Greenway sections still closed, but...

...an alternative path through the woods let people access some parts of the grounds.  Ziva kept an eye on some boys playing in one of "her" puddles.

We took a look, from a safe distance, at some of the heavy work going on.

The closure kept us from covering any meaningful distance, but I didn't want it to stop me from at least one stab at a nature photo, so I found a spot along the river.

I like to shoot into the light (contrejour sounds fancier), though having the sun in the picture can be a problem unless there are some handy tree branches to mute things a little.  It's not the Grand Canyon or El Capitan, but working on mundane local surroundings like this is something I find rewarding.

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Warm, Sunny, Icy

Sunday's afternoon weather forecast: sunny with a few clouds, high temp 64ºF, ice on the surface of stagnant or slow moving water. That last part actually wasn't in the cards, as far as I knew. It was a great time for a walk on the Raleigh Greenway, and my wife and I set out to cover some ground for the exercise. I wanted to keep up, so I didn't burden myself with any camera other than the ever-present iPhone. About 2 1/2 miles from our home, we passed this scene. A section of the path is being prepared for paving. This may have partially blocked a small feeder stream (probably strengthened by drainage from construction up the hill) which now widens into a swampy area on its way down to Crabtree Creek.

I liked the patterns in the ice and water, backlit by the sun, which you can see reflected in the foreground. I wished for a camera with more control and quality available, but you use what you have. Not too shabby for a cell phone camera that's two generations out of date. We "serious" photographers - said with a smile! - update our DSLRs more frequently than our cell phones.

A slightly different view. It's difficult to frame an image on the screen of a phone with bright sunlight in front of your face, wearing darkened photosensitive eyeglasses, hanging on the side of a half-dead tree.

[iPhone4]

Permalink: http://jilcp.blogspot.com/2014/02/warm-sunny-icy.html

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When a miss leads to a new shot

Today I got home with a load of groceries and spotted a beautiful shaft of sunlight on the top of a small Japanese maple with a particularly nice arrangement of leaves. Unfortunately, when I put away the perishables and ran back out with a camera, the sun had already dropped too low for the effect that initially caught my eye.

Rather than give up, I looked around me to see if anything else turned up. At first I was disappointed, but after awhile I found a perspective that was lit to advantage. It even had a bit of foreground/middle-ground/background separation, so it could qualify as a landscape!

Looking upward for more light, I found this:

Next I moved to a different grouping of foliage and played with this avi-morphic leaf. I spot metered the sunlit subject and allowed the background to go very dark.

The next photo is the one that I think I'll be glad I was able to get. Composing with a fixed focal length lens, there were some constraints on what I could get into my field of view. (I was using a 135 mm f/2 specifically for the wide aperture and potential for separation between subject and background.) Of course I could crop out a distraction afterward, but couldn't add to the width of coverage. I liked having the little bit of of a second leaf appearing in the corner, and tried to include just enough of it for clarity, but little enough to leave a kind of sense of mystery. That may sound like an overblown interpretation, but it was the kind of thing that was flitting through my head as I worked.

I did expand my view a bit by lying on my back on the ground. That enabled this composition of lacy lines.

As I finished up and headed inside, this leaf jumped out at me from the ivy, so this time I grabbed it before the light changed.

Permalink: http://jilcp.blogspot.com/2012/11/when-miss-leads-to-new-shot.html

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Fungal Fun Park

Some rain the day before we left on a whirlwind trip to the mountains (Boone, NC) resulted in the sudden sprouting that evening of a cluster of mushrooms. It looked like a mushroom amusement park. I knew it wouldn't last, so I set up a light at midnight and lay down on the damp ground to try a few photos. Here are some of the results. I love the way sharply angled light brings out form and texture. Maybe not quite close enough to back lighting to be called contre-jour, but whatever it should be called, lighting from a bit behind the side is fun!

The heads of the fungi were thumbnail-sized (well, the thumb of a rather large hand).

Permalink: http://jilcp.blogspot.com/2012/08/fungal-fun-park.html
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