In the Spotlight

Taking, and retaking, beginning and intermediate photography courses is a fun way to make sure that you find a time to get out, in my case into the yard, to keep in contact with your ’seeing’ muscles and whatever imagination can be mustered that day. After all, it’s an *assignment*, isn’t it? Unfortunately, Real Life (remember when the internet was young and real life was called the “Meat World”?) has a persistent way of demanding regular chunks of the day which usually leaves me taking images in the hours from the very flat, unattractive, light of noon up to the possibility of the jackpot of ’sweet’ late afternoon light, depending on the current level of suspended particles in the local atmosphere. During the seemingly interminable hours of flat, contrast-y light it can get too hot, in Summer or Fall, to stay out in the open, practicing honeybee/flower action shots, or what have you, and the heat sends me either inside for a drink or in under the cover of the podocarpus and the split-leaf maple in the courtyard, where it is quite dark and generally cool in comparison. And the breaks in the dense shade spark Ideas.

In under the canopy, in a mini-micro-climate held reasonably comfortable by the dense intergrowing branches overhead, is a great place to watch the shafts of sunlight, shifting like white spotlights across the gloom, picking out forms in that saturated-green of the protected leaves of the split-leaf maple. It was just that sort of day when I was out with my sketching mannequin (my patient, hardworking and *only* cooperative photographic model) to get an assigned shot of a portrait in a natural setting (I got a nice shot of a twenty-inch tall mannequin ‘climbing’ in the maple tree…nice except for a small leaf-hopper which hopped aboard the mannequin while I was working with the camera too far away to see it, and made itself at home where there would normally be a nose on the blank wooden face. Sigh.). After getting my class shot, I couldn’t resist the lovely greens up in the “spotlight” and waited a few minutes until the light worked its way around to this grouping of leaves, which I particularly liked, and made a few exposures of the grouping. I like to put it up on the computer as wallpaper, for a calm influence during hectic days.

May your Holidays be only mildly hectic, if hectic they be, and happy, memorable times!

Cheers,
pete

Steady as you go

Seasons  Greetings to everyone!   All the  best wishes for a fine year end, I hope it’s a happy and memorable time.

For this entry, I’m posting an image I made for an LVS online course  assignment.  I started taking courses in digital photography there when I bought a used  Canon EOS 10D  DSLR (digital single lens reflex-big, heavy body;  interchangeable lenses) camera from an old friend, who swore it was driven only on weekends by a few students who needed a digital loaner to use while taking a course at his California central coast photographic institute.  I hadn’t used my old nikons for much more than taking pictures of my Hallowe’en pumpkin carving since the early 1990s and was sorely in need of an interpreter for the digital device.   The digital controls take a lot of getting used to ( I still keep trying to twist the base of the lens where the old lenses had the aperture control, now located on a dial function on the body) and the classes get me outside and looking for compositions in the yard.  The assignment that led to the picture  above was to take a two images of the same thing to compare image sharpness.  For one image, hand-hold the camera and take a slow exposure; hold it as steady as possible.  For the second image, mount the camera on a tripod, if possible lock the mirror up, attach a remote switch to the camera, and with all of these precautions against camera vibration, record the image.  …discuss…

I walked around the house, looking for something to shoot in the same yard that had supplied the images for the previous two or three courses, and an old trowel on an expanded mesh iron patio table caught my eye.  With the two leaves along the handle, it made a composition I liked,  not using the whole trowel but sort of nudging the ‘inner gardener’ to think about a garden lying fallow, absorbing nutrients and resting.  To take the portion of the handle and blade that I wanted, I had to place my left elbow across an old terrarium that was next to the trowel.  This allowed me to hang the camera down from above, while I stood on tiptoe,   and tried not to breathe.   Feeling (over)confident about the support, I set the camera to record enough depth of field, pushing my exposure down to 1/30th of a second, a good deal slower than the 1/160 sec. arrived at by the common rule of thumb for sharp pictures:  use a shutter speed at, or faster than, 1/focal length of the lens.  In the small LCD display on the camera, it looked to me like I had my shot.   It wasn’t until several days later that I would come back with the tripod to take the same subject with the camera on the tripod…and discovered I couldn’t!  The tripod legs spread wide enough that when the camera was at the right height, they hit the side of the table and could not be moved into place.  I had to settle for an unprepossessing image of more of the trowel, the leaves losing their framing effect,  the added attraction  of the very old, very cracked water sealing putty and filthy glass of the bottom of the terrarium. It was very ugly and I have not posted it, but it was undeniably tack-sharp!  On comparing the two in Photoshop at full size the difference became quite apparent. So,  I’ve become  a tripod enthusiast.  I’d be even *more*  enthusiastic with one of the new carbon-fiber lightweight tripods but  maybe if I keep doing “curls” with my old, heavy, tripod I can stay strong enough to use it.

Yes the picture is a bit ‘muzzy’;   I still like the ‘feel’ of the image.

Holiday Cheers!

pete

My Hubble Milkweed

“one failure to seed

haunts the butterflies to come;

my hubble milkweed”

Our front garden sports a number of pots from which rise, each year, true milkweed plants. My mother started the practice sometime during her career as a kindergarten teacher. During the course of the year, the kids would watch the growth processes of stick insects, Monarch butterflies, Silkworms and the beautiful web construction of the garden orb-weaver spider or Golden Argiope which was given an upright frame standing in a basin of water to ensure it wouldn’t wander off somewhere. The spider and its web were very popular with the kids until an arachnophobic visiting parent demanded, ignorantly, that the (beautiful, totally harmless) large, horrible, obviously dangerous spider must be immediately removed from the room and banned from the lessons to keep the children safe. sigh. And so passes the baton of the lack of Understanding Life; but, I digress . Where was I… Ah, so the milkweed-at-home program was started as fodder for the classroom Monarch caterpillars, but soon became a small oasis for the few stragglers from the Monarch migration route, either late-bloomers or blown off-course. Apparently a few liked the local nectar and we eventually had a few homegrown Monarchs. In the last couple of years, however the Monarchs have all but vanished; this year only one appeared in the garden and that one did not stay more than a week. The small grove of eucalyptus trees, about four hours south of here, where they overwinter in tree-coating swarms or flutters (a flutter of butterflies, a murder of crows, a clowder of cats *grin*), was well populated this last season so I guess the winds aren’t blowing many off-course, at least in this direction.

I don’t know what it is lately, whether it be the drought in our area or the lack of a good long string of the hot summer weather that many of the plants thrive in, but the pods of the milkweeds are setting on late and many are failing to open fully, trapping the silky, wind-catching strands that are attached to the top of each seed in the pods’ twisting, drying form. As disappointing as this is from the butterfly-feeding/gardening point of view, it affords me a photographic opportunity.

Have you ever sat low, next to a dandelion and tried to capture the right moment when the wind (or if you are impatient, a sharp exhalation) blows the seeds on their strange little fibrous hang-gliders from the center of the seed-head, sending them off to enhance the dandelion-ness of the world at large? Well, the trapped fibers of the milkweed seeds’ wind-drifting structure affords me the opportunity to try for an image similar to that launch with more than one chance at it; as the wind puffs, the seeds rise and fall with it, but remain ensnared to rise and fall on the next puffs as well.

On the day I stumbled across these, tucked in behind a juniper bush, the late afternoon sunlight was just beginning to get close to grazing across the tops of the coastal hills on the west side of the valley, shattering as it passed through the pine and birch branches in turn. Planting my backside down on the wooden rim (read: torture device) of a planter full of strawberry plants, I set the tripod legs splayed one notch wider than the normal angle between the camera base and vertical, getting them leveled by extending one leg down a foot more into the path way that curves past on the left. Then it was a short game of tag with the gentle breeze gusts to expose an image with the seeds lifting away from the pod. The resulting image above, with it’s muted color from being lit low from the side against the backdrop of the dark juniper came out with a very ‘painterly’ look to it, and immediately reminded me, for some reason, of some of the astro-photographic images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and put on display at NASA’s web site about the Hubble. I dubbed it, ‘My Hubble Milkweed’ and added it to my favorite recent images. Today, I post it here and hope it is pleasing to your eye.

May good fortune be yours,

Pete S.

The Gauntlet, taken up

Okay, you’re right: this is NOT one of my photos or fractals. This is a line drawing that I wish I could credit to its rightful owner; please let me know if you know of the source? Thank you,

The reason for the switch in art today is that, as a student in John Kramar’s LVSonline introductory course on techniques for Remote Perception, the drawing was given as a subject with which to practice ‘blind drawing’. Blind drawing simply means that all of your attention is kept on the subject while, without looking at your paper, you draw its contours. For the exercise, the drawing was also turned upside down, so that one is truly just copying the shape and flow of the lines; a technique taught by Betty Edwards in her ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ courses and book.

Karol Grace posted about blind drawing in her Three Dog Studio post: Making Art with your Eyes Closed, just as the remote viewing class was introduced to it. In both uses, it is a warm-up for getting the figurative muscles of your art brain flexible and engaged. The results of blind contour drawing can be, um, disappointing and humbling, and , in friendly discussion, hilarious. I left a comment on the blog, saying something to the effect that her linework looked good even if the subject *was* a little (cue the friendly discussion *smile*) ‘randomized’ and she tossed down a grinning gauntlet, challenging me to nerve up and post my own stab at blind drawing; here we go-talk about ‘warts and all’ blog entries!

I attempted my first copy of the subject above, on the honor system, and found that I could not be trusted. Failed miserably; caught myself several times sneaking a peek at the drawing hand to try to place it for the next line. Predictably, the drawing was reasonably close to the original above. But, oh, the guilt! *grin*. I didn’t include that first drawing here, as the second of the truly blind attempts was made on the same paper and overlay it; very hard to tell which part was the peeked-at version and which was the second blind try in the resultant mess. To ensure that I couldn’t look at my drawing hand again, I went off and found a milk-jug box, the sort that holds two one-gallon plastic jugs of milk. It was just the right size to lie on its side on the desk, with room for a stack of paper and for pen maneuvering, inside. With my hand out of sight in the box, I tried it for the first time without being able to look. Horrible. Shudder-inducing. Really dreadful; you can find her right eye and eyelid floating in space next to the main..er…collision of lines. More Practice!

The third blind attempt a wasn’t a whole lot better. I have no recollection of drawing her nose three times, lol.

The final try has some recognizable copies of lines from the original, even if the misplaced right and left contours make it as much like the original face as a mask run over by an 18-wheeler. It is progress, however halting.

For me, blind drawing, in spite of the name, is a great way to practice seeing, seeing what is really in front of me, which I think is of great importance to how I make choices when I’m working with the camera. One of my most common errors is looking at, but not *seeing* the truth of the scene in the viewfinder. How is the light *really* distributed, how is the color from the thing closest to my center of interest altering the picture I think I’m taking, are my technical decisions with the camera and lens really setting the center of interest off from the colors and forms that might distract the eye. Having practice at seeing helps assure I don’t just find new ways to depict the proverbial lamppost growing-out-of-a-subject’s-head image.

I’m glad to have been re-introduced to this form of art exercise, it’s also a neat way to subtly shift my state of mind into something more focused and quieter. Not smarter, obviously, otherwise I’d've burned the evidence!

Well, that’s it, that’s my blind drawing come-uppance, lol. Let the friendly discussion begin!

Pssssst….on Karol’s Three Dog Studio blog there is also a very cool idea for making a sketching journal that is much less unnerving than a daily confrontation with a plain, blank page; check it out!

cheers,

pete