Photographing parts of the earth, I've come to appreciate its diversity, resilience and wonder. Why not give it a day of its own?
Of course, it's our attitudes and actions toward the planet on the other 364 days that really matter.
The photo above was taken in August of 2008 on a walk in the misty morning air in Dundee, Illinois. Beams of sunlight danced across the water of the Fox River. As my wife and I crossed a footbridge, I caught this image of a small tree perched on a rocky outcropping on the river. At this point, the tree was mostly dead. It has since become all dead, but for a brief moment, the sky reached down and the tree reached up and the two connected.
A little study in contrast and composition involving visual weight and placement.
I was wrapping up my post-snowfall shooting on Monday and heading back to my car when I glanced to my right and saw the park bench in the distance. I kept walking but then my brain made me stop. Apparently it finally finished processing the visual info it just received and formed a picture in my mind.
I walked back to the spot where I first noticed the bench, quickly framed the shot and fired off a couple of captures, then headed back to my car. My brain made me stop again. This time it reminded me that my aperture was only f5.6 and that it would not be enough to keep both the tree trunk and bench in focus. Argh.
Back to the spot again. Set aperture to f/11. Framed and shot two more frames.
Sometimes I wish my brain were just a little quicker.
In the nearby forest preserve that I frequent, I regularly pass this grouping of trees, and every time I do, I'm struck by their choreographed appearance. Leaning, turning, twisting, reaching like a dance troup frozen in time.
Usually, their limbs and branches mesh into a confusing mishmash of busyness in a photo, but a late winter snowfall helped to define the lines of the branches and really bring out the gracefulness of their forms.
Sometimes it takes the hard times to bring out the grace in us. Hopefully, others will see a defining choreography of our lives and not a chaotic scrambling when that happens.
It snowed last night. No surprise. It's the Midwest and it's late February. It happens.
I took advantage of the fresh blanket of white stuff to get out and do some shooting this morning. Other than a few small woodland critters, mine were the first footprints in this neck of the woods. Nice. Quiet. Just me and a light breeze.
Took some straight shots with available light. Then got out the flash, a stand, a couple of warming gels and a wireless trigger and set out to play with the possibilities.
I trekked into the middle of this trio of pines and set the light stand behind the middle tree. Set the camera to Incandescent white balance to turn things a tranquil blue. Erased the legs of the light stand and my footprints into the tree cluster in post.
We've had a lot of those lately. Fog at night freezing on surfaces and turning the landscape into a sugar-coated spectacle.
Photographed by setting up a flash unit on a stand to backlight the branches. Two layers of warming gels on flash, with camera white balance set to incandescent to simulate the early morning sunlight that wasn't there. Fired with a remote wireless flash trigger.
All I heard on this foggy winter morning was a gentle sigh of the wind -- the measured breathing of the world as it lay asleep under a blanket of white.
The old guard standing watch over the foggy winter morning.
Photograph taken last week at the Paul Wolff Forest Preserve near Elgin, Illinois. After the candle photos taken with a strobe setup, these straight-up shots were a breeze. A warmer, drier breeze to be exact.
More fog photos to come, and at least one more candle shot. Stay tuned.
I'm usually not one to add borders or any other decorative elements to my pictures. I like to let the image stand on its own. But because of the white background of both this photo and the blog page, I decided to add a drop shadow to help define the photo's boundaries.
It also seems like we in the upper Midwestern US will cross the boundary into winter this week. Snow is in the forecast. Brace yourselves. Here we go again.
Have you ever thought you've figured out how to do something, then picked up some new information that makes you wonder how you ever did the things you thought you had figured out in the first place? I picked up a piece of Photoshop wisdom that has pretty much revolutionized how I do my post processing. Two pieces, actually, but I'll only cover one for now.
When adjusting levels, holding down the ALT key (on a PC -- I believe it's the Control key on a Mac) while moving the left and right sliders shows how much pure black or pure white is in your image. That made it very easy to know when the background of the photo above was sufficiently adjusted to white without adversely affecting anything else. Conversely, the combo of ALT plus the black slider helped me know when the pine needles and cones had maximum amount of definition without overdoing it. The result is an image with a very tasty amount of contrast
Up until now, I kept the sliders at the edges of where the histogram began to show image data. Visualizing the blacks and whites allows you compress the tonal range and add punch to any image. The above photo looks like it was taken in a studio under controlled lighting. In reality, it was taken outdoors on an overcast day following an overnight snowfall.
Over the weekend, my wife and I hiked a couple of the trails at Glacial Park, just north of Ringwood, Illinois, near the Wisconsin border. The area has been described as "biological eye candy" and I can see why. The park is a mixture of rolling kames, prairie, ponds, kettles, bogs and oak savannahs. Nippersink Creek meanders its way through the northern reaches of the park.
In early autumn the prairie grasses turn a burgundy color. By this November day, it had settled into an amber hue. Large flocks of cranes circled overhead.
I had recently decried my annual photographic funk that hits in November. If ever there was a cure, this was it. What emerged from the day is a composite portrait of the month of November. While on the surface, everything appears still and asleep, if you look long enough, you'll see signs that life continues. The juxtaposition of the end of life and the continuation of it is what makes November what it is, and is what I'll present here over the course of the next few days.
As I think back on those months of the year when I struggle the most, photographically speaking, I've concluded that the worst photography month for me is November. Maybe it has to do with it being an in-between time -- the splendor and glory of autumn is over and it's still a while before snow arrives to blanket the barren landscape. My November pictures just kind of sit there, unadorned, blah.
I've got to think of something to pump some life into this month's pics. Hey, I know, maybe I can do some night shooting, when you really can't see how boring the landscape is. Hmmm. Maybe put some people in the shots. Uh huh. Play around with some off-camera flash. Yeah. Maybe do all three at once. That's the ticket.
Night comes around every day. Got my flashes. Just need to find some victims folks willing to model for me. Hmmm.
More abstract nature pics from Pingree Grove Forest Preserve near Pingree Grove and Gilberts, Illinois.
The area near these two northern Illinois communities has seen an explosion of new subdivisions going up in recent years. Glad to see that part of the plan was to preserve a few hundred acres of open space in the middle of it.
And I'm sure the wildlife that was displaced by all of the construction appreciate it, too.
A three-pronged birch tree in my neighborhood in Elgin, Illinois. Played with really narrowing the depth of field. This shot is a panorama of 38 separate images shot with a 135mm f/2.8 lens and stitched together with a software program called Hugin (free download). By the way, Hugin is nice in that it takes into account the focal length of your lens and camera sensor's crop factor before starting the stitching process to ensure that distortion in the final image is kept to a minimum.
The cemetery shot from yesterday was also made using this technique and was composited from 26 separate images. Useful if you realllllly want to separate a subject from its background.
Was at the Mitchell Park Conservatory in Milwaukee last weekend. Saw this plant with a long skinny pineapple trunk and propeller leaves in front of a humongous palm leaf thingy.
Shot it with a 200mm lens and an off-camera flash on a bracket to throw a tad more light into the fuzzy propeller tree and separate it more from the palmy whatsit behind it.
Bet you can't tell that I never studied horticulture, can you?
I was looking through my archive of images from Door County, Wisconsin last night to pull some submissions for a publication when I came across this photo of a maple tree north of Sister Bay, taken last October.
There was some major red rule action going on here. I took several shots of the tree at various focal lengths, but this particular crop seemed to do it for me the most. The result is a natural abstract image, a tapestry of red and black.
... as seen from Sleepy Hollow, Illinois. Yes, there really is a Sleepy Hollow. It's located in Chicago's northwest suburbs. The town is a blend of three-quarter-million-dollar homes and large expanses of open space. If you skip the mansions and stick to the open areas, you can see some very nice views of nature.
"But yesterday you said you were starting a series of insect macro photographs to clear out your backlog of bug pictures." Yes, I did. And I'll hop right back on that tomorrow.
Unless, of course, today's sunset looks promising.
Gotta give a shout out to Sandy, who kindly steered the readers of her twoblogs here yesterday. Thanks, all, for the kind words about my pictures. Glad you like.
I'm finishing off the series of foggy woods photos with this one taken at the Burnidge Forest Preserve in Kane County, Illinois, not too long after the shots posted yesterday and the day before. By then, the sun was quickly burning off the fog and making its presence known. Just a few minutes after taking this image, the magic had disappeared.
Fog presents an interesting challenge to a digital camera. The automatic focus mechanism struggles to latch onto something solid and the auto exposure can be fooled into making the fog too light and/or everything else too dark.
Tip: Use your camera's spot metering function (I don't use anything else) and place it on an object that you are featuring in your photo -- in the case of the last two photos, I used the trunk of the foreground tree and grass/reeds in the middle ground -- then push your shutter button halfway to lock the exposure, recompose, then click. Check to be sure you haven't blown out any large areas -- if your camera has a highlights feature for the LCD, which causes pure white areas in an image to flash, use it; it's a life saver. Make exposure adjustments if needed and try again. For the record, I metered on the area midway between the sunburst and the ground in the photo above.
By the way, do you have a song stuck in your head now? If not, maybe this will do the trick:
I walked back and forth in front of this stand of trees at the Paul Wolff Forest Preserve near Gilberts, Illinois to find the angle that would best distribute the trees throughout the shot. I settled on placing the two larger trunks just left of center and splitting the distance from the closest tree to the right edge of the frame with the three thinner trees in the distance, though at the time I wasn't thinking about subdividing the space, it just looked balanced to me.
The remains of a tree appears in the mist. A memory of what once was, framed within the light and life of the present.
I took advantage of the foggy backdrop that was provided one morning last week to do some shooting at a couple of forest preserves near my home. A little Orton processing was added to this photo to heighten the dreamlike quality of the scene.
Hope you're making your way out of the fog on this Monday toward what will be a great week.
