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Mel
I’m a wildlife person. Many of my friends are surely convinced my interest in life is biased more toward animals than people. Not sure how this part of me developed but my earliest memories are of liking animals, following them around, watching what they do and wondering what their life must be like. I’m one of those neighbors with the bird feeders, squirrel feeders, hummingbird feeders, etc. I’d feed the four legged critters around here as well except the golf course people would frown on more hazards in the fareway.
Winter is one of my favorite seasons, not the least because of the victorious feeling I get from bundling up in my high-tech clothing and venturing out to subdue the snow, wind, cold. Granted we’re all just a few volts and BTU’s from living in a cave trying to survive until spring but the thought of that doesn’t get in the way of my enjoying the season.
So what about animals right now? They can’t drop by the local REI and pick up an extra layer of fleece or poly. They have to handle what the climate hits them with through a truly natural means – feather, fur, fat and common sense. I watch the birds on the deck vacuuming up the seeds, standing on one foot and then the other, all puffed up as they trap as much warmth in their feathers as possible.
And then there are the deer over at the park. I’ve read that in full winter coat and nicely fattened, a deer is so well insulated they can lay down on snow and not melt it. Their winter fur is apparently hollow tubes that hold the air undisturbed next to their bodies, retaining their inner heat against the wind and cold. The doe in the image was grazing on the tips of pine trees when I pulled up, and she wasn’t that concerned with me while there were calories available. The snow from the limbs had fallen on her back and showed no sign of melting. Maybe the story is true and maybe they don’t feel the cold, but it sure seems like a hard time of the year for outside creatures.
The snow that gave us a white Christmas is still hanging around, giving me lots of opportunities to practice photography in a mostly monochromatic world. Last night we got another couple of inches as a light powder fell with no wind. I decided to add to my closeups of the snowpack with pictures of the flakes themselves. I caught some on a chilled glass plate and photographed them with a macro lens. I’m pretty pleased with these initial efforts and look forward to more snow falling so I can become more proficient and see different types of flakes.
Looking for some tips on photographing snowflakes I found a site where they take snow photography very serious – http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/ – and show pictures that are just awesome.
Amazing isn’t it, the micro world that exists all around us mostly unseen.
Finally got some medium format negatives scanned from a shoot where I was comparing film to digital. The images below are of the same scene, cropped to approximately the same size. One is a 10 megapixel image from my digital “35mm” camera and the other is a 2.5 megapixel scanned image from my medium format film camera. Although the amount of data from the film scan is 1/4 of the digital camera image, it was obtained from a negative that is 4 times the area of a 35mm sized sensor.
My perception is there is little difference between the two images – some tonal and sharpness differences I could probably eliminate in Photoshop if I took the time. Not much to drive a choice until you realize I could have the film image scanned at a much higher resolution – say 150 megapixels – to have more data to process for better tone gradations and sharpness of details. The bigger negative will always have an advantage, especially when cropping for creative compositions. At this point in the technology race film continues to offer more information whereas digital offers convenience. It’s your choice as a photographer which you prefer or need for your circumstances.
Digital – left image, Olympus E-3, ISO100, 1/400 sec, f/9, 31mm (60mm full frame equivalent); Film – right image, Mamiya 6MF, ISO400 Kodak T-Max, 1/125 sec, f/4, 50mm, red filter. Both sharpened slightly, digital changed to B&W in Photoshop.
On the last night of 2009 we had a full moon, the second of December thus making it a blue moon. It was a great opportunity to take pictures under a different light, calling to memory the old Christmas story, “The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow, Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below.” If you haven’t gotten your tripod out and worked on photography under the light of the full moon shining on a white plain of snow, you haven’t fully pushed your photography to new frontiers.
The light from the moon, being reflected from the sun, is basically daylight – it’s just at a lower luminance. Exposures will be longer but the color balance will be pretty similar. Since the sky isn’t glowing with sunlight, you get a richer, deeper blue when there are no clouds. Meanwhile, the shadows on the snow are so clear, defining their subject nicely.
If you’re lucky (or smart) enough to get out just as the sun is setting, you can get pictures of the moon rising while there is still some remnant of sunlight on the ground.
The snow keeps falling here, more than was seemingly anticipated for December, spawn of an errant system that found itself stuck on the Great Plains. Between the actual snow fall, the very light density of the flakes and the perpetual wind, our world is a series of rounded, clean surfaces. A terrain before erosion has worked its creative destruction.
With temperatures in the teens even the sunny days aren’t incentive enough for people to get out early after the sun rises. An early hiker willing to don all the layers needed to retain warmth outside is rewarded with a nearly blank canvas untouched, at least by human feet.
Animals out seeking food and warmth to survive conditions we pass off as inconvenient leave signs of their passage. Footprints reveal who passed where, going to where – everything but intention can be read from the trails in the snow. The early sun shining low across the snow casts shadows in each depression to clearly mark passage of a creature out to make a living. Movement along paths opened in the snow darken as trails, leading lines for the photographer desiring a reference in the white world.
Tracks
While I’m setting up my tripod in knee deep snow I admire the animal that lightly ran across the snow, invoking references to elves in Tolkien’s writings. Do they ignore the cold under their feet as easily as they do the depth of snow? What do they think of this surface, so unlike the grass or leaves they encounter most of the year? Or is survival such an imperative in this harsh climate all other considerations are secondary?
I’ve got an opportunity to enter a jurored art show at a local gallery and am completely blocked. The resident artist and show host has provided a image for inspiration, a painting of a coastal city with buildings, bridge, sailboats, etc. The instructions are to interpret this scene in my style and medium.
Obviously my medium is photography but I’ve been looking through my images containing all these elements and I have no idea how to portray them in a way that “interprets” the scene given. Let’s face it, do I even have a style? Is it a literal perspective, an abstract, a collage, something painterly? Usually I’m pretty creative when given a starting point but this one has me stumped, against a deadline of the end of this week.
Certainly a challenge to take images already in hand and use them to create a new image representing something new, something that wasn’t in my mind at the time I made the pictures originally. Here I have a chance to broaden my mind about my own work – and I’m hitting a wall.
I think entering this show is something that will connect me more with the local art scene and people, one of my goals for 2010. It would be nice to start off with an image people are interested in looking at beyond a single glance – right now I’m wondering if it’ll be more than a blank frame….
The winter weather is exhibiting a full range of options this Christmas week, just to remind us how little concern the earth has for our human holidays. We were assured of a white Christmas with the earlier snow, but a slight rise in temperature and misting rain/sleet showed up, coating the north side of just about everything with a sheath of ice. The pictures below are a few scenes I found in our back yard.
With an icy layer on the pine needles and bare trees, the north wind came next, gusting 20-30 mph to see if it could break down limbs and shrubs. Around here we see little damage, thankfully, and the birds still have their shelter under the two pines in the back yard. Today they have been continually flying between their spots in the lower limbs to the seed I’ve spread around the lower deck. At least they will have a few calories to deal with the cold and wind.
Having clothed the world with ice, the weather’s next act is to turn loose the snow again; a steady stream has been falling for several hours this afternoon and the weather gurus are promising us more over the next 24 hours. Hope parents included sleds on their list of kids’ toys.
Winter is God’s way of reminding us to slow down, think about our place in the world, and reflect on our relationship with each other. Snow and ice remind us how easily we can be isolated but also provide a chance to spend time with people unencumbered by an urge to rush off to something.
Merry Christmas to all, regardless of your climatic situation. Take the time to be a part of the world and the people around you.
I’ve been playing with a photographic technique called High Dynamic Range (HDR) to bring some interesting effects to landscape photos. All cameras, film or digital, record a range of light from black to white but most don’t record the whole range. For example, a bright sunset behind a dark ocean is a hard scene for digital cameras – either the sky is exposed properly and the ocean is black or vice versa. HDR enables the photographer to “expand” the range in the final image to get both light and dark areas exposed properly. Basically you take several pictures of the same scene, changing exposure for each one and then let the computer put them all together into a final image.
I was shooting sunrise over snow this morning and realized with the clouds banding the early sunlight and the reflections on the frozen lake and snow that this would be a great HDR scene. Also, this afternoon I found a book that does a good job of explaining what’s going on in HDR software and gives guidance on how to control it to your taste. I learned that in addition to making better “natural” images HDR can also be used to enhance the drama of a picture. Just another artistic tool in the kit to bring my perception of the world to the screen (or paper).
Sunrise over picnic tables
It’s beginning to look a LOT like Christmas, inside and out. Each year I marvel at the efforts people put into lighting their homes, offices, shops and roads. Just about the time I start to realize I might, just maybe, pull the Christmas decorations out of the closet, all these people around us have strings of lights, snowflakes, tinsel and angels out and around their houses. It’s really more fun for me to enjoy their labors than to get around and figure out how to attached and power any decorations of ours.
Now with the snow on the ground all these lighting masterpieces impart a glow to the world. I was looking out the window last night and remembering again the magic of a winter night, where the ground is lighter than the sky, turning upside down all our expectations of the evening. All around the neighborhood there are shining, blinking, flashing and glowing lights casting their energy on the white ground and warming up the low hanging clouds.
Why are people so against winter? It’s such a magical time of the year.
Christmas ball tree
Maximum glow
Keep the home light burning
Mel Mann Photo Blog 