Tag Archives: spring

Change of season

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Spring is popping and the shift over to shooting flowers and new growth is following in kind.


One of the features of local flora I find funny is that some of it is green all year round but I don’t really notice it until Spring is coming.


The ivy is green all year even if the grass is not.


In a few weeks these trees will be verdant and not desolate looking at all.


A real sign of Spring.

I’m seeing a shift also in my work.


More painting effects, less straight photography.


I’ve seen enough Springs to know that changes in people can occur along with changes in the season.


So perhaps a Spring season is coming to us as individuals as well.


We can always use another Spring.

Image processing is important too

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Back when we shot slides, there usually wasn’t much that happened after the slides came back from being developed.  Some were accepted, many were rejected and for those that were accepted there was often some little thing about it that would have benefited from the digital image processing we now have.

Becky and I went over to Fort Harrison State Park this morning to see what there was to see (and shoot).  We were both happy with what we found and instead of spending two hours, we spent three hours wondering around.

There were a lot of shots where it was clear there was something there but more needed to be done to look into the life of it.

It came to a head for me when we went to an area called the Duck Pond.  Yes, there were ducks on the pond when we got there, but  I was more interested in some landscape possibilities.

This image wasn’t bad but it was lacking something.  I converted it to black and white and that helped, but it wasn’t quite there yet.  I added some filters and adjusted the blending mode and was much happier with the result.

This looks a little like an infrared image but it isn’t.  Now this is talking to me.  I tried the same technique on some other images and was pleased with them too.  Here’s another one from this morning.

That was nice too.  Finally, I tried this with some older images that didn’t stand on their own but were good enough that I wasn’t going to throw them out.  Here is an example.

Some object to all of this digital image processing but I don’t think of myself as a documentary photographer, rather I’m a kind of photo poet.  The poetry (for me) is in the interpretation of the image.  Modern digital image processing allows a wide range of interpretations and the main limit now, rather than the image itself, is our own imagination.  More on photography and written poetry in a later post.

A trip to Clifty Falls and more

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My wife Ellie and I had talked about it for some time and we finally got the chance to spend a few days at Clifty Falls, a state park in southern Indiana. 

We went down Sunday and came back Tuesday.  We’ve been married nearly 48 years and since it is easy, over that span, to take each other for granted, I thought I would have flowers waiting for her in our room.  Last week I called the Clifty Inn where we would be staying and yes, they would take care of putting the flowers in the room if I would order them from a florist.  I asked for numbers for some florists in the area and they provided them.  The first one I called said they don’t deliver on Sunday so I called the second number.  A guy answered the phone and I asked if they could deliver a dozen roses to the Clifty Inn on Sunday.  He said no, he couldn’t deliver roses but he could deliver 12 cans of motor oil.   I replied that I hadn’t thought of that as a gift.  It turns out the number I dialed did belong to the florist at one time but that it now went to a car repair shop.  The fellow who answered the phone had received other calls like mine and he was waiting for me.  We had a good laugh about that.  None of the florists delivered on Sunday so I set it up for some durable flowers to be delivered on Saturday and they would still be fresh on Sunday.  All was in order and Ellie loves the flowers.  I told her that flowers are nice but they wouldn’t last like motor oil would.  After all, what says romance better than a couple of oil changes?  She just smiled and said ‘Yes, dear.’

It was rainy when we arrived and overcast when we left but we had a good time.  There was one short period of sunshine on Monday evening and three photographers popped out of their rooms at the inn to get some shots.  There is a generating station near the inn with three smoke stacks.  I liked the soft light on the left stack and in the sky.

It rained most of the time but that didn’t matter, we had a good time.  We saw some wild turkeys in the park Monday morning so we stopped to get in a shot.  They saw me and headed in the other direction but I clicked anyway.  Ellie looked at the shot and said ‘Hey, great turkey butts, Barry!’  They aren’t all mooning me, one is offering a side view.

I partially redeemed myself a few minutes later.  A little soft, but better although there again are two butts and a side view.

We spent some time in the city of Madison, which is right next to the park.   Our camera club had gone on a field trip to Madison last fall and I wrote about it then.  Ellie is a quilter and when she visits a quilt shop, it is a good idea for me to have some way of amusing myself, which in Madison is easy to do if you enjoy photography. 

The overcast sky saturates the colors.  Here’s an unidentified shrub poking through a crack in a fence.

In our initial tour around the park Sunday afternoon we heard a wood thrush.  If there is a more beautiful bird call in North America, I don’t know what it is.  We didn’t hear another until we were leaving the park Tuesday morning.  Great book ends for a very happy time at Clifty Falls.

But the trip wasn’t quite over.  We went home by a different route and along the way found Big Oaks National Wildlife Refuge.  There wasn’t much to see but this shot was worth the side trip.

We were away a little under 48 hours but we will remember this trip for a long time.

Back to photographing little things

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Last fall I wrote a post about shooting little things.  Winter came and I set about shooting big things.

But not all of the images were of large things.

Spring is here and I find that the large scenes I had photographed before are not as interesting as they were when the snow was on the ground.  Compare this

with this.

The scenes are roughly the same and neither was given much treatment in Photoshop; that’s the way they came out.  The only reason for making the springtime image was to compare it with the winter interpretation.  But if it is unfair to directly compare the same scene at different times of the year, it is also the case that, for me, I find I do much better with the smaller subjects in the spring.

I’m recycling through flowers again now but I find I am looking at them a little differently than last spring.  Who knows what next spring will bring?

Spring is here

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I don’t want to come across as a curmudgeon but I wasn’t ready for spring.  I had gotten so deeply into winter photography that when the snow disappeared I was at a bit of a loss.  I’ve always enjoyed spring and I’ve done a lot of spring photography.  That’s part of the problem.   I have a lot of what might be called ‘portrait’ flower images, flowers in profile, three quarter turned, full face, etc.

Chionodoxa is small but very attractive.  So is pink dogwood.

But I have shot enough of that kind of image.   I don’t have a replacement yet so I am just out taking pictures.

This one is called ‘Photography, 2010.’

I got a little closer to spring shooting this morning with this image of a door.  At least it’s green.

I just went out again this afternoon and I guess I may be headed in the right direction.

I’ll keep trying.  Too bad I can’t photograph bird song.  That would be nice.