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

Tag: summer

Iris Domestica, the Leopard Flower or Blackberry Lily (3 of 3)

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From Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature by Alva Noe:

“Things show up for us as colorful and noisy. But this is all false appearance, a consequence of our particular makeup and local perspective. The qualities of objects we seem to see wouldn’t get cataloged in the final description of absolute reality. For they are merely effects, in our minds, of processes that are, in themselves, without color and without sound…. Everything we know in the world around us — from mountains to ice creams to sunsets to rose petals to the sun and the earth — is made up of physical parts that are made up in their turn of parts that are made up of still smaller parts. It’s pure matter… all the way down.”

From “The Act of Expression” in Art as Experience by John Dewey:

“[When] excitement about subject matter goes deep, it stirs up a store of attitudes and meanings derived from prior experience. As they are aroused into activity they become conscious thoughts and emotions, emotionalized images. To be set on fire by a thought or scene is to be inspired. What is kindled must either burn itself out, turning to ashes, or must press itself out in material that changes the latter… into a refined product….

[Elements] that issue from prior experience are stirred into action in fresh desires, impulsions and images. These proceed from the subconscious, not cold or in shapes that are identified with particulars of the past, not in chunks and lumps, but fused in the fire of internal commotion…. Through the interaction of the fuel with material already afire the refined and formed product comes into existence….”

Hello!

This is the third of three posts — with images magically remanufactured as black-background variations — of Iris domestica photographs that I uploaded to Iris Domestica, the Leopard Flower or Blackberry Lily (1 of 3) and Iris Domestica, the Leopard Flower or Blackberry Lily (2 of 3). Also, for extra fun, I made a collage of all twenty images and included that at the bottom of this post.

Of all of the photos I’ve converted to black backgrounds, these are the most complicated. As is implied by the quotation from Strange Tools above, Iris domestica is a fine example of something that seems to reveal smaller and smaller parts and pieces, the more you look at it. Here, for example, is one of the photos from my previous posts…

… where you would see the two flowers in the center as the subject of the photo, despite the presence of many other elements. This is correct of course, and I guided your eyes toward seeing the photo that way by Lightroom adjustments that created greater visual distinction between the subject and background, by dimming and softening the background so the pair of orange-and-spotted flowers became more prominent.

Converting a photo like this to one with a black background can be a challenge. Last year I did something similar — see Leopard Flower Variations (On Black) from September, 2022 — where I used Lightroom brushes to paint the backgrounds black, limiting myself mostly to the flower blossoms because brushing around the plants’ thin stems, leaves, and seedpods was too time-consuming. Shortly after that, Adobe introduced enhanced masking tools with the ability to select objects, subjects, and backgrounds, which I’ve been using as much as possible since they became available.

Updates to our post-processing tools serve us best when they open up new possibilities; and with these Lightroom masking enhancements, I’ve tried to take on more complicated variations. Instead of just brushing out the backgrounds around parts of an image as I did in the past, I can now use a combination of masks to get better results. With object selection, I can choose different parts of an image that I want to retain as the black-background version’s overall subject, then invert all those selections, then change the background to black.

Here, for example, is an interim step in this approach. I selected parts of the image as individual objects in a single mask one at a time — the flower petals, the seedpods, and the stems — then inverted the mask (shown in dark green). Lightroom’s object selection got a lot right; but as you can see — look to the right of the flower — some of the stems appear disconnected from the rest. This happens when selected objects are close in color to the background colors, and will also happen where there are similarities in sharpness or contrast between foreground and background.

If I stopped here and converted the background to black, the gaps in the stems would be apparent, as you can see here…

… or, up closer, here:

I often compare the next steps (in my own head, at least) to painting different colors on walls and window trim, where you have to pay attention to the boundaries between two objects (the wall and the window frame) and two colors. If you slip with the paintbrush and one color intrudes onto the other, corrective action (!!) is warranted, along with, perhaps, a bit of cussing and extra bits of patience. But you have to fix it because you know it won’t look right if you don’t.

When adjusting masks that have started out coarse as shown above, I’ve learned that I need to remember that elements of any image tend to be brighter where they’re closer to the camera (or to the eye), and darker toward the back. This light-to-dark, front-to-back brightness variation is one of the ways that we perceive two-dimensional images as having depth, and it applies to even the smallest details. In Lightroom, the masks appear to become “fuzzier” when they partially cover darker, toward-the-back elements. If I adjust the masks too much, I lose the front-to-back appearance of depth and leave the image looking flat — and something as small and thin as a flower’s stem would look like a two-dimensional geometric line, instead of a living portion of a plant. At the same time, I have to deal with an illusion: the more I zoom into a photo, the more tiny pixels appear to need adjustments. It took some practice to keep in mind that front/light-to-back/dark contrast helps us perceive something as “real” and avoid adjusting the masks more than I should.

Since I have to pay close attention while working on the masks, I’ve noticed how familiar I become with the subjects of the photos and all their details. For most of my photos, this means that — even if it’s unintentional — I’m constantly observing the structures of plants and their flowers. This in turn helps me shoot with different expectations about what I see, what I can show, and what level of focus or what kind of light I need, especially if the photos might end out with black backgrounds. This is another valuable characteristic of the software tools we use: they not only offer expanded possibilities, but they help us see something we might overlook, as we envision different ways of taking photographs and enhancing them.

Here you see the corrected mask — where the stems (just to the right of the flower) are no longer disconnected from the rest of the plant. I used a “subtract brush” to erase the black background from areas where it intruded on the plant’s stems.

Now I can turn the mask overlay off, and I’ve got a completed black background. Select the first image below if you’d like to see a larger version, and I’ve included the original starting point for this image for comparison.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Iris Domestica, the Leopard Flower or Blackberry Lily (2 of 3)

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From “Belamcanda” in Garden Bulbs in Color by J. Horace McFarland:

“More familiarly known as the Blackberry Lily or Leopard Lily, Belamcanda chinensis, a summer-blooming member of the iris family, is well worth growing. It came to us from China and Japan.

“With foliage much like iris and clusters of bright orange flowers on two-and-one-half-foot stems, the plant is very striking in the summer landscape. Plant the root-stalks in masses of six or more in places where they will have an effective background. Fortunately, the Blackberry Lily is relatively hardy, save in exposed areas.

“The first common name mentioned comes from the character of the seeds, which resemble blackberries. The other name, Leopard Lily (sometimes listed as Pardanthus chinensis), brings to mind the curious spots which accentuate the flowers.”

Hello!

This is the second of three posts featuring photos of the Blackberry Lily, Leopard Lily, Leopard Flower, or IRIS DOMESTICA! — that I took a few weeks ago. The first post is Iris Domestica, the Leopard Flower or Blackberry Lily (1 of 3).

I photographed these the day after several seriously-windy thunderstorms had passed through the area, and some of the plants had blown from their normal standing-tall positions to hang from their bent (but not broken)stems, almost horizontally among their leaves. The first seven photos below show the bit of extra drama I got from the plants in those positions.

Thanks for taking a look!

Iris Domestica, the Leopard Flower or Blackberry Lily (1 of 3)

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From “Summer Blooms” in Through the Garden Gate by Elizabeth Lawrence:

“This summer the black-berry lily, Belamcanda chinensis, bloomed from early June until well into August. There was scarcely a day when there were not several small, ephemeral, red-spotted flowers. They open at various times in the morning, according to the amount of light, I think, but I could never catch them at it, though the clump is right outside my studio window, and I see it every time I look up from my work.

“The flowers close before dark, neatly furling themselves into a minute and almost invisible red and yellow striped barber pole, so they do not detract from the appearance of the plant even though they persist for some time. The handsome pale green seed pods form quickly, and when they burst open, early in September, the bunches of shiny seeds look like ripe blackberries. If the stalks are cut to the ground as they finish blooming, the plant will bloom again in September, but most people like the fruits for winter arrangements. The fan-like foliage is pale green with a delicate silvery bloom, and the stiff, well-branched flower stalks stand well above it. Although the stalks are from three to four feet tall, I am glad I put the plant in the front of the border, for it deserves to be seen as a whole and to stand alone.

”Belamcanda is the Malabar name for the black-berry lily, which grows spontaneously in India where it is considered a cure for snakebite.”

Hello!

It was only last summer that I discovered the charming plant with its pinwheel-shaped flowers featured in this post (and coming up in the next two). It has such a unique appearance — well-described in the quote from Through the Garden Gate above — that I assumed it would be easy to identify, and my friend PlantNet did tell me it was a Leopard Flower whose scientific name was Iris domestica. It’s also commonly known as Leopard Lily or Blackberry Lily, and I explored the history of its name a little in last year’s post (see Leopard Flower Variations). But based on how easy it was for me to find the phrase “blackberry lily” in my botany books and online sources like the Internet Archive — and how infrequently I got hits on “leopard lily” or “leopard flower” — I guess “Blackberry Lily” is its more common-common name. The Blackberry or Leopard Lily is among several other plants often referred to as “leopard lily” — such as those listed on the Wikipedia page Leopard Lily.

I’ve gotten in the habit of referring to it by its scientific name Iris domestica, simply because that keeps me from forgetting that it’s been classified into the Iris family and has never been considered a true lily. But it was only given the name “Iris domestica” in 2005 — see the excellent article Blackberry Lily from the University of Wisconson’s Horticulture site for a history of its names — so in many gardening and botany books you may see references to its original scientific name, Belamcanda chinensis, especially if those books were published before the name change.

Compared to most other irises, Iris domestica is a late — very late — bloomer. I suspect in these photos the plants had been flowering for about a week, since the green seedpods you see in some of the photos have not yet opened to show the blackberry-looking seeds that engendered its “Blackberry Lily” common name. I almost missed them entirely: ’twas a hot and steamy July day when I came across them this year as I was melting my way out of the gardens, but I spent another hour or so taking these shots because they really, really wanted to be photographed.

That I almost missed them this year reminded me of another big miss from earlier in the summer: that I had never gotten a chance to photograph Tiger Lilies because on one of my trips they had not yet bloomed, but by my next trip they were all spent and had blown away. Tiger Lilies seem to bloom almost all at the same time and don’t last long (this is probably not botanically accurate), and we had many multi-day windy thunderstorms right around their blooming time. But the fact that I missed them (and nearly missed Iris domestica) got me thinking that — with several years of photographs taken at Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens — I could probably put together a cheat sheet to remind me which flowers bloomed when.

So I did this: I went through my Lightroom folders for the past five years, and created a spreadsheet of all of the flowers I’ve photographed and the months I photographed them. I ended out with a list of 50 flowers, flower families, and blooming trees, which you can see here (as a pdf) or here (as a picture). Of course the dates reflect blooming times in the U.S. southeast — but I thought others might find the chart a useful reminder of when to be on the lookout for whatever’s blooming next. Among the delights I realized after assembling the spreadsheet: that anemone, angelica, coneflower and asters, goldenrod, and lycoris (a spider lily) will be there waiting for me, in September, October, and November. Wheeeee!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Martagon Lilies (3 of 3)

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From “The Introduction of Lilies into Cultivation” in Lilies for American Gardens by George Lewis Slate:

“The development of lily cultivation has taken more than a century. A hundred years or more ago the catalogues of English firms offered L. candidum in variety, L. bulbiferum and its variety croceum in several varieties, L. pomponium, L. chalce-donicum, L. pyrenaicum, L. tenuifolium (now pumilum), and numerous varieties of L. Martagon. In the catalogues of today we find most of the lilies of the world, indeed practically all of the worth-while species. Many new hybrids and varieties are also found in the lists of specialists. From whence came all these lilies?

“As man arises from savagery and develops a civilization he concerns himself with those plants that provide food and shelter. As these needs become satisfied, they require less time and he concerns himself with the esthetic side of life. The beautification of his surroundings with plants receives consideration. The native plants are used first, but soon a desire for greater variety and exotic plants develops, and the gardens and wilds of foreign countries are searched for new material. The stories of these searches and the bringing into cultivation of new plants are often fascinating accounts of adventure and hardship.”

From “Down from the Houses of Magic” by Cyrus Cassells in The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street:

Midsummer.
And after belligerent sun, twilight brings
A muezzin of sea-wind,
And the soul of the garden bows,
A praise in the earth:
Among Turk-cap lilies, suddenly,
In the willow’s cool hair,
The breath of God….

Hello!

This is the last of three posts featuring Martagon Lilies from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, where I took some of the images from the previous two posts and used Lightroom witchcraftery to convert their backgrounds to black.

The first post is Martagon Lilies (1 of 3), and the second post is Martagon Lilies (2 of 3).

Thanks for taking a look!

Martagon Lilies (2 of 3)

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From “Well-Known Lilies” in Lilies by Carl Feldmaier:

“The native Turk’s Cap, Lilium martagon, is… a rather modest bloom, well known only to the initiated. Pharmacists, naturalists, and mountain-climbers value the beauty and individuality of this lily, which is usually concealed beneath hedges and undergrowth and which flourishes in mountainous country at heights varying from low wooded slopes up to the middle ranges. It prefers calcareous soil, or at least calcareous subsoil. To stumble upon it growing wild, with its dull, rose, panicled blooms, under beech trees or among viburnum or buck-thorn, is a rare pleasure: one plant may be densely spotted, the next a little less so, and finally one will find a completely clear pink flower….

“This lily was already well known during the Middle Ages, principally on account of its yellow bulb, and was much sought after for its medicinal properties.”

From “Vespers” by Louise Gluck in Poems 1962-2012:

End of August. Heat
like a tent over
John’s garden. And some things
have the nerve to be getting started,
clusters of tomatoes,
stands of late lilies — optimism
of the great stalks —
but why start anything
so close to the end?

Hello!

This is the second of three posts featuring Martagon Lilies from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, with photos that I took in late July. The first post is Martagon Lilies (1 of 3), and for the final post I’ll convert some of these to black-background images, as I so often like to do.

As we just yesterday wrapped up Mugshot Week here in the city of Atlanta, I thought you might enjoy reading absolutely nothing about it from me — but instead I decided to share this excerpt about the early history of mugshots, from the book Capturing the Light: The Birth of Photography, a True Story of Genius and Rivalry by Roger Watson and Helen Rappaport. Those often-iconic images emerged alongside daguerrotypes, as a development from portrait photography that was so often the subject of early image-making. The nineteen present-day mugshots were all taken a few miles from my house, with the process mostly outside of public view — except for the former president’s extravagant trip into and out of the city, a spectacle that unfolded surreally along streets and past buildings I recognized — but they’ve achieved notoriety and wide circulation, just like the olden-day mugshots received.

Here is the excerpt, from a chapter entitled “The Mute Testimony of the Picture.”

“When [Henry Fox] Talbot first defined photography’s uses in his 1844 book The Pencil of Nature he had no concept of the many fringe uses to which the form would make a contribution — beyond a conventional role in portraiture, landscapes and architectural views, and the documentation of works of art and scientific collections. His inclusion of the reproduction of works of art foresaw photography taking on the task that engraving and lithography had long held and was one of the most forward-thinking uses of its unique features. Talbot’s notion of keeping a photographic record of one’s valuables, as well as legal documents such as wills and deeds, was a prescient insight into photography’s future, for if such things were ever stolen, ‘the mute testimony of the picture’, when produced against a thief in court would, he asserted, ‘certainly be evidence of a novel kind; but what the judge and jury might say to it, is a matter which I leave to the speculation of those who possess legal acumen’.

“This idea of photography being used in court was truly novel but the photograph’s deployment in crime detection was one of the first and most important offshoots of the new genre, though it didn’t start — as many people assume — with the Rogues Gallery of mug-shots compiled by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which was the source of the well-known ‘Wanted’ posters seen in westerns later in the century. The Belgian police had been the first to experiment with photography in recording the likeness of criminals around 1843-4, and the Danish police had done likewise in 1851. There is evidence too that in the early 1850s in California the San Francisco Vigilance Committee had daguerreotypes made of offenders, and later in that decade the New York Police Department began keeping a photographic record as well….

“Nevertheless, in the early days the use of photography in crime detection and prevention was basically down to the enterprise of individual police departments and prison officers. One such in England was Captain [George Thomas] Gardiner, the ‘ingenious and excellent governor of Bristol gaol’, who in 1856 ‘possessed himself of a photographic apparatus’ for taking the photographs — at a cost of sixpence each — of those criminals he believed would be most likely to reoffend, so that these could be circulated to other forces….

“This principle had already been successfully put into practice in 1855 by a forward-thinking chief constable in Wolverhampton — Colonel Gilbert Hogg — in the pursuit and arrest of a confirmed female con-artist Alice Grey. Grey’s daguerreotype had been found among her abandoned belongings in a lodging house, but copies could not of course be made from it. The enterprising Hogg therefore took it to the photographer [Oscar Gustave] Rejlander (at that time based in Darlington Street, Wolverhampton), who made a calotype of it and printed twenty copies. When these were circulated to police stations across the country, they revealed a trail of fraud and deception dating back five years; the use of the photograph led directly to Grey’s arrest and successful prosecution.”

Thanks for reading and taking a look!