Maine Melange

Recently returned from our Maine vacation with some photos, and as many of you know, Acadia National Park, specifically, is one of my favorite places on earth.  A mélange of Maine images I call it.  I’ve always loved the word mélange – its meaning and especially its sound.  Although it’s kind of a pretentious word, I think it fits pretty well here.  Comes from the Old French meaning “to mix.”  And the connotation is a “mixture of disparate components,” according to Wikipedia.  My Maine collection of images is a bit of a jumble, a mixed bag if you will.

The first image above, Northeast Harbor Bows, is a good example.  With its muted, fog shrouded subject of working boats, it is not the usual eye-popping exhibition of Fall colors in Maine – though I have to say this year the leaves did put on one of the best shows we’ve seen in our thirty plus years of visiting.  If there is a central theme to this image collection though, it might be oldness, or timelessness, or at least constancy.  These crafts appeared well worn, long serving and stalwart.

The rest of the collection can be seen by clicking the link below. There are a few shots of Maine’s glorious October color. Another of the special late afternoon light in Southwest Harbor near the wonderfully restored old farmhouse where we stayed (see the shot of the weather worn shingles and porch planter).  Those Mason Jar lights with water worn sea glass surprised us as the kitchen chandelier.  And of course there’s an ageless mountain view, and a waves-on-craggy coast capture that’s persisted for millennia.  Maybe my favorite image is Mélange, a close-up, depicting Nature’s autumn stage of sure and steady recycling.  All timeless, all Maine, all peaceful and reassuring.  

Other photos from Maine Melange

Photographic Serendipity -- the 7 % Solution

Found this nice photo image unexpectedly.  Story below.

Hadlock Falls

Taking photos is often a very studied process for me.

I mean there’s finding the right subject — I’ve always loved waterfalls — and choosing the right perspective, the direction and type of lighting, and not to mention a zillion possible combinations of settings on my camera.  But mostly I think composition is the key factor in a successful, pleasing image.  Where you balance the elements of a scene, consider the colors, textures, lines, shapes and, with waterfalls, the implied movement. 

A few years back, shooting in my favorite place on earth (Acadia National Park), I spent an afternoon capturing many images of Hadlock Falls, a good sized waterfall in the park beside one of Rockefeller’s carriage trails.  I was very pleased with the shoot and one of those photos wound up being selected for a juried exhibit at the Hammond Museum in North Salem, NY.  Here's the photo.

Hadlock Falls Original

But here’s the kicker.  Today I was trying to do some organizing of my collection of some 30 thousand! photographs, trying to create some sense and order through cataloging and key wording.  And, as usually happens when I attempt such tedious work, I was easily distracted — the original Hadlock Falls photo caught my eye and I tried to tighten it up a bit with some minimal cropping.  I won’t bore you with the details but the editing program I use sometimes has a mind of its own as you push and pull with the mouse, at the same time grabbing and locking in on a “handle” at the border of the photo.  Some digital clumsiness on my part caused me to lock onto a tiny portion in the middle of the photo and mistakenly hit return.

Surprised but fascinated, I moved the tiny selected window around until it revealed the image above, and I finalized the crop.   Because the trimmed image accounted for only about seven per cent of the area of the original, the visual result was very pixelated (grainy, losing a great deal of detail through over enlargement) and it magnified the lack of sharpness caused by a little camera shake and very slow shutter speed (1/8th of a second).  The “incorrectly" cropped image had a nice painterly quality of color and brush texture that I really liked.

So who is responsible for this pleasing impressionistic rendering?  The camera, the enlarged pixels, the cropping software?  Me?

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it and maybe you might want to see if you can locate this tiny selection from within the original image?

One final observation: there’s something a little weird about this Seven Percent Solution image.  Do you see a mysterious figure in the top right section of the image?  Do you think it might be Professor Moriarty, that “Napoleon of Crime," peering out from behind his watery cloak while menacingly outstretching his right hand?

Might have to call Sherlock in on the case.

How to Train Your Hummingbird

Perhaps more to the point: How my Hummingbird Trained Me.

Some of you may recall last year about this time I told my story about trying to capture backyard images of this lovely little creature whose wings beat at 80 times a second, whose heart beats at 20 times a second and who, in order to keep up with a metabolism which is the highest of any warm blooded creature, has to consume her body weight in nectar every day.

In any event I think I prevailed in this battle of bird brains with bigger, brighter pictures this year.

And the three most important secrets for capturing close-up images of Hummingbirds: Patience, Patience, and more Patience.  

These birds are very shy with incredible evasive maneuvers: hovering, flying forwards, backwards and diving at 60 mph.  But I was determined to get closer shots this year, while stopping her aerial antics in mid flight.  I knew from previous years to move my chair closer and closer to the Bee Balm patch over a period of days.  Each day moving up 2 feet and sitting with the camera for an hour or so to get her used to my presence.  But the Bee Balm patch was about 8 feet wide and maybe four feet deep this summer.  And, initially my target was very cagey feeding at the back of the patch where I could get no clear shot.  This was no stationery hanging-hardware-store nectar feeder.

It became a balancing act.  I’d move up – she’d stay back.  Sometimes she’d stay away for ½ an hour rather than her usual 7 to 10 minute intervals. Eventually she started coming to the front of the patch where I could try for a clear shot – is it possible she completely drained the nectar from the flowers in the back of the patch?  Long story short, over three days, I discovered that she felt safe only within an 8 foot Charlie-free zone.  Soon as I moved closer to 6 feet, she totally gave up feeding and stayed away.  Back at 8 feet she would come in for nectar at her usual 7 to 8 minute intervals.  Wonder if I’d waited her out for 6 days whether she'd have let me move in closer.

So who’s training whom here?  In the end we came to an understanding of sorts.  I stayed outside her comfort zone and she spent more and more time putting on her show for me, about 20 to 30 seconds, but always taking 7 to 10 minute breaks, landing high in trees 40 or 50 feet away.  While I learned a little bit of the meaning of patience, I also got a trial and error education about the proper camera settings for shooting this fast and unpredictable subject.

I used a monopod to steady the camera and I used a longer but slower lens this time  But it was was still another balancing act, experimenting with combinations of shutter speed (needed at least 1/1000th sec to stop her in motion), ISO settings (like a high film speed of 6400 to produce an acceptable level of image noise), and aperture settings (5.6 to 6.3 to get enough depth of field for enough of her body to in focus).  In addition my camera has a zillion modes of automatic focus – you didn’t think I was manually doing that with her laser-like movements, did you?

Anyway she came to tolerate me and I learned to be patient during her absences. Maybe the best part about waiting for her periodic returns was ruminating about this man bird standoff.  No, it was more than that.  She gained acceptance of a foreign being in her world by interacting and moving to a comfortable level of trust.  I moved slowly into her realm and let her know I posed no danger, respecting her space and really appreciating her different and wonderous qualities.  Kind of like a negotiated peace agreement with Nature.  

Morning Musings and Mind Meanderings

Took this shot in my neighbor’s stunning garden the other day.  Beautiful butterfly landing on a lovely flower.  As is my usual practice, dove into Google this morning to learn a little more about both before blogging about the image.  It’s an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, very common in eastern North America.  And it’s a female because of the blue spots on the back of the wing.  To attract these females into mating, the male of the species puts forth a pheromone, something akin to a perfume.  Interesting what I could glean in 10 seconds, but more remarkable to me was realizing how, a relatively short time ago, I would have had to first travel to the library, and pull down and thumb through a volume from a set of 20 fat encyclopedias.

The flower turns out to be a Lilac bush.  Which while reviewing it in Google, reminded me of the famous Whitman poem (When lilacs last in dooryard bloomed …) inspired by Lincoln’s assassination in 1865.  I was assigned to read it in high school but today the words resonated more.  Thinking about all this president struggled to accomplish, all the divisiveness then. And now.

My musings this morning are not about politics but about change and how it affects us, how aware we are of transformations we are immersed in.  Reminds me of a little story by the novelist, David Foster Wallace:

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

With so many of us connected to instant information, are we better off?  Are we more informed and open in our beliefs?  Are we sometimes wrong but never uncertain?  When we do an Internet search that results in 87 thousand hits, do we wonder about what processes selected the links we’re offered?  If the algorithm “helps us” to find what we’re interested in based on what searches we’ve done before, are we just fortifying our comfort zone?  Does the search engine have a point of view?

A lot to ponder on this rainy June morning while looking at a butterfly on a lilac.

Spring Promises

You can’t help but love the Spring season.  Especially if there are obstacles in your path.  The very fact of Spring, its inevitable, predictable, magical rebirth offers renewal and hope, new beginnings, starting over and second chances.  You can’t help but see this when you witness green shoots pushing up out of the barren ground.  Couple that with the incredible artistry wrought by Ms. Mother Nature when showing off the early stages of her creations, the ones that precede the ultimate displays which are much more familiar to us.

Below I’ve captured one of these harbingers found in my backyard yesterday. A fern about to be unfurled. Revealed with a macro lens that digs a little deeper, moves in a little closer to glimpse these little early miracles of shape and form and color.  Albert Einstein suggested that if you look deep into nature, you will understand everything better.  I would only add that getting there early adds to the comprehension, and wonder, and promise.

Shutter Speed, Art and Ancestral Memories?

This photographic image was taken in Acadia, where I’ve spent a lot of time musing on the magic of this magnificent national park.  I’m particularly drawn to where the ocean meets the craggy shoreline – so mesmerized by this subject that it’s pushed me to explore new ways to photograph it, to try and make art of it.  And it’s also caused me to think more about the source of this seeming universal connection many of us have with the sea.

Acadia Morning

The sea is the subject of a lot of art – paintings, poetry, novels, movies, and even photography.  But how do we define what we see as art?  If you search the internet you’ll find a lot of grand opinions and big ideas.  And then there are the “rules” of visual art – like composition and perspective, lines and form, shapes and color and tone.  For photography, of course, it’s about the light.  But what does art do for us?  Some say it brings us natural beauty and emotional power.  Some talk about portraying the human condition and connecting to feelings that we all have in common.  I always liked Picasso’s view that it “washes the dust of daily life off our souls.”  And I was intrigued by a recent interview with Francis Ford Coppola, where he said that art is about risk and producing something that hasn’t been seen before.

I’d like to explore that latter point as it relates to photography.  The camera does have an incredible capability to produce unique images – ones that can be beautiful and emotionally powerful; but maybe, more importantly, the camera can deliver new visual experiences that we literally cannot see with our own eyes.  Your eyes can’t see the detail of a hummingbird wing in motion, nor can they stop a speeding bullet as it exits an apple.  But a camera can isolate such visual realities as they occur in a thousandth or a ten thousandth of a second.  Amazing to be a true witness to something you cannot see for yourself, without the collusion of a camera. 

On the other end of the time and shutter spectrum, a camera can lay down a digital image of an elongated reality: in real time you might be mesmerized by the waves of an ocean crashing on a rocky shoreline, inexplicably captivated by the scene. Using the adjustable shutter (and a few other tricks), the camera can record the roiling sea for 20 seconds and paint one mysterious, static image, showing you something you’ve never actually seen before, but may have felt at another level.  You might be drawn back in time to some ancient, ancestral memory of surviving as a hominid species on the seacoast, protected from predators by open space and nourished by plentiful resources from the mother sea.  (That last speculative sentence inspired by a recent read of Blue Mind – google the title – a scientific discourse on our affinity to water.)

Or you may just be mildly intrigued by the contrast between towering, finely detailed shoreline cliffs and the smooth water-worn boulders below, crafted by millennia of pounding surf. The latter illustrated by a very slow shutter speed capture.

Either way, or neither way, I shutter [sic] to think what a boring (and artless) world it would be for me without a camera.