Tag Archives: autumn

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.

Field trip to Madison, Indiana

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The Photo Venture Camera Club, the club I belong to in Indianapolis, goes on field trips nine or ten times a year.  Yesterday ten of us went to Madison, IN, a picturesque town on the Ohio River, about two hours from Indianapolis.  We couldn’t have asked for better weather on this crisp fall day.madison_6545_3_4_tonemapped

The weather had been rainy all week but Saturday morning was clear with some fleecy clouds.

I haven’t been much for photographing buildings but this trip was to an area known for its architecture.  I’ m not sure that a number of images I got of buildings and details of buildings were what the Chamber of Commerce had in mind but I would go back for more shots like this:madison_6682

I have images of beautiful homes from this trip but none of them come close to competing with this window and clapboard wall that have seen better days.

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That black space at the top of the garage was perhaps once a window.  Its gothic shape, coupled with the cross-like appearance of the structure on top (an old antenna?) lend it the appearance of a church.

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There are a lot of alleys in Madison too.

And then there was the Tea Room:madison_6810_12_photolift

What is it about these old buildings, details and alleys that makes them so interesting?  One answer won’t hold for all of them but a couple of ideas pop to the surface for me as I look at them.  One is they all have texture, they have a definite tactile sense to them.  They seem to want to be touched.   Their histories seem to be told in their roughness in ways that an image doesn’t quite convey.

This leads into another part of the attraction of these subjects.  They all have stories that we can only guess at.  I have a friend who spends a lot of time photographing an abandoned farm, the location of which she protects about as well as some people protect the location of a good fishing hole.  She is thinking of doing a photo book about it in which she shows the images and tells her own version of what life on that farm might have been like.

I don’t know the stories here but I do know that I plan to look more closely for old abandoned buildings.  They speak to us in ways new buildings, living buildings if you will, don’t.