Tag: photography
Let’s Pretend It’s Spring! (Photo Set 2 of 2)
The galleries below contain the second series of photos I took last week, of signs of spring life that are starting to appear in my gardens.
The first post and a bit about how the photos were taken and processed is here: Let’s Pretend It’s Spring! (Photo Set 1 of 2).
Thanks for looking!
Gallery One: Climbing Hydrangea
Climbing Hydrangea is often seen growing as a showcase flowering vine on large trellises, but mine are in two four-foot tall urns with lattice supports on opposite sides of my courtyard. Planting them in pots was one of my gardening experiments: the plant — while producing only a few flowers — grows wonderfully with a few hours sunlight in the morning and shade in the afternoon. Most of the leaves drop off in the fall after turning bright yellow (see the third image here: Wordless Wednesday: Fall, Fading) but then regenerate from these tiny buds every spring, the buds often starting to appear in late January or early February.
Gallery Two: English Ivy
English Ivy has achieved the distinction of being common, pervasive, and often, invasive. Some people believe that if you take cuttings and throw them on the ground, they’ll grow right where you threw them. While I tried that and it didn’t work, I think it could if the soil was damp and soft; I’ve put a few strands in a jar of water and seen them generate long roots in just a couple of days.
Many of the homes in my neighborhood were built above street level on lots held in place by three-foot retaining walls. As you walk through the neighborhood, it’s very apparent that the same landscaping style was established at about the same time, as the retaining walls were created from similar stone that has aged to nearly identical colors and textures. The front yards, including mine, were planted with English Ivy instead of grass, and the ivy is typically encouraged to cascade over the walls. Near my sidewalk, front porch, and front gardens, I keep the vines at bay with pine bark; trimmed back and bordered by the bark, it’s not hard to keep it from consuming the gardens (and the house!) because the sticky fingers it produces are easily detached from the bark chips.
It grows all year round, though much more slowly during the winter, and isn’t a bit intimidated by frost or freezing temperatures. Once a year, in late February or early March, it puts on a show with a blanket of new leaves in luminous green or yellow-green, similar to the smaller leaves in the last two photos. Then, after about a week, the leaves get larger and the colors blend into a darker green, and rapid spring growth begins for real.
Gallery Three: Catawba Grape Vine
The Catawba Grapevine winters with these tiny, hard, darkly colored nubs that are just starting to show signs of growth. The Catawba was previously featured here on my post Secrets Inside a Grapevine.
Gallery Four: Bluebird Hydrangea
Bluebird Hydrangeas — like many hydrangeas — can always be counted on to over-winter some buds and push out new ones as early as January, even if it’s a little cold. It’s almost hard to believe that from a couple dozen stems like this, a fully leaved five-foot wide blooming shrub will fill one section of my garden. Bluebird Hydrangeas were featured on this blog last year, here: Bluebird Hydrangeas from My Garden.
Gallery Five: Honeysuckle
I have one honeysuckle in my garden, due for replanting from a pot to soil this year, or at least to a larger pot. Honeysuckle produces clumps of multicolored flowers in a variety of complex shapes and sizes; this one opens blooms in orange and light purple — colors similar to the bud in the last photo — that look like tiny trumpets suspended from the branches. At this early stage, the new leaves push out from various points along the plant’s woody stems, starting out as sage or blue-gray in color, then gradually changing to contain more and more green as the leaves mature.
Let’s Pretend It’s Spring! (Photo Set 1 of 2)
In the past few days, we’ve bounced from chilly Winter Evening Silhouettes to something that faintly resembles spring. It may not last — who knows what the next six weeks will bring? — but since it’s here for a few days, I spent a couple hours on Friday crawling around in the back yard, poking my camera among the plants and their pots, looking for signs of emerging spring. I do something similar almost every year, periodically getting snapshots of the tiny greenery and flower buds as the garden comes to life and the southeastern winter subsides. I plant mostly perennials and experiment with one or two new plants each year, so there are always some surprises. Photographing the early buds gets me to pay attention to what’s happening in the garden and gives me a chance to practice my closeup photography.
I took 99 shots with my sexy macro lens, using ISO 100 or ISO 200, manual camera settings, manual focus, and no flash for all the photos. No tripod, either, because the three extra legs make me fall down. I’ve learned from practice that with this lens I can use a shutter speed as low as 1/30 of a second and get images I’m satisfied with, handheld and holding my breath, relying on the camera’s continuous shooting of three frames to get me one that’s sharper than the others; and relying on underexposing some and letting Lightroom recover the exposure and detail when I process the RAW images. The continuous advance for macros might be a crutch, though; I may stop doing that since I end out with three times as many images to import and review in Lightroom and I’ve noticed recently that in most cases I keep the first image and throw out the second and third duplicates. It makes sense when you think about it — at least for stationery subjects — that my grip is steadiest on the first of a series of shots taken from a single press of the shutter.
After cranking up Lightroom and reviewing results, I discarded the typical two-thirds of the photos, marveling — as always — about the ones that looked great in the camera’s viewfinder but looked like crap when seen on the monitor. A photographic mystery, that! Adjustments to the photos included some cropping and straightening; basic contrast, brightness, and minor color adjustments; and a quick run through the Nik Collection to add saturation, remove color cast, and shift (your) focus to what I wanted (you) to see. I exported the photos and created nine small galleries by plant type; below are the first four and I’ll share the remaining galleries in a second post.
Gallery One: Clematis
Clematis is a fast-growing flowering vine that turns thin and brittle toward the end of each growing season as the leaves dry and fall from the plant. The spring growth that appears on the woody stems looks like emerging leaves, but is typically the tips of new vines that will stretch their way out of the old ones. You never know where the new growth will appear, so I always leave the hibernating vine intact, only trimming off dead wood when the plant has started blooming. In these photos, the slight purple cast on the plants or in the background comes from the burgundy color of the stairs leading to my back yard, where I have these clematis vines growing in two pots.
Gallery Two: Lamb’s Ear
Lamb’s Ear is a mounding and spreading plant, notable for the soft white fluff on leaves that vary in color from green to blue-green to very light blue. The bulk of the plant dies off with the first frost or freezing temperatures, with new growth popping out from the roots and stems that remain. The red in the backgrounds — especially in the last image — comes from the brickwork in my courtyard.
Gallery Three: Wisteria
The tiny buds below are from one of two wisteria vines in my garden, one growing on a trellis and this one growing in a large pot. The earliest leaves produced by the vine will have a slightly fuzzy texture that is apparent even at this stage. As the vine matures, it grows so fast you can almost see it get bigger as you stand near it; it easily adds six to eight inches of growth every day in June, July, and August. With adequate sun, it will produce clusters of purple blooms in April or May; but even without blooms, the vine grows beautifully.
As a rookie gardener fifteen years ago, I thought it was amazing how the one on a trellis on my deck pulled its way along the trellis and up the side of the house, until I realized one day that it had grown into the attic through one of the roof vents. Pulling out twenty to thirty feet of the vine was quite a chore as it twists firmly around anything it can get a grip on. It’s no longer allowed to grow that much; I keep it trimmed and mostly off the deck, because if I ignore it for even a few days, it tries to take the attic back. It’s sometimes considered an invasive species … why am I not surprised? 🙂
As with the Lamb’s Ear, the background red comes from the bricks in my courtyard.
Gallery Four: Hot Stuff Sedum
Who can resist a plant with “Hot Stuff” in its name? In late summer, sedum produces tiny, delicate flowers in clumps, but for most of the growing season, shows as repeating leaf mounds pushed up from the soil that shrivel and fall off in the early fall. Miniature versions of the mature leaves appear in the fall or early winter, after most of the summer growth has started to die off. They stay pretty much like this all winter, then start to grow out in April or May. I’ve had two of these for about five years, in pots that they’re starting to outgrow, so they’ll get new homes in a few weeks. Individual leaves are barely a half-inch wide and have a thick, rubbery texture, reminiscent of a soft cactus.
Thanks for reading and taking a look! More soon!
Before and After: Soft Steel
From The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human by V. S. Ramachandran:
“[If] art is about realism, why even create the images? Why not just walk around looking at things around you? Most people recognize that the purpose of art is not to create a realistic replica of something but the exact opposite: It is to deliberately distort, exaggerate — even transcend — realism in order to achieve certain pleasing effects in the viewer. And the more effectively you do this, the bigger the aesthetic jolt.”
From Photographically Speaking: A Deeper Look at Creating Stronger Images by David duChemin:
“Stories move forward through conflict, but photographs — limited to one frame, one moment in time, and no possibility of a character arc — move forward and imply story through contrast. Contrast in photographs occurs in two significantly different ways. The first is visual contrast. A high-contrast black and white image is one in which the extremes — the blacks and whites — are strong and prominent, and what lies in between — the midtones — are fewer. With color images, that contrast occurs between colors at opposite ends of the color wheel — blue and yellow, for example. Similarly, conceptual contrast is about the extremes of ideas, and the point at which they clash. Both can be called contrast, but to distinguish them I will call the difference in tones and colors contrast and the difference in concepts juxtaposition.
“Contrast, a strong difference in tones or colors, is what pulls the eye. Our eyes function on contrast and look for areas where those contrasts are the strongest. Even perceived sharpness in images is a function of stronger contrast. Where there is a slower gradation of contrast, i.e., blacks slowly turn to gray and then white, the eye sees it, in a photograph, as less sharp. In color, as in black and white, contrast pulls the eye, and that pull will be read as intentional…. Awareness of the visual pull of contrast allows us to orchestrate the image in the most intentional way possible, pulling the eye to key areas with greater contrast and pushing the eye away from areas with lower contrast….
“Juxtaposition also draws the eye, but it has more to do with engaging the mind as it’s less a contrast of visual elements and more a contrast of concepts. Where tonal contrast is about the difference between blacks and white, juxtaposition — or conceptual contrast — is about the differences between ideas…. Why this matters is the same reason tonal contrast matters: we pay attention to it…. The contrast draws our attention.”
A couple of nights ago I had a dream that Wordless Wednesday was a real thing in the real world, not just a blogging meme on the internet. On Wordless Wednesday in the real world, people stopped talking for twenty-four hours once a week. Interactions among humans were done without spoken words: everything from going to the bank to meetings at work to running errands took place with hand signals, writing notes, and showing each other pictures. Phone calls were out; text messages with emojis were in, bigly. Wordless Wednesday had evolved into a cultural practice that — in the backstory of a dream — was simply accepted, like so many norms, as the way things were done.
You never really know what precipitates certain dreams, but they often seem to arise from intense mental experiences. Maybe I’ve spent too much time on the blog lately, which could be true since over the past couple of weeks, I put in quite a few long hours prepping this site before migrating followers from WordPress.com. Or it may be from a subconscious current that started flowing as I was reading the Chaos Walking Trilogy by Patrick Ness — which I loved and tore through all 1,300 pages earlier this month — where the characters (humans and animals) can hear each others thoughts, communicating words, images, and events without speaking aloud. The capability is called Noise — a term that in itself creates an interesting juxtaposition (opposites and contrasts!) since it occurs in the mind and not in the auditory physical world. As the novels progress, and the characters develop their Noise capabilities, they shift more and more from using words in their thoughts to communicating in images … so just imagine the Wordless Wednesday possibilities….
The images I posted on Wednesday were taken some time ago at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, where a series of large leaves crafted out of steel are attached to the wall of the visitor’s entrance. These photos are among many still lurking in my archives that I’ve not previously done any work on, potential candidates for deletion that I come back to now and then to see what I can create. The original images always bugged me because they were under-exposed and certain background elements seemed intrusive or badly colored and once upon a time I didn’t know what to do about that.
Here are the original images (click one to see larger versions in a slideshow):
Other than the generally mushy backgrounds, the upper left corners of the images in the second column needed attention; but I couldn’t crop those elements and shadows out of the picture without clipping too much from the main subjects. So as a first step I used spot-removal in Lightroom with some carefully-adjusted feathering to blend the colors and shadows in those corners out of existence. I also spot-removed out the bolts used to attach the leaves to the wall, since I knew from experience that they’d get emphasized when I added saturation to the images in the Nik Collection.
For most of the images I’ve posted here on my blog, I’ve typically used a Darken-Lighten Center filter in the Nik Collection to shift emphasis to a focal point and draw your eye to that point by — as the filter’s name suggests — darkening the background and lightening the center. After applying contrast and color adjustments, I tried the same approach with these four images, but the results weren’t good: the shadows cast by the leaves looked raggedy and grainy, creating inconsistent vignetting around the edges of each image and splashing too much reflected color from the leaves onto the backgrounds. No matter how much I fiddled with the Darken-Lighten filter’s adjustments, I couldn’t get to a result that I liked.
So … what do you do when the way you always do things just doesn’t work? Try doing the opposite.
Instead of darkening the backgrounds and lightening the centers, I switched to lightening the backgrounds and darkening the centers — which removed much of the color cast from the backgrounds and eliminated most of the vignetting, leaving only some subtle shadows behind each leaf. As a last step, I applied Classical Soft Focus, which does just what the name implies: it softens the appearance of primary image elements, which, in this case (with backgrounds now largely a single color) softened and brightened each of the steel leaves while leaving the backgrounds unaffected. The result, I hope, was to “achieve a certain pleasing effect” for you, the viewer.
Select the first image to page through a slideshow and examine the before-and-after versions. You won’t regret it! 🙂
Thanks for reading and taking a look! Bye for now….