Tag Archives: autumn

It’s about light

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Photography is about light.  I’m not talking about the extreme case where no light equals no photography.  Rather, it is the quality as well as amount that matters.


We often talk about ‘sweet’ light, that light that occurs not long after the sun has come up and shortly before it goes down.  Those indeed are special kinds of light.  But there can be decent light just about any time of day.


This light, with a little help from Photoshop, occurred about 11:00 one morning.

Especially if it is filtered through leaves and trees, light in late morning can be just fine.


Backlighting can be good just about any time of day.


And light can often be assisted by Photoshop as it was in this next example.


As I look at this last image, I can see that it needs some more work.  But that can be done in the evening, when the light is pretty well gone.

Dents, creases and folds in the water

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A lot of photographs of moving water use a long exposure to bring out the silky smoothness of the flow.  Here for instance, the exposure was .6 sec.  That’s pretty long for a normal exposure.


This one was even longer at 1.6 sec.


We’re used to seeing nice smooth flow.  That is a trick of the camera and also of  our brains.  We interpret the scene as smoothly flowing.   Photographing water up close and at more normal photographic exposures shows something quite different:


Dimples.  This is a function of surface tension.  Once again, enter a different world than the one we think we inhabit.


Most of these pictures were shot at 1/100 sec. or faster and a  different picture emerges.


That looks like a hole in the water.


Would you expect to see something like that?  I wouldn’t have.


Surface tension.


When I see this, I wonder what else we are missing.  It’s all right there in front of us.  All we need to do is look with a camera.  And wonder.

Mid autumn? Late autumn?

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Autumn begins at the autumn equinox which this year was at 11:09 PM EDT on September 22.  The winter solstice marks the beginning of winter and that will be at 6:38 PM EST on December 21.  If you find the half way point between the beginning and end of autumn it falls on today’s date, November 7.  So it is mid autumn today.  But if someone asked you, would you say today is mid autumn?  Without thinking about it I would say we are in late autumn.

Most of the leaves have turned color.


A lot of leaves are off the trees.

Although there are some left yet.


Daylight savings time is past and it gets dark earlier.  It’s getting colder.

In my subjective, personal accounting of the seasons all of that says that it is late autumn, not mid autumn.


And that adds up to my still need to clean the gutters.  It’s supposed to be warm this week, maybe I’ll do it in the next few days.  Unless I can find something more important to do, such going out to record the changing season with a camera and Photoshop.

Wondering around outside home

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I could have titled this post ‘Wondering around our lawn’ but anyone who has been to our place would take exception with the term ‘lawn’.  So this, in its own way, will be a testament to weeds.  And leaves.  Always some leaves this time of year.


So I just ‘wondered‘ around outside to see what there was to see.  Perhaps I never grew up but I still can’t get over the beauty of little things right there in front of us.


What would it cost to have something like that created for you?


These berries belong to an exotic and will likely not be eaten but they are still striking in appearance.

Did you ever look closely at how leaves attach to branches?


And there are the spider webs again.  I seldom notice them except when I’m doing close up work.  I’m listening to E. B. White read ‘Charlotte’s web’ in the car so I do look closely when I see a web.  I found it interesting that Charlotte saved Wilbur by posting writing on the web.  I’m not up to her level but I’m trying with my own posts.  On the web.


I wouldn’t turn down a trip to Glacier NP or the Tetons but I really don’t need to go far to find satisfying subjects.

Little things.  There are lots and lots of little things and they would like to be seen.  Maybe it’s my job to do that and encourage others to look to.  Go out and wonder.   You won’t be disappointed.

How are you going to look at it?

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Autumn.  The time of the year when growth stops and withering takes over.

Plant life is now turning from the vertical to the horizontal and the ground will be richer.   Is this a matter of death or might it be life?  In each of these images, both answers are present.


Try getting down on the ground to get a shot and you might learn what I did today that while the plants are dead they sometimes offer gifts in the way of new plants in the form of stickers on one’s clothing.  Generous gifts.

They aren’t all stickers, some take wing.

And some are berries.  But all could well produce new life next year.

So is it death?  Is it life?  Yes.

More autumn leaves

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We had a lot of wind the other day (close to tornado conditions) and a good many leaves came down.  The hickory and some of the maple trees are nearly bare but the oak and sycamore leaves are hanging on.

Here are some leaf images from this autumn I haven’t used yet in these posts.


No texture there except what was in the leaf which was suspended on a thread from a spider’s web.  Unfortunately the thread is not visible.


More surface tension.  Expect to see more of these, I find them fascinating.


I was supposed to be photographing something else when I saw this.  Sometimes I’m grateful for a limited attention span.


This is one of my (recent) favorites.  It is a straight photograph superimposed on the output of a leaf scanned in a flat bed scanner.

Here are a couple more leaves that I ran through the flat bed scanner.  Notice they are three dimensional; the lid of the scanner was left up so they didn’t get flattened.  This is the leaf (a day later) that was scanned and used as the background in the image above.


I especially like the three dimensionality.


And here is one final image.  This started out as a standard digital photograph and textures were added.

Added texture

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I’ve been impressed with how adding texture to an image can, in some cases, make it more interesting.  I had taken this picture a couple of weeks ago but didn’t use it in a post because others at the time were more interesting:

I like the image well enough, it just doesn’t seem to have the umph I would want.  I had been looking at what are called ‘grunge’ textures on the web and decided to download a few and try them.  The one in this case was done by Jerry Jones. I added it to the image and this is what resulted.


It adds an atmosphere that I can’t quite define but what need is there to do that since we can all see it?

I began doing my own textures, largely by shooting scenes that seem to lend themselves to it.  Here’s the first one I tried:


I think this is going to work as long as I don’t push it too far.  Here are a couple I did today:



I would be interested in hearing what you think of this.  Does it add interest?

It’s all in how you look at it

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I’ve been shooting reflections in water for a long time and this autumn has been no exception.  Here’s a very typical shot:

Nothing especially interesting about that but look what happens when I turn it upside down:


Now it starts to take on a different meaning.  It is as if we are looking at a scene through wavy glass.


I especially like that one.

And they can take on an abstract quality:


They can be interesting when rotated a quarter turn:


I purposely do not look for shapes in clouds.  My mother used to look for faces and animals but I just want to appreciate the shape without labeling it.  But here is an exception.  This just looks like someone pushing against something that doesn’t want to move:


And finally, one of the charms of a reflection is seeing it disturbed:


Hard to get tired of doing this.

Mostly weeds

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I’ve been getting closer and closer to the subject recently.  This one might be good for Halloween.


I’ve noticed that weeds, when you view them from some distance, look like weeds.  But when you get close to them they don’t seem to be so much weeds as miniature beauties of some unknown variety.


They have flowering parts and graceful, colorful leaves.


Weeds are really smart.  They often feature flight-worthy mechanisms to transport the seeds away from the mother plant.  Something like sending a kid off to college (or does the kid escape to college?)


Do they look to you as if they are dancing?

This next one is titled ‘Echo’.


And finally here is what started this whole venture into looking closely at weeds a few days ago.


I think weeds are God’s way of keeping us in our place.  All we have to do is look at them to see they have standing too.

Autumn evening

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I was thinking about going out to shoot this morning but then I put it off until afternoon.  That didn’t work either so I went out to the backyard this evening.  I think it was worth the wait.


We’ll call this plant ‘flowering-whatever-it-is-2.  I don’t know what it is but I like it, especially backlit.

Here’s another shot from the same plant which some would call a weed.


According to the definition ‘a weed is a plant growing in the wrong place’ this is not a weed.


Probably pretty insect-resistant too.

Now here is a more ‘legitimate’ plant.  This is an American Beech tree.  We’ve enjoyed this tree for 30 years.  It is beautiful in all seasons and when a light rain falls on its leaves, it is musical.


And it has a dazzling array of fall colors.


Hard to beat that around here.