of images where I’ve removed the backgrounds behind the subject I wanted you to see by converting them to black. This was a different kind of image manipulation serving the same goal: presenting a photo based on what mattered to me when I viewed the subject, while discarding distracting or irrelevant items. Given the Generative Remove tool’s capabilities, I look back on that now as a transitional period in my own development, one that I’d probably still be using had this new tool not been invented, and one that permits me to take wider shots than I did in the past while knowing I can remove aberrations while still preserving the botanical accuracy and garden context of the original scene.

Because its operation is quite opaque — like a black box in technological terms — using it is heavily experimental, but with a lot of ambiguity since you can never get the same results twice even if you try to make an identical second selection. And while you can’t tell it what to do with words that represent your thoughts or your vision, eventually it sinks in through that experimentation that you can influence how it acts. I’ll explore that more fully in a later post, but here are two things I discovered that have turned out to be consistently true: if I want to repair damage to a particular leaf, I should first remove any small spots or blemishes on adjacent leaves, or the tool will incorporate nearly identical spots into its replacement; and, if I want the tool to construct something like a new leaf in an otherwise nearly blank location, it will do that accurately if I include a sliver of a leaf nearby in my selection. These two techniques tell me that the tool is contextual: in determining potential replacements, it’s looking at what else is in the photo in conjunction with what I’ve selected before providing replacement options.

Here’s another way to understand that. For this image, I selected everything in the sixth photo above for replacement — therefore asking Generative Remove to recreate the entire photo. What does this result tell us about how it works?

I’m glad you asked! We can see that — even though I’ve told the tool to replace all the image’s content — it still recognizes that the primary subject was a white flower of a particular shape, the background leaves were unimportant, and that the most prevalent colors in the image were white and shades of green. It probably knows nothing specific about objects we would identify as chrysanthemums, but takes the pattern it found in my photo’s subject and repeats it while varying the pattern to simulate randomness. It applies this same approach to the grass in the background: note how each swatch of grass is very similar though not precisely identical.

This arrangement of recurrent but slightly varying patterns is one of the reasons we would recognize this implausible field of flowers as likely created by an image generator: the patterns are too uniform, and any given section of the image looks nearly identical to any other. That has two implications: first, that when editing photos and using this Generative Remove tool, I have to keep an eye out for unnatural patterns or patterns that aren’t a logical fit; and second, when you see an image with patterns like this, your conclusion that it’s AI-generated is most likely correct.

Thanks for reading and taking a look…

And Happy New Year!

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From “How to Find Happiness Through the Year” in Lovingly: Poems for All Seasons by Helen Steiner Rice:

Everybody, everywhere
seeks happiness, it’s true,
But finding it and keeping it
seems difficult to do,
Difficult because we think
that happiness is found
Only in the places where
wealth and fame abound —
And so we go on searching
in ‘palaces of pleasure’
Seeking recognition
and monetary treasure,
Unaware that happiness
is just a ‘state of mind’
Within the reach of everyone
who takes time to be kind —
For in making others happy
we will be happy too,
For the happiness you give away
returns to ‘shine on you’.

From “The White Anemone” by Owen Meredith in One Thousand Poems for Children, selected by Elizabeth Hough Sechrist:

‘Tis the white anemone, fashioned so
Like to the stars of the winter snow,
First thinks, “If I come too soon, no
     doubt
I shall seem but the snow that stayed
     too long,
So ’tis I that will be Spring’s unguessed
     scout,”
And wide she wanders the woods
     among
Then, from out of the mossiest hiding-
     places,
Smile meek moonlight-colored faces
Of pale primroses puritan,
In maiden sisterhood demure;
Each virgin floweret faint and wan
With the bliss of her own sweet breath
     so pure.

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Hello!

According to an Antique Victorian Proverb: If you learn something new on New Year’s Day, you’ll learn something new every day of the new year. This may or may not be true (and I may or may not have just made it up), but today I’m going to be a “learning shover” — a role described in the 1909 book Passing English of the Victorian Era: A Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang, and Phrase, unwieldily titled thusly by James Redding Ware. “Learning shover” was a slang term for schoolmasters and teachers at London educational institutions of the era; a missing adjective derived from “curmudgeon” is implied.

I took the photographs in this post in December, on a hunting trip at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, looking for late fall color that would end up in one of my Christmas project posts, Seven Days to Christmas: When Nature Does the Decorating. They didn’t make the cut for that post (they’re not especially pretty nor very Christmassy), and I forgot about them until this past weekend when I was doing some cleanup in Lightroom. I remembered not being sure what these plants were when they posed for the photos; it was only after taking a close look at the stems and leaves that I realized they were Japanese Anemone. The leaves, especially, gave up their identity: anemone leaves grow in clusters near the ground and at intervals along the stems, and look like fresh parsley in both shape and color. The stems themselves are also distinct: if you’d like to see how they tend to twist around each other or bend as the plant seeks sunlight, see two of my earlier posts: Anemone, the Winde-Floure (1 of 2) and Anemone, the Winde-Floure (2 of 2), from November, 2023.

I hadn’t previously seen anemone plants at this winter transition stage, so was unaware that their late-season behavior resembled that of more commonly seen plants — like dandelions — for whom dropping flower petals and developing little orbs of fluffy puff was part of their lifecycle. Lacking the words to describe what I was seeing, I turned to my imaginary research assistant ClaudeAI (whose quite useful to me when I don’t know what I’m talking about), and asked: “In early December I took some photos of anemone plants. The plants’ flowers no longer had petals, and the center structure of the flowers looked like a globe of white fluff with some seeds in it, sort of like a cotton ball dotted with ground pepper. How is this change in the flower’s appearance explained botanically?” And ClaudeAI said:

What you’re observing is the fascinating transformation of anemone flowers from their showy flowering stage to their seed-dispersal stage….. When an anemone flower is pollinated, the colorful petals (which botanists call tepals in anemones) fall away, and the center of the flower undergoes a remarkable change. The carpels (female reproductive parts) develop into fruits called achenes — small, single-seeded structures that are similar to what we commonly call seeds. Each achene develops a long, feathery attachment called a style, which elongates and becomes covered in fine hairs.

These feathery styles serve a crucial purpose in seed dispersal. Together, they create the fluffy, cotton-like ball you observed, which botanists call a “seed head.” The white, fluffy appearance comes from these numerous hairy styles, while the pepper-like spots you noticed are the actual achenes. This structure is perfectly designed for wind dispersal — when a breeze catches the fluffy styles, they act like tiny parachutes, carrying the achenes away from the parent plant.

This adaptation is particularly interesting because it’s similar to what we see in other members of the buttercup family (Ranunculaceae), to which anemones belong. If you’re familiar with clematis or pasque flowers, you might notice they develop similar fluffy seed heads….

Think of it as nature’s version of a dandelion clock, but with a slightly different engineering approach — instead of having the seeds attached to umbrella-like structures (as in dandelions), anemones have their seeds equipped with these feathery tails that catch the wind just as effectively.

I wanted to learn a little more (of course!) — so I asked ClaudeAI to explain exactly how the seeds get dispersed:

The seed dispersal process in these plants is a masterpiece of natural engineering, and understanding how the seeds detach reveals fascinating adaptations that have evolved over millions of years.

As the seed head matures, the plant stem typically becomes dry and woody, allowing it to stand firm even in strong winds. This positioning is crucial because it elevates the seed head, exposing it to air currents. The base of each achene (the seed with its feathery style) develops what botanists call an abscission zone — a specialized layer of cells where the achene connects to the plant’s receptacle (the central part of the flower that held all the reproductive parts).

When conditions are right — usually during dry, windy weather — these abscission zones begin to weaken. Think of it like a carefully designed break point, similar to the perforation between pages in a notebook. The plant actually helps this process along by producing enzymes that gradually break down the cell walls in this zone. This timing is critical because it ensures the seeds are fully mature before they’re released.

The detachment process itself is quite elegant. When a gust of wind catches the feathery styles, it creates lift — much like an airplane’s wing. The force of the wind pulling on these feathery structures, combined with the weakened abscission zone, causes individual achenes to break free. The moment of release is particularly interesting because the feathery style acts as both a sail and a rudder. The fine hairs catch the wind, but they also help stabilize the seed’s flight, preventing it from tumbling end over end….

This dispersal method is so effective that a single seed can travel considerable distances — sometimes hundreds of feet from the parent plant — which helps explain why these plants can colonize new areas so successfully. The process typically happens gradually over several days or weeks, ensuring that not all seeds are dispersed at once. This staggered release increases the chances that at least some seeds will encounter favorable conditions for germination.

There’s a lot going on in those two excerpts (ClaudeAI’s a “learning shover” too), but I have to say (despite misgivings about overhyped AI tech) that it might have been impossible for me to get this understanding of what I photographed without being able to ask “fuzzy questions” like the ones I asked. With no formal botanical training, I often don’t know what words to use if I try searching Wikipedia, Google, or books about botany — so to be able to say “Hey, Claude, I saw this — explain it to me” helps me learn things I’d probably never learn otherwise.

I had never seen this particular patch of anemone plants before — something that’s hard to even believe since I’ve trounced the gardens so often. Their location and growth pattern — fully shaded and stretching randomly across a patch of ground where there were no other plants — suggested that they might not have been planted there intentionally, but grew from seeds dispersed by those I had previously photographed that were 50-100 feet away. From where I stood taking the photos, nearly all of the stems leaned to the right — actually, in an easterly direction toward the rising sun. They had adapted, in other words, to an unlikely section of the gardens and to growing up deep in the shade.

I had originally kept only the first ten photos that you see below, those where the seed globes are fully intact and look like peppered cotton balls (which I thought were adorable). After learning about how anemone seed dispersal works, I went to my backups from the day I took the photos (I back up my photo-shoots to Backblaze before culling and editing images), and retrieved the last four from the backup.

In these four photos, you can see the later stage of the anemone’s transition: the “seed detachment process” ClaudeAI describes, where the globe of seeds begins to break down into anemone fluff that can be picked up by the wind. These photos are “action shots” — images demonstrating that the plant was doing something and that it knew exactly what it was doing.

And with that… my work as a “learning shover” is done… for now!

Thanks for reading and taking a look…

And Happy New Year!

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From “Creativity, Success, and Personality” in The Interior Landscape: The Landscape on Both Sides of the Camera by Guy Tal:

“Creativity is most rewarding not as something to practice ad hoc when making a photograph but as a general attitude toward life. A creative attitude may lead to the experience of flow, to occasional grand discoveries and meaningful breakthroughs, which is not the case when you follow familiar (convergent) recipes and templates aiming to produce predictable, preconceived outcomes. Put another way, the rewards of prioritizing creativity over success are ongoing and sustained. They grow cumulatively over time and may on occasion yield immense and unexpected rewards, even the possibility of enriching your life with new meaning.”

From “The Passing of the Year” by E. E. Cummings in Complete Poems, 1904-1962, edited by George J. Firmage:

The world outside is dark; my fire burns low;
All’s quiet, save the ticking of the clock
And rustling of the ruddy coals, that flock
Together, hot and red, to gleam and glow.
The sad old year is near his overthrow,
And all the world is waiting for the shock
That frees the new year from his dungeon lock. —
So the tense earth lies waiting in her snow.

Old year, I grieve that we should part so soon, —
The coals burn dully in the wavering light;
All sounds of joy to me seem out of tune, —
The tying embers creep from red to white,
They die. Clocks strike. Up leaps the great, glad moon!
Out peal the bells! Old year, — dear year, — good night!

From “Iseult la Belle” by Henry Reed in Henry Reed: Collected Poems, edited by Jon Stallworthy:

Though I drop back into oblivion, though I retreat
Into the soft, hoarse chant of the past, the unsoaring, dull
And songless harmony behind the screen of stone,
I do not age.
But I come, in whatever season, like a new year,
In such a vision as the open gates reveal
As you saunter into a courtyard, or enter a city,
And inside the city you carry another city,
Inside delight, delight.
And it seems you have borne me always, the love within you,
Under the ice of winter, hidden in darkness.
Winter on winter, frozen and unrevealing….

To flower in a sudden moment, the bloom held high towards heaven,
Steady in the glowing air the white and gleaming calyx.
Lightness of heart.

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Hello!

Well another year has bit the dust! If you’re reading this, you’re alive — and perhaps, like Iseult la Belle, you do not age!

For this post I had planned on writing a retrospective of 2023’s Christmas Project to describe some of my techniques and a few things I learned along the way — but, instead, I ended out un-decorating and de-glittering over the weekend to start the new year fresh and with a (reasonably) clean house. So I’ll still likely do the retro — but later this week or later than that. Stay tuned!

The first quotation up-top is from a book I just bought: The Interior Landscape: The Landscape on Both Sides of the Camera by Guy Tal. Like all of his books, this one explores the relationships between photography and creativity in incomparable ways, and would be an excellent addition to any photographer’s or artist’s library. I’m just starting the it, so — more on that later!

I chose the two poems above because they seemed to well-represent the transition between years: the first one a bit darkly, perhaps; the second one with flashes of delight. I often choose white flowers for a New Year’s post — and those I’ve included below were some I had taken in mid-December, after a couple of days of subfreezing temperatures. The first five are my favorites because of the desiccated leaves in the background or at the frame edges, leaves that gave off a rich orange/brown glow on a cloudy day and are actually leaves of lilies I had photographed previously. Old and new together: old lily leaves and new, white asters.

Thanks for taking a look!

And Happy New Year!

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From “Winter Hours” in Winter Hours by Mary Oliver:

“Light streamed from them, and a splash of flames lay quietly under their feet. What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?”

From “Journals (1858)” in The Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau by Henry David Thoreau:

“Each new year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence. How happens it that the associations it awakens are always pleasing, never saddening; reminiscences of our sanest hours?

“The voice of nature is always encouraging.”

From A Big Little Life by Dean Koontz:

“In each little life, we can see great truth and beauty, and in each little life we glimpse the way of all things in the universe. If we allow ourselves to be enchanted by the beauty of the ordinary, we begin to see that all things are extraordinary. If we allow ourselves to be humbled by what we do not and cannot know, in our humility we are exalted. If we allow ourselves to recognize the mystery and the wonder of existence, our fogged minds clear….

“Thinking clearly, we follow wonder to awe, and in a state of awe, we are as close to true wisdom as we will ever be.”

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Hello!

Here are a few photos of some sparkly grasses — in color and even sparklier black and white — that Nature waved in the air to help us celebrate the first day of 2023.

Happy New Year!

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