The time has been that these wild solitudes, Yet beautiful as wild, were trod by me Oftener than now; and when the ills of life Had chafed my spirit — when the unsteady pulse Beat with strange flutterings — I would wander forth And seek the woods. The sunshine on my path Was to me as a friend. The swelling hills, The quiet dells retiring far between, With gentle invitation to explore….
But Winter has yet brighter scenes, — he boasts Splendours beyond what gorgeous Summer knows; Or Autumn with his many fruits, and woods All flushed with many hues. Come when the rains Have glazed the snow, and clothed the trees with ice; While the slant sun of February pours Into the bowers a flood of light….
Approach! The incrusted surface shall upbear thy steps, And the broad arching portals of the grove Welcome thy entering.
Hello!
This is the second of two posts featuring hydrangeas and their winter shapes. Unlike the previous post (see Winter Shapes: Hydrangea Skeletons (1 of 2)), I took these on a dark and cloudy day, so there was no backlighting to make their little parts appear to glow. Yet these can be delightful to look at anyway (in my own humble opinion) because the softer light shows off some of the fine, lacy (and sometimes silver) textures in individual stems and flower petals.
I snipped the quotation above from the poem “A Winter Piece” by William Cullen Bryant. The poem is much longer than those excerpts, and is a vibrant ode to wandering the woods in the winter, with vivid descriptions of the sights and sounds one might encounter on an extended woodland walk. If you’d like to read the whole poem — or just skim it for some of the charming details — here’s a link to the full version:
“If you pay attention to the world around you, you can’t help but fall in love with nature. The rhythms, the beauty on a vast and a minute scale, the triumphs of life: It’s all laid out around us, and if we choose to be in touch with all this richness on a deeper basis, we’ll be better photographers. Learning to see is, after all, about learning more about yourself as you connect with the natural world around you.”
“Natural light exists in two forms: as strong, direct sunlight, known as specular light, and, if softened by clouds, diffused light. Both types of light are sourced from the sun. With nothing standing between your subject and the sun, the light is direct and produces sharply defined edges. Emotionally, this direct light expresses vitality, hope, and joy. People go out to sit in the sunshine because being bathed by the light of the sun can bring a feeling of happiness. Our existence depends on the sun, and emotionally we know that, so sunlight inherently expresses life. Sunlight is bold and aggressive. It can be wonderful for dramatic landscapes, and for times when you want to create strong contrast in a photograph. Yet sunlight is not appropriate for every subject. You wouldn’t express the peacefulness of a forest in the high contrast of full-on sunlight, but you could use that light on a landscape of sand dunes, or to capture the intense glow of backlit flowers or leaves….
“Working with light, it’s important to recognize some differences between how we see light and how the camera sees it. Our eyes can read a greater range of contrast than the sensor in our camera can. As we scan a scene, our pupils are constantly opening and closing to adjust for the amount of light so that we can see detail in everything. We are looking here, then there, and the eye is constantly adjusting to the light and shadow present. The camera can’t do that. It simply grabs a moment in time, the one you’ve chosen, and tries to capture as much range of light as it can, but that can be a big compromise. Because of this, a scene might look good to our eyes, yet the results may be a disappointment. The more you realize this difference, the better you’ll become at analyzing the contrast of light in any situation and deciding how you’ll manage it.”
“In the garden, hydrangeas are handsome and versatile shrubs. They excel in a woodland setting, particularly if you choose cultivars with lighter-coloured flowers, and they can make a spectacular specimen in a mixed border….
“Hydrangeas work well with complementary herbaceous plants… and also with evergreen shrubs that have an opposing season of interest, such as azaleas or sweet box…. And, while in full floral spate the hydrangea will steal the show, in the depths of winter, the denuded shrub, with its charming, skeletal flowers, adds useful structure and interest to the garden.”
Hello!
Continuing with a “Winter Shapes” theme (see Winter Shapes: Japanese Maple Leaves (1 of 2) and Winter Shapes: Japanese Maple Leaves (2 of 2)), I assembled some closeup photographs of hydrangea “skeletons” from two recent photoshoots. As with the Japanese Maple photographs, this first of two posts features those from a sunny day with sparkly backlighting, the kind of lighting I often seek out when photographing flowers and plants.
It can be especially effective to work with backlighting that’s filtered through nearby shrubs or trees, so that background brightness doesn’t swallow the subject entirely while it creates interest through blends of blurred light and shadow. I usually take multiple shots of scenes like this from different positions and camera settings, since — as Tharp describes in “The Nature of Sunlight” above — the camera tries to gather as much light as it can, which may be too much for subjects as small as these hydrangea remnants. It’s also true that since I’m facing the light source when taking photos like this, the camera’s viewfinder is awash with light and it may be difficult to see the viewfinder’s rendering — so I have to rely more heavily on what the camera is telling me about the exposure than I do with more direct lighting. It took me a while to get used to that — largely ignoring the viewfinder image but paying attention to the aperture, shutter speed, and histogram instead — but once it became a habit, it gave me more creative control over what I was trying to accomplish.
“Each hydrangea species is a product of its ancestral home…. H. serrata hails from the wooded mountains of Japan and Korea, where it is sometimes called ‘tree of heaven’.”
“[We] know from experience that the Chinese hydrangea — meaningthereby the one generally cultivated — is so hardy that it may be left out of doors throughout the whole year, without the least risk of injury, excepting it be in the northern parts of the country, where the plants do not have an opportunity of well ripening their wood. The more recently-introduced kinds, which have mostly come from Japan, are of an equal degree of hardiness, and may be cultivated under much the same conditions. Too much stress cannot be laid on their hardy character, in order that owners of gardens… may be made aware of it and come to enjoy the beauty of the flowers….”
“[Hydrangea serrata] likes partial or dappled shade…. The species has lacecap flowers and serrated leaves — hence the name — and does well under trees. A number of cultivars… will go through several colour changes throughout the season — but since they are not susceptible to pH, these are consistent in their inconsistency. The white cultivars will remain white regardless of soil pH, but the other pink and blue cultivars are moderately susceptible, so situations arise where, for example, Bluebird, grown on alkaline soil, will produce flowers that are noticeably pink.”
Hello!
This and the next two posts feature photos I took in May and June, of the tiny flower structures of several Bluebird Hydrangea plants growing near the base of three large pine trees on the eastern side of my back yard. The blooms were a bit puny this year — owing, I think, to warm January and February temperatures (causing the plants to flower prematurely) followed by a couple of very cold weeks that nipped them in the bud, so to speak. But I still liked aiming a macro lens at them to capture as much of the color and detail as I could — especially on those whose shapes reveal both vertical and horizontal arrangement of the white petals. If you would like to see last year’s versions of the same plants and flowers, click here.
Lately I’ve become fascinated by historical botanical drawings, which I often find in older books about botany or gardening, like the one I quoted at the top of this post. Many books like this — published in the late 1800s or early 1900s — are more likely to contain sketches, drawings, or woodcut prints of plant specimens rather than photographs, since photography and publishing had not yet merged to be as ubiquitous as they are now. If the subject interests you, here are two highly browsable sites filled with information on the history of botanical drawings:
The second site — Plantillustrations.org — has thousands of drawings extracted from historical books and other web sites. It can be searched by either the common or scientific names of plants, or browsed by the names of over 2500 artists. Here, for example, is a delightful illustration of a Bluebird Hydrangea’s relative, originally from a book published in the mid-1800s: Hydrangea serrata. Take a look, it’ll be fun!
“Image possibilities that contain a strong potential for structure notably include elements of line and shape, almost always heightened by some form of contrast….
“Black and white enhances these possibilities by taking away the distraction of colour, forcing more attention on the contrast across edges….
“Physiologically, our visual system responds more sensitively to some hues than to others, which is why yellows and yellow-greens are brighter to our eyes. But more than this, there is our psychological response to different hues. One simple example of this is that ‘hot’ colours around orange are readily associated with flame and burning, and also the production of light. Most people feel these to be inherently brighter than, say, blues, which we tend to associate with water, coolness, and dim light.
“Take this away, and the tonal scale simplifies dramatically. What this allows is a clearer, purer concentration on the subtleties of transition between shades of gray.”
Hello! A few days ago I posted a some photos of hibernating hydrangea and Japanese maple leaves; here are the same photos, rendered in black and white, and modified with various filters in the Nik Collection to create additional contrast and detail, add a bit of glowing softness, and shift the black-and-white tones to a touch of silver-blue.
At the end of this post, there is a before-and-after gallery, if you would like to compare the color and black-and-white versions.
Thanks for taking a look!
Here are the before-and-after images; select the first one to compare versions in a slideshow.
