Blooming Highlights

The rush of migrating birds has ended, and it's time to catch up with the highlights of the spring wildflower blooms. I find myself pulled between the elusive birds and ephemeral blooms.  Here is the best of the spring blooms.

At the entrance to Cornell Plantation's Mundy Wildflower Garden, I found Celandine Poppies and Virginia Bluebells in wonderful colors.  I had to get very low on the ground to get this view.

Nearby was one of my favorites each year, May Apple. Another chance to lie on the ground.

The Trillium grandiflorum were a bit higher and less difficult to photograph.  They are always grand.

An easily overlooked wildflower is the Wild Geranium (Geranium maculatum).  Oddly, the garden geraniums we plant in our gardens are not members of the Geranium genum.   The Wild Geraniums are so prolific that the deer must not be eating them.  Hope it stays that way!

Now, all of these are fairly common, and while beautiful, they do not excite the passions like a wild orchid. These Pink Lady's Slippers were in a cluster of 185 plants that I visited for the first time this spring.

That is an extraordinary cluster of blooms.  I also like to portray the charming arrangements that the blooms sometime present.  This one is, for me, a portrait, .....perhaps of two sisters?

 

So, those are my highlights of spring.  In only a week or maybe two, the later blooming orchids will appear, and I'll get excited once again.  The one difference is that I will have to endure the mosquitoes that frequent the bogs and fens in June.

You can understand how I am torn between choosing blooms or birds on any given day.

Kind regards,

Paul

Sometimes a simple camera will do..

I am excited at the prospect of a full class tomorrow for my first workshop on smart phone photography. Preparing for the class has really advanced my understanding and skill with this minimal camera.  I am at times amazed at what this iPhone4 will produce and only hope I can inspire others to explore their possibilities with the smart phone camera.

So, in finalizing the material this morning, I needed a few more photos and did not have time to go further than my backyard.  I chanced upon a very bold Tiger Swallowtail butterfly on the coneflowers. With some editing on the computer, I achieved two reasonable image of one of my favorite butterflies. I was only about 5 to 6 inches from the subject!

The nectar must have been powerfully sweet to overcome the butterfly's aversion to people.

I only hope that I can cover 16 people when we are in the herb garden at Cornell Plantations.

Regards,

Paul Schmitt

Birds and Blooms

True to my blog's name, today was birds and blooms, just in reverse order. Began the day at Cornell Plantation's Mundy Wildflower garden with another skilled photographer.  It's always enlightening to see how two photographers can stand next to one another and end up with widely different and equally interesting photos. It is an excellent way to increase your creativity.

The Wild Geraniums instantly got my interest.  Just love their color and simple form.

While the garden is devoted to native plants, it is virtually impossible to keep non-native plants out.  Think of how impossible it is to banish dandelions for your garden or lawn. 

So, the garden also has masses of lovely pink and purple Dame's Rocket. Now, this plant is widely called Phlox, but it is not.  Phlox has the same colors, but it has five petals.  This has four. I am sure the small bee on the flower doesn't care what the name is. End of botany lesson.

I have Dame's Rocket around my yard, and while I do pull it, I've accepted that it will not be defeated.  I accept it in small numbers because the colors are appreciated and it would be too much work to do otherwise. It is a truce.

And, as I continued in the garden, the Dame's Rocket provided a nice framing to some Cow Parsnip that just began to bloom. Cow Parsnip is a sort of coarse and ungainly plant. The bees love it.

Usually, Cow Parsnip grows in large, ungainly masses that make it difficult to photograph in such a way that a single plant's form is clearly seen. So, I liked this combination of Cow Parsnip and Dame's Rocket.

As I continued, I found another plant just beginning to bloom, and it is one of my favorites, Blue Flag.

By this time, I was growing hungry, my companion had to go, and the wind was making it nearly impossible to photograph flowers and get sharp images. Time to grab a Subway and eat while I observed a nearby  Redtail Hawk nest.  Arrived to find one adult perched nearby.  At first, it flew from a perch behind where I stand on the bridge and went to a perch directly above the nest, and then into the nest. The two chicks were dozing. It soon left the nest.

It returned to the perch behind me where I could see it was watching something in the wooded area.  It flew into the woods, but returned to the perch with no prey. It was likely a squirrel or chipmunk.

What happened next was pretty exciting as the bird launched from the tree and flew nearly directly overhead on its way to the nest.

After some time, one chick must have rung the dinner bell and the adult hawk responded.  She pulled a grey squirrel up from inside the nest and began to deliver bits of food.  The other chick in the back watched but did not join in, eventually going off to sleep.

I figured the action was over for awhile since sleep usually follows food. Time to head home and start the long process of downloading and editing. 

All in all, a pretty good day of birds and blooms.

Paul
 

iPhone photos- Can they be creative?

When a leaky zip lock bag proved to be the undoing of my cell phone in August 2011, I made the leap from a very basic cell phone to an iPhone.  I was wading in a river with my camera on an inner tube float and my cell safely protected by a zip lock bag, or so I thought. It got very wet.  So, I went from saying "it is just a phone" to saying it was my link for checking weather radar and getting birder updates on where to find the best birding. I had not included the camera in the iPhone as part of my decision.  That would change.

The change in my opinion began one afternoon when I was wandering through the herb garden at Cornell Plantations. The light was good, and I had been lazy.  My DSLR was not with me.  I decided to "play" with the iPhone camera just as when I experimented with a Holga toy camera. It had a single element, uncoated plastic lens. There were  two aperture settings, one shutter speed and no meter.  Basic.  Very basic.

Now, the iPhone is a bit like the Holga  too.  There is one aperture, f/2.8.  Since the lens is very wide angle, there is a large depth of field.  Correct exposure is dependent on the automatic metering to set shutter speed.  This makes for a good test of the photographer's basic skill set and understanding of wide angle photography.

My first images surprised me.  Was this capable of more than snapshots?  I immediately saw the first challenge, namely holding the iPhone so my fingers did not get into the image.  In addition, I was so close to the subject that it was easy to shade the subjects.   Those are good basic skills to keep in mind.

A next question to me was about the wider landscape image.  Could I use the wide angle to show a perspective of flower beds and their surroundings? 

I found the size of the iPhone made it easy to hold it in unusual positions and see the result on the image screen.

This image would have been better if I had a short stool to stand on, but I loved the color, and the instant review of the photo. The colors were looking pretty good too. This  image was at 1/125 second and ISO 100, naturally at f/2.8.  The previous image was at 1/120 second, ISO 80. I was surprised that the sensor ISO speed went down to 80.


So, I went looking for some more images.  If you are photographer, you know how a few good images inspires a burst of creativity with no apparent sense of time passing.

 The images kept coming as I awakened to the possibility of a creative camera that is so small and as ever present as a cell phone.

Parallel to this discovery was the delight I felt when I could pull the image I just made into a photo editing application, and make some simple adjustments.  If you can remember shooting a roll of slide film, mailing it to a processor and waiting for the return mail some week later, then this is revolutionary beyond the initial digital revolution when you could download a memory card to your computer the same day and edit.  Now you can do edit and email it to someone within minutes, and it can be a  pretty good image.


Here is a good example of how the iPhone can capture an unexpected creative image. We were visiting our daughter in Washington, DC this autumn and with some unexpected time, headed across the Mall to see the new monument to Martin Luther King Jr.

 In the interest of  honesty, this is a digital composite. The sky was a dull and uniform grey, so the sky  is added.  My point is that I was able to capture the critical image data and create an artistic and reasonable image to express the feelings I had at this sculpture.



Just this past week, I was feeling cabin fever after a day of pouring rain, and went in search of images with both my iPhone and Canon G9 point and shoot.  I wanted to compare the two cameras critically.

I think this is a pretty good image.  It was made with the camera very low to the pavement in order to correctly position the reflections. Which camera would you expect to have created this landscape image?







So, after deciding on the   source of the landscape image, decide which camera likely made the portrait image at that follows. It is in the same light.

Well, the first image is from the iPhone.  The tipping of the Corning clock tower and the bank building suggest a wide angle shot with the lens tipped upward. This causes keystoning.  The second image uses a longer focal length to limit the portion of the scene in the image.  There is less keystoning. The colors are pretty good in both with a slight edge on my screen to the G9, a very slight edge.

I asked the question whether the iPhone is capable of creative photograph, and I think the answer is a qualified yes.  It works where wide angle distortions are not a problem.    (Note that the  one common complaint is that people's faces are distorted to look bloated and warped. That is to be expected from a wide angle lens.) I do think it is important to get close to a foreground element that can fill the image.  Objects in the distance become very small and are lost to the viewer.

The simple truth is that the camera you have with you is better than the one you left at home.  Another lesson is that a simple camera can yield creative results if you have learned how to use it to its potential.  The iPhone camera is fully capable of creative images within its limits, and it is fun.

I have begun a gallery of iPhonography in my website and hope you will visit it at:

Natural World Photography by Paul Schmitt



Here is my final image from when I was leaving clock tower area.  Can you tell what it is?


Paul Schmitt