Author Archives: Barry Lively

An appreciation of milkweed

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Yesterday I talked about the utility of milkweed – habitat for monarch butterflies, substitute for kapok in World War II – and said I would go back today to gather seeds for our butterfly garden.  I did that.  It was breezy and since I had my camera with me I planted it in front of a nice strand of milkweed floss and took a lot of shots as it danced in the breeze.milkweed_8662

It is easy to walk by milkweed and to notice the floss and seeds in only the most pedestrian way.  Unless we are looking, truly looking, they won’t occupy more than a moment of thought; visually, just a glimpse.

These little creations are striking when you take the time to look at them.  I could go on and on about this but I think the best tribute to them is just to show a few shots.  Words just can’t capture their subtlety and beauty.  (In each case I have darkened the background somewhat to help them stand out.)
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They speak for themselves.

Milkweed then and now

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Nice overcast sky today and the breeze wasn’t particularly strong so I went out to shoot milkweed.  Milkweed is a favorite subject this time of year, it stands still and the variations in form, texture and luminosity go on and on.Milkweed_8539

Milkweed is valuable today as habitat for monarch butterflies.  My wife reminded me of that and I expect I’ll be going back tomorrow to collect some seeds for our butterfly garden.

In 1944, in World War II, milkweed took on another kind of importance.  The Japanese controlled what today is called Indonesia and that meant they had control of the kapok crop.  Like milkweed, kapok produces a floss that was the main component in making flotation devices such as life jackets and life preservers.  With a lot of the war fought on and over the seas, kapok, and its loss to the Allies, was very important.

Milkweed produces its own floss and it works about as well as kapok.  Unfortunately milkweed was not a commercial crop and so people had to go out into the countryside to gather the seed pods before they burst open in the fall.  With adults off to war or working in the factories, it was up to school children to gather this crop valuable to the war effort.  I remember going out with my aunts and uncles (in junior high and high school) to gather them.  I was five years old at the time.  We knew it was important and a lot of work went into it.  I have no idea how much we gathered.  I do remember the large onion sacks bulging with milkweed pods.  We were doing our part and I got a chance to do something important with the big kids.Milkweed_8526

It will likely rain tomorrow but I will probably go collect milkweed seeds anyway.

Creative typo

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My brother and I spent part of  yesterday at Fort Harrison State Park.  A couple who were out for a walk stopped and asked what I was photographing.  I replied ‘Anything that will stand still long enough’ which is true enough that it didn’t seem to require any further explanation.   _MG_8452

What I was really doing would have required a bit more conversation but would probably have been worth the time to say it.  I was out wondering.  Not wandering, but wondering.

About a year ago I was emailing back and forth with a friend.  I was intrigued by a photograph she had done and asked how she got it.  She was busy doing other things and wasn’t paying attention to what she was typing and she wrote that she was ‘wondering’ around and saw the image.  That word ‘wondering’ captures it for me.  It was a typo but when I pointed it out to her and how great a choice of words it was, she agreed and now she goes wondering too.  Or maybe we’ve been wondering all along and didn’t know it.

Wondering.  Sometimes that leads to seeing something we might not have noticed before and sometimes it means asking ‘I wonder what will happen if I move the camera during the exposure?’ or try some other creative technique.  That is what I was doing yesterday beside Fall Creek.  Most of the images weren’t very interesting but some were, at least to me._MG_8455

It’s time to go out again.  I wonder what I’ll see?

Halloween gift

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We have iris growing next to the house and we hadn’t gotten around to cutting them back.  Yesterday my wife noticed one with buds.  It was going down into the 30s last night so she cut it and brought it inside.Iris_8305_4

It bloomed during the night and I photographed it in late afternoon sun today.

This, my wife tells me, is a ‘rebloomer.’  It blooms early and then it blooms late.  The squirrels, chipmunks, trees of various persuasion, grass, weeds, most kinds of flowers, are all settling down to winter – gathering food, shedding leaves, bringing sap back to the roots and in general going to sleep.  But this flower is blooming.  That’s extravagantly beautiful isn’t it?

Some believe that the origins of Zen Buddhism lie in what has come to be known as ‘the flower sermon.’  The Buddha held up a white flower before his disciples and said nothing.  The ‘suchness’ of the flower, the way it was at that moment, was the point, saying anything about it would have added nothing.  We need say nothing more about this iris.

This is turning into a favorite place

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My friend Becky and I went to Fort Harrison State Park the other day to see what there was to see and photograph.trees_7880_2

I find that sometimes it’s good to go out with someone else; each of us sees things the other doesn’t.  This doesn’t mean, though, that we end up shooting the same scenes.  Sure, there are some shots that are very similar to one another but the majority aren’t.  We could be standing side by side and the shots would still be very different.teasel_7765

The conversation was good and the shooting opportunities were plentiful.  It is always a source of wonder to me that what I bring back from one of these jaunts is nothing like what I would have anticipated getting.  So I usually just don’t try to anticipate.  Great encouragement for living in the moment.trees_7635_3

It is in those moments in the present that the connection is felt.  After a while the dialog with Becky drops off to brief exchanges as we walk from one place to another and the dialog with the scene picks up.  I have no idea what the content of that dialog is, it obviously isn’t words.  But it is there and it is in the connection.  I’m coming to think that these felt connections are traces and hints of our spiritual identity making contact with the world.  It is something to celebrate.backlight_7800_2

Just a good day to shoot

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Some days are a gift.  It was nicely cloudy this morning when I had the dogs at the bark park.  In between throwing tennis balls for Prince and Tuck I was able to get in a few shots.BP_7436

The clouds largely disappeared and later in the morning I was on the Fall Creek Trail at Fort Harrison State Park.  It’s hard to beat an autumn day, a good day for smelling the leaves and kicking through them.  Inside every six year old boy there is a six year old boy.  Inside every 70 year old man, there is a six year old boy. We were having a warm spell and a lot of people were enjoying it.

It being toward the middle of the day, lighting was more harsh than it was in the morning but shooting high dynamic range eased that.  The camera was on the tripod and shots were bracketed plus and minus two stops.  I later combined the resulting three images in Photomatix Pro and was quite pleased with the result.  There are times when I want some of what has come to be called the ‘HDR effect’, an effect that can push colors to the cartoonish side while the range of illumination is taken from, say, 13 stops down to eight or nine stops.  That cartoonish effect can be effective in some situations but not here.  All I wanted to do was compress the range of captured light into the range that can be displayed and keep the colors pretty much as they were.   Here is the result:Fall_Creek_7523_4_5Enhancer

One effect of compressing a wide dynamic range into a narrower dynamic range is that tonal transitions become more smooth and gradual.  Compare the above with this image, the one the camera recommended and was included as part of the HDR work:

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This is very nice too but the brightness on the right side of the tree to the right of the path suggests why it isn’t a good idea to shoot at this time of day if it can be avoided.  All in all, a good result with new technology and better yet, a good day to be outside.

Sticking with it

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One more time into the walnut plantation.

Gold among the walnuts

Gold among the walnuts

It was wet and a little drizzly yesterday morning when I went out to shoot.  I was there because Alain Briot’s column on landscape blurs reminded me that that was a good time to get saturated colors.  As indeed it was.

It was windy and dark which spells disaster for some kinds of photography but for landscape blurring – which consists of moving the camera while the shutter is open – it is very promising.  As usual the number of images retained after the shoot was much smaller than the number taken, a great argument for digital cameras.  I got the shot above early on.  (For those interested in such things, most of the effect in the image above was created in the camera.  Adobe Camera Raw added some contrast and a little vividness while Photoshop permitted selective darkening and bringing up the orange a little bit in the leaves.)

The story continues.  There was a red poison ivy vine decorating a tree trunk several yards into the brush and without thinking I just went in to get a shot of it, looking for poison ivy along the way but forgetting about the burrs that are so common this season.  I was immediately attacked by a lurking burr factory.  I was born in 1939 so I grew up watching horror movies where some otherwise more or less mildly obnoxious pest was irradiated in an accident and grew to gigantic size and set out to take over the world.  I don’t remember any giant burr movies but it would have been a good subject.

You have probably encountered burrs.  Once they are stuck to your pants, they are as tenacious as a politician working to stay in office.  I was wearing sweats so conditions were ideal for them.  I tried brushing them off and that didn’t work very well so I put an old towel on the driver’s seat and sat on that on the way home where surely there would be a good solution.  I tried lots of things and they all failed.  I’ll talk about just one of the methods.  We have a brush which we use to brush our two White German Shepherds.   Note that the brush was full of white dog hair, something I noticed but didn’t think about.  The brush didn’t work as intended.  In fact it achieved the opposite result, which was that the burrs did not come off but the dog hair left the brush to join the burrs.  Now many of them have little white beards.

Burrs with dog hair

Burrs and dog hair among the threads

Michael Pollan, in his ‘The Botany of Desire’, says with tongue in cheek that members of the vegetable kingdom rule the world and use us to carry their seeds from one place to another.  I’m coming to believe that.  Maybe those old horror movies were speaking the truth.  Burrs just didn’t need to be irradiated and they don’t need to be big to take over the world.  That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

I have/had trouble praying

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From the time I was small, I’ve had a problem with prayer.  As long as I stick to standard prayers – the Lord’s Prayer and some other memorized prayers- I am alright but as soon as I go off into prayers for specific people or situations I get stuck and my mind wanders.  But that isn’t quite true, my mind also wanders during the Lord’s Prayer, any prayer or any time for that matter.rock_5343_2s

I got into a conversation about this with three of my friends, all of them solid church goers and dedicated contributors to the community.  All four of us admitted to problems with prayer.  All of us are men and one of us is a minister.   Now that I think about it we never did pursue that problem very far, perhaps none of us knew quite what to do.

Some weeks later and in a different context the minister friend recommended Barbara Brown Taylor’s ‘An Altar in the World:  A Geography of Faith.’  Ms. Taylor had been an Episcopal priest for several years before going into writing and teaching full time.  She had been named by Baylor University as one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English speaking world.  I had been prepared to take her seriously anyway but that pushed her book to the top of my reading list.  The deeper I got into the book the more interesting it got.  And then there was this:

‘I would rather show someone my checkbook stubs than talk about my prayer life.  I would rather confess that I am a rotten godmother, that I struggle with my weight, that I fear I am overly fond of Bombay Sapphire gin martinis than confess I am a prayer-weakling.  To say I love God but I do not pray much is like saying I love life but I do not breathe much.’  (p 176)

Now she really had my attention.  And to cap it off a few pages later she took her cue from Brother David Steindl-Rast, author of ‘Gratefulness, The Heart Of Prayer’, in suggesting that

‘Prayer…is waking up to the presence of God no matter where I am or what I am doing.’  (p 178)

Alright!  Prayer isn’t just a recitation of fixed passages or verbal requests for God’s attention.  I knew that all along but for a truly outstanding minister to admit she has trouble praying, as I suspect many of us do, was quite a revelation.  But she went further than our little group of four men had gone by pointing out that just being aware of the presence of God no matter what we are doing is a form of prayer.  And_there_was_light_7289_7289_2

If we are wiping a child’s nose, running a backhoe, mowing the lawn, watching a ball game, helping out in a soup kitchen, playing with the dog, any of these activities – and are aware of the presence of God, we are praying.  I think that would include the activity of photography.

Meanwhile, back at the walnut plantation

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I wrote a couple of days ago about a walk through the walnut plantation at the Fort Harrison State Park and how I ended up shooting little things instead of big things such as walnut trees.  I have a bias toward little things but in my defense there is a lot of distracting underbrush around the walnut trees, as beautiful as they themselves are.

I went back today and much as I would like to say that I was determined to shoot big things and big things only, I just went to shoot.  It occurred to me to try a technique I learned reading William Neill’s ‘Impressions of Light’ which is available as an ebook at his website.  I regularly go back to this book for inspiration.walnut_plantation_7192

The technique is simple.  Slow the shutter speed and move the camera while the shutter is open.  I had done this before with images of water (I’ll cover that in a later post).  I put a four stop neutral density filter and a polarizer on the lens and shot at f/11 and  ISO 100.  This slowed the shutter down to 1/13th to 1/6th of a second for various exposures.walnut_plantation_7140

The camera was on the tripod and I simply moved it up and down more or less vertically to emphasize the trunks of the trees.  The brush is still present but instead of being distracting, it now it adds a bit of color.walnut_plantation_7207

Camera motion can be an artistic tool.  I can’t say that I know how an image is going to turn out as I am setting up the shot; I can’t previsualize with any accuracy what it is going to look like.  The ‘take’ rate, the percentage of images that turn out well, is small but I do like what the technique can do.  And the bonus is that parts of the image that are potential distractions, such as underbrush, can, with some luck, turn into desirable features of the image.

In looking at these images, I get the sense that we are seeing something about the scene that we wouldn’t see any other way.  Somehow, to use Wordsworth’s phrase, we are seeing into the life of things.  We are seeing something for which there is no immediate verbal label, something that for a short while at least, we can treat as new.  That is something we expect of art and something we hope for as spiritual seekers.

Shooting little things

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Fort Harrison State Park is nearby on the northeast side of Indianapolis and I stop by once in awhile to do some shooting.  A couple of friends had been there recently and got some magnificent shots in a stand of walnut trees, a stand large enough to be called a plantation.  I went over this morning to see if I could do as well.

All I found was row after row of trees with a lot of brush growing in between.   I got a few uninspired shots and then started looking at other possibilities.  I’ve noticed that, given a choice, I shoot small things rather than large ones.  My defense is that there are a lot more small things than there are large things and if you are in the woods the range of lighting on small things is a lot broader than it is for large things such as trees.  That’s my argument and I’m sticking with it.

There were back-lit possibilities all over the place.  Here is one:WP_6969

That, by the way, is the bark of a walnut tree.  Two walnut trees in fact.

A problem with shooting small things, and large things for that matter, is the background.  It can be pretty difficult to get the ‘right’ angle for the subject while avoiding a distracting background.   The image above is OK in that regard – the background doesn’t overwhelm the subject.

But here is the problem in spades. Autumn_leaves_7081_pre

There are three leaves that attracted my attention but they are lost against the background.  This has happened so often that some time ago I took up removing the background altogether for some subjects.  Autumn_leaves_7081

Exactly the same image as above but without the background.  Georgia O’Keefe made the comment

Nobody sees a flower – really – it is so small it takes time – we haven’t time – and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.  I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

I don’t do large images, I just remove the distracting part and leave the image relatively small.  Removing the background certainly calls attention to the subject.  Works for me.  Some day I really will make images of large subjects.  Just not today.