Orionids

My intention was to catch a falling star.  I got to the beach about an hour before first light.  The night was clear and dark, but not much happening in the way of meteors.   The Orionid meteor shower was pretty much a no-show.   But I enjoy looking at the night sky. 

From left to right across the bottom: Bright Sirius, the dog star, then the familiar shape of Orion, Jupiter above the V-shaped horns of Taurus the Bull, and to the right of Taurus, the Pleiades, an open cluster also known as The Seven Sisters. At the top of the frame are the twin stars Castor and Pollux in the constellation Gemini.  And one little shooting star.

The nice thing about being at the beach early in the morning, there's usually something to enjoy, a distant thunder storm, a flock of gulls, or just being there.

The next morning I did it again, and again not was much happening in the sky, but I had the pleasure of meeting a friend who enjoys the same sort of thing.   All in all a good weekend.

© 2012 Buck Ward        The Photographist       www.buxpix.net

Metamorphosis

Or, how  changing conditions can change your photograph

As I stood on the fishing pier under the bridge, a dinghy made its way towards me in the twilight.  I had composed, but I waited for the small boat to clear my frame. It would have been a blur, a dark smudge, amongst the yachts, even though I had increased the ISO to 800 to shorten the exposure time.  When the dinghy cleared, I made my first exposure. This first photograph was exposed for five seconds, which can be seen in the blur of the buoy in the center foreground. Fortunately the yachts were still enough that their motion is not apparent – their masts aren't blurred and masthead lights aren't distorted.  Even though it was fairly dark, there is some detail visible, lit by the industrial-strength lights on the shrimp docks some distance off to the the left.

The next photograph was made just a few minutes later, a little before sunrise, with a nice pink sky. I had reduced the ISO to 200.  The faster shutter speed, 1/2 second, made a difference in the buoy, as well as the texture of the water and the sky.  The yachts are more in silhouette due to the brightness of the sky. This might have been a good candidate for a graduated neutral density filter to bring out more detail in the yachts, and perhaps to lighten the dark band of fog beyond, without overexposing the sky. 

A fellow carrying his morning coffee walked up to me on the pier and struck up a conversation. He lives on one of the yachts I had been photographing. He pointed it out to me, but I was never really sure which one was his. I asked if he had come in on that dinghy earlier. He said that he had, that he was bringing his wife in so she could go to work. He told me all about how he had sold the house and bought the 40-year-old boat, and had been working on it, fixing it up. When he finished getting it ready they were going to let it take them down through the Caribbean and along the coast of South America. We chatted for a while and then he excused himself to go get his second cup of coffee. The fog bank that had been beyond the anchorage was rolling in, engulfing the yachts.  I made my final exposures.  Less than an hour had elapsed since exposing the first photograph. Changing conditions had given me three different photographs of the same scene.  Time for my second cup, too.

Some technical stuff about white balance-  

All three of these photographs were made with a manual white balance setting of 5500K, which approximates a daylight setting.  The colors you see are just as they were captured by the camera. Automatic white balance, AWB, would have warmed the first photo, cooled the second, and I think it would have slightly warmed the third. That is, AWB would have reduced the apparent differences in color among these photographs.  When I first started shooting digital, a set the white balance to daylight - after all, I'd been shooting daylight balanced color film for years.  It's what I was used to.  Later I set the white balance to AWB.  When I started doing portraits, I discovered that AWB would react to to a change in clothing color or background by changing the apparent coloring of the photographs.  For consistency, I stopped using AWB and now almost always use the manual setting.  By shooting RAW rather than JPEG, I can always adjust the white balance in post-processing if I need to.

© 2012 Buck Ward        The Photographist       www.buxpix.net

Big Tarpon, Little Sunburst

Sitting, waiting, in the early morning stillness. Maybe the sun will show a little artistic gumption and paint the sky this morning. The night is just beginning to surrender.  I hear a big splash, then another.  Dolphins, I think.   In the darkness, I can just barely make out the movement on the water.   More splashes, right in front of me. I can see the roiling of the water, all around. There must be several. It's not uncommon to see a small pod moving along, rolling, blowing. But I wasn't hearing blowing, just splashing, and they weren't very close together the way they usually are when they're traveling, but rather they were spread out a bit. They must be feeding, or playing. I strain to see a fin or a fluke in the dim light. As it gets lighter, I can see the splashes.  Then I realize, it's not dolphins.   It's tarpon!  Big ones!  There must be a dozen or more of the big fish churning the surface.

The splashes subside. I return to the business at hand – my semiannual quest to make a photograph of the Sanibel lighthouse silhouetted by the orb of the rising sun. The sky at the horizon begins to take on a nice deep orange, reflected in the water. Nothing special, but I pop off a few. Faint crepuscular rays begin to form. I hope they will develop into a glorious sunburst, but no, it never achieves grandeur.

The glow of light concentrates behind the lighthouse, but I can tell that the wispy clouds are too thin to let the sun pretend to be a big red rubber ball.  It will blow the silhouette away with blinding light.  And so it does.

Once again I didn't get what I hoped for.  But I did get a nice subtle sunburst.  And, I shared my solitude with the tarpon.

© 2012 Buck Ward        The Photographist       www.buxpix.net

Soft and Hard

Here are two photographs.

One is soft and smooth and organic, a quasi-minimalist study in the leading lines rule of composition.  I was chasing a bird, figuratively speaking, a white morph reddish egret. It had gone away and I was hoping it would come back. I could see it off in the distance, but it wasn't cooperating. I had my long lens and gimbal mount on the tripod. All of a sudden I saw this pattern in the clouds in the sky. I pulled out a wide-angle lens, removed the camera from the telephoto, and mounted the wide-angle on the camera. I abandoned the tripod and telephoto lens and ran along the edge of the water to put the island of mangroves under the center of the shape of the clouds. Hand holding, I made three exposures, before the sky smeared. And then the image was gone, just as quickly as I had seen it. The first of those three proved to be the best. The egret never did come back. A friend suggested that I entitle this photo Lost because it resembles a recurring scene from the television show of that name. I never saw the show, so I don't know. 

The other is sharp and hard, high contrast and orthogonal, a planned, pre-visualized photograph. I had eyed this building for a while – an old house converted to a law office in downtown Fort Myers. I am a morning shooter but this old house faces westerly and so it needed afternoon light. It would be nice if the sun could have washed the shadows from the porch, but that can never happen. Behind me is a four-story parking garage, which would cast its shadow on the street, then sidewalk, then porch, then house as the day grew older. I was gratified that I was able to catch this in one session. Usually I give it a handful of tries on different days before finally giving up.

In addition to the soft fluidity versus the rigid angularity aspects of the two photographs, there is to me the more striking difference of their tonal ranges. The histogram of Lost roughly resembles a standard bell curve. The tones gather towards the middle, with little pure black and white. The histogram of the Law Office shows the tonal range more evenly distributed across the range with slight spikes at the black and white ends. 'They' say there's no such thing as the right histogram, but I tend to strive for something like the Law Office for a black and white photograph. I like a black and white photograph to have blacks and whites. The histogram of Lost is more characteristic of what I would want in a color photo – no blown-out highlights, no blocked-up shadows – but in this case, I just felt that it worked better in monochrome.

In the final analysis, is analysis even necessary? Art is intuitive. You see what you like and like what you see – or not. Not that these execrable photographs are great art. I can analyze and explain them. I could tell you what I like and don't like about them, mostly the latter – all the little nuances and details. But after all is said, one must simply look – and maybe shrug.

© 2012 Buck Ward        The Photographist       www.buxpix.net

More Birthday Posters

Last year I made a poster for Mary Margaret's birthday. So this year I made posters for her sisters, Caroline and Ellie, commissioned by their mother.

The girls did various poses in the studio. The posters had to match the décor of their rooms.  Mom picked the color schemes and selected the poses. The background of Ellie's poster is actually a photograph of a pillowcase she had brought with her.  It was difficult to separate her pink silhouette and lettering from elements of the pillowcase background, but finally, a thin drop shadow did the trick.

Caroline's background was tricky, too. She needed pink zebra stripes. I worked hard to retain her reflection on the studio floor so it makes it appear that she is sitting on the pattern instead of floating in front of it.  The striped pattern is actually a double mirroring. Placing the horizontal mirror line at the axis of her legs gives the serendipitous illusion that the pattern bends up behind her.

The 24”x36” posters were delivered in time for Caroline's seventh birthday.   The Olympics going on in London right now reminds me that the AIGY in Ellie's poster is for Aiken (SC) Gymnastics, whose owner competed with Nadia Comaneci in the Olympics in Montreal in 1976. 

© 2012 Buck Ward        The Photographist       www.buxpix.net

To Catch a Lightning Bolt

By midday the weather looked promising – big cumulonimbus clouds against deep blue - my kind of sky. I had some things to finish up. Finally, late afternoon, I headed out to see what I could see. By the time I got to where I had a clear horizon, the sky had smeared – a cloudy sky with a few blue patches, Dutchman's trousers I used to call it.   No towering majesties, but there was still interest. The sun, beginning to lower itself into the west, created a low faint rainbow in the east. Nothing spectacular, but worth a smile. The clouds gradually drifted away to hazy banks in the distance. As the sun got lower and lower, I hoped it would do some sky painting, but the distant clouds put it slowly to sleep. I could see rain showers and then some lightning, far away to the north. It would be nice to get some lightning shots, but it was still too light to get the longer exposure times needed. Gradually the storms moved off away behind me, as I hoped some sky scenery would develop for me in the south, where my camera was facing. The clouds grew and changed and faded with the speed of a minute hand. Then, as twilight approached, a flash of lightning. I set the ISO to 50 and stopped the aperture down to f16. A third of a second – maybe I'd get lucky. There were a couple of spectacular flashes just as I was about to release the shutter or immediately after it closed. As the sky darkened and my exposure time slowed to several seconds, the lightning moved away and became reflections of flashes inside clouds, and I hadn't caught anything. The thunder was soft distant rumblings.

Then, lightning bolts off to my left! The camera had reached its maximum automatic exposure time of 30 seconds and was beginning to increase the ISO. I still hadn't managed to catch a lighting bolt, missing by mere fractions of a second on several occasions. The lightning now started flashing about in the clouds beyond the lighthouse. I switched to bulb, set the aperture to f11 and the ISO to my default of 200. The camera was beginning to have trouble focusing on the darkening low-contrast clouds, so I set one of the AF points on the lighthouse a couple of miles across San Carlos Bay. When the lantern blinked the camera would focus and I could trip the shutter. I was guessing at the exposure times, starting at 60 seconds and gradually lengthening as it grew darker. The lightning started showing off again, occasionally being quite spectacular, and I began to catch a few.  As it got darker, my exposure times grew longer, and by the time the exposure reached four minutes, I could catch a lighting bolt almost every time. I'd close the shutter after a good one, and then try to catch the next one. After a little while the storms moved away. The show was over.

In about an hour, I exposed perhaps sixty frames and caught lightning bolts 16 times, mostly in the later, longer exposures. I didn't get the cumulonimbus skyscape I went after. Isn't that always the way? But I'm not disappointed at all. 

© 2012 Buck Ward        The Photographist       www.buxpix.net

On a Rainy Day

The sun is up but it's still not light

The rain is steady and so I write

Overcast all yesterday

It steered my path, my morning way

And so I wandered toward Six Mile

And walked along its wooden aisle

I walked above the forest floor

Seeking vision's hidden door

Inside the emerald dimness glows

Slowly I go, contentment grows

Cypress, maple, reedy pools

Vines and tangles, green chaos rules

As I move through private glens

The fronds and ferns entice my lens

The swamp is deep in dark and light

Green and brown is black and white

© 2012 Buck Ward        The Photographist       www.buxpix.net

Tornado Warning

Sanibel Police Department Press Release, 1:45 am:

“At approximately 12:45 am, Saturday, June 9, 2012 a Tornado Warning was issued for western Lee County.  The City of Sanibel activated the reverse 9-1-1 Emergency Notification System.  The Sanibel Police Department called homes from the Gulf Pines Subdivision to the western terminus of the Island.  The message advised all residents to take immediate steps in the event of an actual tornado.  As of 1:25 am the entire Island is under a severe storm warning and persons should take proper precautions.”

Without having to be notified, we knew about the weather because the thunder and heavy downpour had awakened us.  As I lay in bed drifting back to sleep, I looked forward to the morning, thinking about where I would go.  Storms make good skies.  Sometimes.

The beach was deserted when I arrived.   I had it all to myself.  Through scudding clouds, the third quarter moon cast my shadow on the shelly sand.  The sky was beginning to lighten in the east as I caught the lighthouse in a three minute exposure.

Later, with the sun trying to squint through cracks in the clouds, it took four seconds to convince the camera the sand was white, allowing it to see the double blink of the lighthouse's lantern under the dark sky.

As the sky gradually dissolved into overcast, I saw an osprey on its perch. Some photographers might pull out the long telephoto lens, but in this dull light the photos would be lifeless.  I chose my trusty wide-angle zoom.  I managed to position myself awkwardly in a buttonwood on the edge of the surf and waited.  I hoped the fish hawk's mate would come by.  I wanted to get the gnarled branches with both ospreys in nice open-wing poses.  Norah Jones sang in my ear buds, "Don't know why I didn't come."  I waited.  After a while, the other osprey paid us a visit and the pair rewarded my patience.  Glad I didn't share Norah's lament.

© 2012 Buck Ward        The Photographist       www.buxpix.net