Thinkin’ Spring

Oh…the weather outside’s disgusting,

I can hear my knee-joints rusting,

so it’s here inside I’ll grumpily remain,

let it rain, let it rain, let it rain.

With apologies to Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne for fiddling with their classic.

I’m staring out the window at a medium waterfall that earlier was the downspout-less end of the  eaves trough.  It’s overflowing.  The narcissus and daffodils in front and in back of the house resemble a lost colony of colorful morning-after fraternity row students, crashed face down all over the yard where an overindulgence of rain has left them ’til they dry out a bit.  The last few days of seeing them up and alert seemed to promise a return to getting out into the yard with a camera.  Meanwhile, I’m thinking drab little scattered thoughts, as disciplined as a herd of cats, so I am going to post some spring-like pictures, photographic and fractographic, to keep my anticipation going, although some of these need to be re-taken using  better eyes.

Translucent petals on flowers alway make me want to saturate an image with their color. To that end, closeups taken from in front of (in some cases inside of) the flower with the sun or a pair of flashes lighting it from behind, can bring out shades not seen in reflected light shots.

Sparklies!

It has been a long, dry year so far in our part of the West. With the increased restrictions on outdoor water use, it seemed likely that any self-imposed photographic challenge this Fall/Winter season would be about capturing the state of the most pathetic desiccated strawberry plant or mummified hollyhock pod to be found in the yard. Granted, that’s part of Nature’s cyclic meander but for me it’s rarely a delightful time, photographing the decay. It didn’t seem this Fall’s photographic practice subjects were very promising.

And then it rained recently, gloriously, for about three days. It brought enough moisture to produce our first really thick, pea-soup fog this morning. It was marvelously cool and damp; a sudden dislocation from the San Francisco East Bay area to the San Juan Islands near British Columbia, in sensation. It was completely delightful. After leaving the cats’ bowls, I stood at the bottom of the hill, at the end of the driveway, picked up the newspaper and stood up, surveying the trees above the house to see who had come for seed, as I do each morning. As I searched, the sun broke through just above the roof, firing up the droplets from the fog on all the front yard’s flattened leaves, remnant flower heads up on dried stalks and the millet heads everywhere, firing them all into a yard full of sparkling diamonds, with shreds of mist wafting through the open areas: gorgeous!

And me, out without my gear.

Ah well, next time; I’m still working on finding the optimal way to shoot the millet heads with dew or frost on them. If you use enough depth of field to get the droplets and all of the millet fibers sharp you lose the spread of the refracted light that makes the sparklies, or specular highlights, so spectacular. If you use a narrow depth of field you must perfectly align with the seed head and ignore the glowing blurry mess of the out-of-focus millet fibers. I’m happy to see the possibility of this practice subject coming back this season.

I hope you have a similar Fall spectacular to admire.

pete