Turkey up top

Gquowp-gquowp-gquowp!   For the last few days we’ve  been hearing a different call around the yard, coming at any time of the daylight hours.  I’ve spelled it as best I can there, but it’s not an utterance with which I’m familiar.  I had heard that our town had its  own complement of wild turkeys but I never thought I’d see them in such a suburban setting. The nearest strip of real woods is on the canalized creek-bed a quarter-mile away and yet, gquowp….gquowp….gquowp-gquowp, now and again.

Then came the early morning sightings out the kitchen window.  Preparing food in the kitchen for the morning feedings, checking out the window to see how low the finch’s thistle-seed feeder has gotten since the day before, when,  just outside the front door and  down between the retaining walls where the violets used to grow, a long neck and large head move cautiously forward, revealing a fairly large feathered  torso on stilts,  across onto the left-hand neighbor’s front yard.  Up along the edge of the hedge, followed openly, about four feet back,  by the right-hand neighbor’s petite tabby cat, who looks frankly astonished. Which look changes, once she sees us looking out at her, to something like “I could take that, ” as she comes back to our front walk.  The turkey, like a magic trick, vanished in the short time we were watching the cat.

We saw it a couple of times in the next few days, strutting from the right-hand neighbors, across the open cul-de-sac and up the driveway du jour to vanish into thin air, somehow, when it reached a house.  Then it seemed to have gone from the neighborhood.

Until this afternoon, gquowp….gquowp…gquowp..mumbling a couple of feet to the left of the backyard glass door.  Still looking for other turkeys, I guess. I went and got the camera, hoping to get a good shot, but when I returned it had, yes, vanished, so I hurried out the front door to catch it coming down the side driveway. Peeked around the corner: nothing.  Went all the way around the house the other way: nothing. Then, faintly, gquowp! Gquowp…gquowp.  I went back around front, looked ’round the yard and found nothing.  Gquowp-gquowp-gquowp-gquowp-gquowp!  Oh, the sound was from something taller than I am, and there was the turkey, on the ridge of the garage, neck extended, calling and looking for other turkeys. I took a couple of shots, until it seemed uneasy. I backed away onto the porch, checked exposures quickly and went back, hoping for a closer shot or a preening or wings-extended shot. No turkey on the roof, but there it was, at the bottom of the front garden walking up across the neighbor’s lawn, on its way to vanishing again.   If I didn’t know better,  I’d swear the thing teleports!

I hope I get some more tries, it’s a tricky critter!

Has the early spring brought you new visitors this year?

Cheers,

pete

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.

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.

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