The End of Summer...

The second official day of autumn and I couldn't sleep, not ready for summer to end. In a futile attempt to hold it back, I share the above haiku/photograph combination, which is actually a late summer haiku, according to haiku master and friend Bill Higginson, who is responsible for the original translation of the Japanese poem as part of the Butterfly Dreams project.
The truth is, all things end. All we can do is hope for spring.

Butterfly House Photography:Tips and Techniques

Well, that last one worked so well, I thought I'd try it again.
Click on the title above to go to a pdf:

Enjoy!!

and thanks to Jeanine Leech (http://www.doubleplaydesigns.com/) for layout assistance!

Thought I would try something a bit different this time. Click on the link

Photography on the Peruvian Amazon

to go to a pdf about my favorite photographic place. Please let me know if it works.
Thanks.

End of...the Season

our garden,

long past prime...

bleeding hearts

Grasshopper--a Haiku Photograph

I don’t think of my photographs as being “minimalist” necessarily, but I can’t deny that I look for simplicity. Two of my earliest influences were Japanese ink block artists Hiroshige and Hokusai.

What I learned:

• Not every square millimeter of image space needs to be filled.

• Space that contains nothing may make a significant contribution to the impact of the image; it sets off the subject as a beautiful setting sets off a diamond. It gives the subject a space to move into, thus aiding in establishing a story— establishing potential for future movement.

• Negative space is not the same as empty space. Empty space is merely empty space--it contains nothing, contributes nothing. Negative space has no content but offers possibility, and contains potential.
  

Back to haiku:
While my son Ben was living in Washington D.C., we went to an exposition of prints by Hokusai at the Smithsonian. I recall an image which showed a meticulously drawn branch, leaves, and flowers, but nowhere to be seen were the birds after which the painting was named. Perhaps the birds were sitting on the branch when he began the painting; perhaps he could simply hear their songs as he was painting; perhaps he simply imagined that branch as an ideal roosting place for the birds; perhaps…
See what I mean? Haiku photographs are all about possibilities.

Color Problems: Part 3

I then take a second exposure, using values that bring the red histogram back within reasonable range. I say reasonable because there may be spikes of red and yellow which are simply NOT capture-able (is that a word?) by your sensor. This looks like a pretty under-exposed image on the LCD, but I take it anyway.

When both images are opened in Camera Raw (or whatever software you use), there is visible detail in the darker one within the areas of red that were blown out on the original exposure. When I blend those two together, I have one image which maintains detail throughout.

Color Problems: Part 2

So here is the original image. Again, the luminance histogram (the black-and-white one) tells me that the exposure is just fine. Experience tells me, however, that red is n easy color to overexpose, and I check the RGB histogram. Imagine my (lack of) surprise when it shows me that the red channel is way blown out!

I take my first exposure based on the luminance histogram, and you can see above the areas of red next to and in front of the Japanese beetle that have no detail whatsoever.

Color Problems: Part 1

Yes, I know it's not a bug, but I will use it anyway to illustrate a point that I stumbled over recently while photographing birds with Matthew Studebaker, who is a superb workshop leader and an encyclopedia of avian knowledge.

The luminance (black-and-white) histogram for this bird read just fine in the field, with no obvious burnt-out highlights. Imagine my surprise when I opened the image in Camera Raw and found that there was a color highlight burnt out to the point where it was not even retrievable! The yellow on this bird's chest and throat contains NO detail. I could not even use my trick of bringing over two images and blending them--even grossly underexposed, sorry, NO detail in the yellow. Ray Klass, Photoshop Guru extraordinaire, showed me an another technique, an old printer's trick called "plate blending", which has to do with bringing detail from one channel back into the original image. The problem is that there has to be detail in one channel to begin with. In this image there was none. A potentially interesting shot, but unusable.

This image awakened me to the purpose of the RGB histogram which Nikon has so kindly included in most of their newer cameras.

Crab Spider on Datura

Two items of interest here. One is the neat way that the spider's arm recapitulates the curve of the datura's petal. This is pure serendipity--you can move some insects around to pose them--the arachnids generally are not amenable to that type of manipulation and will usually head underneath the flower.

The second issue is the white flower. For hairy insects (yes, I know--a spider is not an insect), I like to use fill flash to help the little hairs stand out a bit more. It is very easy to over-expose whites, and I rely heavily on my histogram to prevent this. With whites, the luminance histogram (black and white) is quite adequate. With colors, particularly reds and yellows, the luminance histogram may not tell the entire story, as we will see in the next post.

Another Dragonfly...

Yes, another dragonfly picture. I like this one a bit better than the first I posted. This has a softer entry into the frame--the triangle of grasses doesn't come in quite as abruptly from the lower edge, allowing the insect to float upwards. The stem on which the dragonfly is perched is angled in the opposite direction as the grass stems in the background, lending a bit of tension to the image. And I like how the two dewy strands of spiderweb recapitulate the dewy whiteness of the wingtips.
What I don't like--I wish I had used a shallower depth-of-field, so the background grasses would be just a bit less distinct and distracting. Often a change from f8 to f5.6 will be enough to give you a softer background. Of course, I know that in theory--I just wish I had thought of it in the field. This would be difficult to blur in Photoshop because of all the interacting lines, some foreground or subject, some background.