Close to Home 4
May 10, 2020
The ponds in my community continue to fascinate me. You’ll probably see a lot of them before our lockdown is lifted. I’ll also keep checking out our groundskeeping area.
May 12, 2020 Update
Last night Robert Rodriguez critiqued the first photo on his Creative Critique-Live #6 event. If you want to see what he said about it and did to it, fast forward to 20:55 on the YouTube video. The whole video may be of interest to you other photographers who read this blog.
1 These feral apple trees were flowering at Green Pond.
2 A friend said this photograph made her think of a moon gate.
3 I was aiming for the ripples in the middle distance as they were lit by the sun setting over Meadow Pond, but the ripple in the foreground was an unanticipated gift.
4 My resident botanist tells me that many young leaves make their appearance as pink or red rather than green. The advantage is that light is less able to penetrate the tender young tissues until they have matured, by which time they will have developed their chlorophyll and turn green. There may be even more to it. I found the following on a web page of Northern Woodlands, a quarterly magazine published by the Center for Northern Woodlands Education, a nonprofit in Lyme, New Hampshire:
Scientists studying the physiology of fall foliage have suggested that the anthocyanins responsible for red color in leaves—in fall or spring—may help them withstand cold and screen them from damaging ultraviolet rays, air pollution, and various other assaults. This may not seem all that clever in an autumn leaf that’s about to drop, but in a spring leaf just getting started on a full growing season, it’s a brilliant strategy—especially considering all that could go wrong for a young leaf.
5 There’s one in every crowd, right? (And no, these wheelbarrows are not waiting to turn green.)
6 I also found a collection of traffic cones for my collection of traffic cones in our groundskeeping area.
7 The sun begins to set on Green Pond. The flowering tree in the background is the same tree seen in the foregound of the first photograph, taken in the morning a few days earlier.
Romancing Reality 
I go for the Moongate!.. 🙂
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May 10, 2020 at 6:35 AM
Glad you like it, Harrie. Thanks.
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May 10, 2020 at 11:13 AM
It’s interesting to learn about the conjecture that red in developing leaves corresponds to protection afforded by anthocyanin.
That’s a funny comment about the wheelbarrows not waiting to turn green. Now I wish they would, just to surprise you.
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May 10, 2020 at 8:11 AM
You made me laugh, Steve. Hasn’t happened yet, though. I visited them this morning.
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May 10, 2020 at 11:17 AM
Your posts are always so science-y as well as lovely! And this one with some wheelbarrow humor! Love it.
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May 10, 2020 at 9:18 AM
Thank you, Clare. Your phrase “wheelbarrow humor” sent me Googling. Turns out there is a lot of it: https://upjoke.com/wheelbarrow-jokes.
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May 10, 2020 at 11:24 AM
The moon gate is beautiful but what’s more beautiful than a traffic cone?
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May 10, 2020 at 11:29 AM
Beats me, Ken. Thanks.
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May 10, 2020 at 12:03 PM
Love 1 and, especially, 4 – 4 is really something! 🙂
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May 11, 2020 at 3:19 AM
Thank you, Adrian. About #4: I was photographing the lily pads under cloudy skies when suddenly the sun broke through. What a treat!
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May 11, 2020 at 9:18 AM
Adrian, you may be interested in the update I gave this post. See way above.
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May 12, 2020 at 9:08 PM
I see the moon gate in #2 – that’s one beautiful image – I love it! The ripples you point out in #3 are lovely, as is the whole. #4 is another stunning image – poetic and beautiful. The botanical information is new to me, and very interesting – I’m glad you included that. The wheelbarrows and cones are always enjoyable. Lovely atmosphere in the last image.
And the first image – you were courageous to include the link. I didn’t know about these critiques. It’s a very good idea, IMHO, to begin by showing paintings the way he did, then refer back to them to illustrate the principles of what he’s doing. He’s good and his low-key, almost soft approach appeals to me. That being said, I thought the first image he critiqued was better the way it was submitted. I get what he’s doing but prefer the original, with less contrast. On the other hand, I thought the additions to the beach photo were just what it needed. I agreed with what he said about the trees in the foreground of your photo, and darkening the left side a little seemed to be a good idea. I’m not sure I like it better as a black and white. Overall, it feels like the foreground is fighting with the background for attention. My eye wants to linger in the background, with the curves and soft colors. It’s interesting to see how extensively he uses the adjustment brush, including varying the flow and density. I’ve been using the adj. brush (and the other tools like it) more than I used to, but I never remember to vary the flow or density. (Will I remember now? 50% chance!).
Maybe I’ll try submitting an image to one of these critiques! Thank you for introducing it and kudos to you again for sticking your neck out. 🙂
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May 15, 2020 at 4:30 PM
Ha. This time I landed in the right place. 🙂 Wow. A class reunion in a reformatory. That must have been quite the class. 🙂 I hope this doesn’t say too much about me, but I love the bacteria film image. Of course if it does then I guess I am in good company with the photographer who made it. Oh boy. Now I am again in a different post. I’ll quit while not too far gone. I hope you are laughing at me too, Linda. 🙂
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May 27, 2020 at 2:57 PM
I watched his critique of your image and think he made some good suggestions. I’ve watched his videos before, both his own and those he did for B&H.
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May 27, 2020 at 3:07 PM
He did. Gotta watch that aperture setting. Actually, I need to bracket more, because I thought I knew what I was doing with that exposure, but obviously I didn’t. That might have been more apparent on download with more settings to chose from.
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May 27, 2020 at 3:16 PM
When we are shooting it is very easy to lose ourselves in the subject and miss the edges of our frame. A good starting point for focus, if you don’t already know this, is to turn your focusing ring to infinity and then come back to the line just before it for reasonable good close to distant dof. Just a starting point but often that is enough. If you already do that and I was being presumptuous I apologize. 🙂
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May 27, 2020 at 4:01 PM
No, Steve, I don’t do that. I’ll have to try it. I do have an unlabeled button on the front of the camera that will stop down the lens to show me what is in focus. I sometimes think to use it. In the case of this photograph, though, I was just thinking wrong. I thought I wanted only the closer apple blossoms to be in focus. That’s what I got, but it’s not what I should have wanted. In any case, you are not being presumptuous—even if I were already doing what you suggest.
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May 27, 2020 at 4:15 PM
I am glad that was a usefu suggestion, Linda. Another thing to try is focusing 1/3 into the frame as a rule of thumb. The focus preview button is a big help especially if you have LiveView on your camera and can magnify the image and float around to different parts to check. I’ll stop now. 🙂
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May 27, 2020 at 4:19 PM
I used to focus 1/3 of the way in when I used a film camera. Then I read that with digital cameras, it should be 1/2. Maybe I’ve been following the wrong advice. I do have live view, but since I almost never use a tripod (that’s probably heresy to you), live view would be awkward. At least I think it would. Still, I can see enlargements of what I’ve shot. (I use a Nikon 600.) In this case I would have thought (if I had looked at the enlargement) that that was what I wanted. But it wasn’t. I will just have to be more thoughtful and careful.
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May 27, 2020 at 4:36 PM
I can say that just about 100% of my shots are on a tripod. I’ve always done that and now that I am older my hands are pretty shaky so it isn’t often I am in a situation where I can be steady…aside from using my phone. We do get excited and forget to check some things. You have to make mistakes to learn. It just takes time and patience. Your abstracts are awesome.
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May 27, 2020 at 6:00 PM
Yeah, I don’t even try, unless I can lean on something, to shoot slower than 1/40 of a second—with vibration reduction. I think I used to shoot at 1/25 without. Totally off topic: Do you know whether it would corrupt a new external hard drive if I cloned to it corrupted image files from the old drive? (I’m sure the corrupted files would still be corrupted.)
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May 28, 2020 at 3:08 PM
No, I don’t know about that. Have you tried recovering those files? If you have and they are still corrupted my first instinct though would be to delete the files first just to be on the safe side. If they are unrecoverable then there is no point to hanging on to them other than the hope that some future software might be able to. Did you back them up anywhere else?
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May 28, 2020 at 3:46 PM
Well, no, I’m not laughing, because something is obviously wrong. But I see you have sent two more messages. Peeking at them, I see you finally were put into the correct post. Whew!
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May 27, 2020 at 3:07 PM