Short Leash Photography

Regulator Time

I am now nearly 4 weeks out from my total hip replacement and I am doing well. Although my steps are still slow and careful, I’m generally walking without a cane.  I’m far from ready to tackle rough, uneven trails or to bound between rocks at coast, but I have come a long way in a relatively short period of time. The first couple of weeks were a struggle, certainly because of the limitations and discomfort but also because my camera sat neglected on the desk.  

I had planned the surgery for June to take advantage of the good weather as I started my therapeutic walks, but it also meant that I was missing some lovely opportunities to shoot in the burgeoning summer.  I sat gazing in frustration through the window of my post-operative cell at the wonderful pictures of Lupines in Sugar Hill, surf and sunsets on the coast, and the spectacular summer Milky Way.  The experience proved that I am a pixel addict and, even though I was generally tied to the house and grounds, I had to find things to shoot. Short Leash Photography became my unavoidable project.

In House Macro

My early walking was largely restricted to laps around the house and through mind numbing repetition I began to notice some interesting subjects for indoor macro photography. I initially could only manage the camera, but then realized that I could use my tripod as a cane. Among my subjects were various architectural details, Susan’s jewelry, and close-ups of the portrait of Captain Rodolf Bowles Sargent.

Captain Sargent

 Captain Sargent commanded schooners out of Maine in the 1800s. He is only an “acquired relative”, but he has looked over my family and I for nearly 50 years and, given all that he has seen, I feel justified in adding him to the family tree. The story of his acquisition is complicated but legal, involving alcohol, a desperate housewife and a rescue from near destruction. Remind me to tell you full story sometime. 

Gourd from the Galapagos Islands

Around the House & Gardens

By the second week I was beginning to get outside, mostly just around the house, but also for some short hobbling walks around the neighborhood. It was refreshing to start looking at some living things, and I was able to use my modified monopod as a walking stick. I shot mostly with my Macro Lens, capturing flowers from our garden and those through the neighborhood. Carrying the camera threw off my balance a bit but it was worth the extra concentration to feed my pixel deficiency. 

 

Visitors

Phil

It was great to have visitors during my period of confinement, but one can only answer the “How are you doing?” question so many times. I did have a daily supply of sympathy from the guys who were busy scraping and painting our house. It is always enjoyable to watch other people do work around the house.

 






I especially appreciated my nonhuman visitors who seemed to have no concern about “how I was doing”.  Every year the barn swallows return to nest in our barn, typically right over my car, enthusiastically anointing the hood. This year however they chose our front porch, a location that was more convenient to photograph and much easier to clean. By the time we became aware of the new location the five chicks were crowding the nest and ready to take wing. 

 

This has been a good spring for white tail deer and I was able to catch one industriously feasting on last year’s drops in our orchard. I think the guy sensed from my cane and limp that I was not a threat for a sudden attack and I was able to approach reasonably closely.

Updating

One early frustration of my recovery was the inability to sit for any period of time. Even when I could start some limited shooting I wasn’t able to comfortably upload and edit my images. Even 20-30 minutes of sitting left me stiff and needing to get up and limp around the house. I’m doing much better now, but I still use my Fit-Bit to remind me to stretch every hour. As I mentioned previously, I used this time to update the software on my computer. Window 10, Photoshop CC 2015.5 (Why isn’t it 2016?), Lightroom CC, Microsoft Office 365, all got refreshed, along with a bunch of images dumped into the cloud. I love that “New Software Smell”! 

Abby & Grayson at the Waterhouse

Family

It is especially great when family decides to visit. Although they seem less excited to be photographed and more inclined to yell at me to get up and walk. It was wonderful to get Abby and Grayson up for the holiday and I managed to get out for diner at the Waterhouse Restaurant  in Peterborough and then Driving Miss Daisy at the Peterborough Players.  Hopefully in a few months I will be able to join them on hikes in our beautiful forests.

Escape

I should mention one more accomplishment on my way to recovery.  I have always had difficulty writing my blogs around the house. It must be all the various distractions and I have found that I do much better when I get away to my favorite writing spots around downtown Keene. I’m happy to report that, now that I am driving, this article was mostly written sitting outside Brewbakers Café. I’ll pay for it when I stand up, but in the meantime, I’m Free!

Jeffrey Newcomer
partridgebrookreflections.com
603-363-8338

Working With the Light (Part 1)

Glorious "Context" - Nubble Light at Dawn

I'm beginning to panic. This fall I'm scheduled to teach a class on digital photography for our local community education program and I have to get serious about putting together the materials. I have done plenty of talks for regional groups including camera clubs, Rotaries, Audubon Societies, and retired teacher groups, but I've never tried to assemble a reasonably coherent curriculum. Over the last year I have written several blogs about the basics of photography with the idea of covering topics that I could use in an introductory photography course, but now I have to get focused on putting it all together.My biggest worry is that I have no way of gauging the knowledge and experience of those who will sign up for the classes. I tried to aim my course description toward folks with an interest in learning about controlling exposure, focus and composition in landscape photography, but I could end up with some who are only interested in using their cell phones to take snapshots of their lunch. Its a crap-shoot, but I plan to combine classroom discussion with photo shoots and critique, it should be fun.

This week's blog is intended as another prep for the course. I plan to talk about how to approach a photographic situation and the first step is to recognize the quality of the light. Each type of light provides its own challenges and opportunities and working within those bounds can result in great images in any situation. So lets briefly consider a few kinds of light.

 Also check out Part 2 of "Working with the Light" discussing some of my favorite "lights", overcast, fog, mist and extremes of weather

Golden Hour : Sunrise Sunset

One Gull Short of Pretty, but BORING?

I begin with what many photographers consider the gold standard of light, the "Golden Hour". The light around sunset and sunrise shines in beautiful warm hues of red, yellow, orange and gold. It may seem almost impossible to take a bad picture, all you have to do is snap a glowing sunset and the likes and favorites come rolling in to Facebook. The problem is that all that golden light can make you lazy. The same rules of composition and context apply and, to me, without those elements a sunset can be just a boring splash of color smeared across the frame. 


Context
 As is true in all landscape photography, the key is context and interest. When facing a spectacular morning or evening sky your first thoughts should be devoted to finding interesting stuff to put in front of all that color. Look for interesting foregrounds, reflections and framing to provide a sense of place and story. It is also helpful to show some detail in the silhouetted shadows. Expose to the right or consider a multiple image HDR rendering. Remember to keep the horizon line straight and away from the DEADLY, dead center of the image. It all comes down to the difference between a snapshot of some color and an image that allows the viewer to lean against that tree and fully experience the glorious moment. But there is much more to the golden hour than a crimson sky.

Framing

 


Turn Your Back On the Sun
Even mundane subjects can come alive when illuminated by the warm light of the golden hours. Don't forget to turn your back on that brilliant disc and  take advantage of the soft glow which often contrasts beautifully with the deepening blue of the evening sky.




 





The Blue Hour
  

 Unfortunately, many photographers arrive just at sunrise or retreat right after the sun dips below the horizon. The golden hour is lovely, but often the best light comes in the few minutes just before sunrise and after sunset. The "blue hour" is a great time to capture soft images without the harsh contrasts created by the unfiltered sun. 

Blue Hour Lights

It is also one of the best times for night photography. A little light in the sky allows foreground detail to shine through and the blue sky is the best background for evening lights and the rising moon. The difference in feel between blue and golden hours could not to more striking and it is what makes sunrise and sunset such a rich time for a broad range of images.









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Bright Sunlight -  The Lead Hours

Stop Whining and Start Shooting!
After reveling in the glorious Golden Hours it is time to go from best to worst. Bright midday sun is universally considered the worst condition for landscape photography. Unfiltered overhead light creates harsh shadows, with impossibly stark contrasts and the rich colors of flowers and foliage are obscured by brilliant reflections. Perhaps the best approach is to take a nap until the sun begins to set. After all you did get up at 3AM to catch that heroic sunrise, but if you can stay awake, all is not lost.

A Beautiful Sunny Day
Midday sun is unquestionably the most challenging light, but non-photographers are always saying, "What a beautiful sunny day. You must have gotten some great pictures." We want to laugh, but there must be something these unschooled rubes are seeing that we smug photographers are missing. The truth is that the beauty is there, but the problem is in the limitations of our photographic tools to capture it.

Taming the Contrast
 Bright sunlight produces harsh contrasts that were impossible to capture with the narrow dynamic range of convention film photography. Without the use of supplemental illumination such as reflectors or fill flash, the decision always had to be made between recording the highlights or the shadows, but things have changed with digital photography. The dynamic range of digital sensors is improving, but they still struggle with high contrast. The difference is in the ability to bring a precisely exposed images into powerful software which, almost miraculously, can protect highlights while salvaging detail in the shadows, and the blending of variably exposed images and the use of sophisticated HDR software has further expanded our ability to record the midday light. To me the greatest attraction of bright sunny illumination is the cool shade that it inescapably creates and now our images can languish under the tress without being oppressed by a surrounding curtain of blown out highlights.

There Must Be Sun for Shade

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is the contrasts between light and dark that give "bright sunny days" their special attraction.  Our job as photographers is to stop whining about the "terrible light" and start finding ways to push beyond the limitations of our medium, and capture the midday glory thiat is so apparent to everyone else.











 



Filling the Shadows

A Touch Of Fill Flash

For Portrait or Macro photography, shadows can be illuminated with light from a reflectors or fill flash. Happily color balance with artificial flash is not a challenge since the strobes are generally set to match sunlight. The key to reflectors is to go big and close. The larger and closer to the subject the more the light will wrap around and appear soft. I have a couple of reflector disks of different sizes but the light bouncing off the large brightly lite wall can work as well. The advantage of a wall is you don't have to struggle with with folding it up after you're done.



Taming the Reflections
The rich colors of flowers and foliage are blunted or obscured by the reflection created by unfiltered sunshine, and sadly there is no perfect solution within current editing software. Midday is not the best time to capture macro images of flowers or the full glory of an autumn hillside, but, if you must, there are a couple of techniques that can help.


Polarizers 

Given the right angle of the sun a polarizing filter can cut deeply into reflections and unveil the underlying color. Direct sunlight reflecting off most surfaces becomes polarized to a specific angle which can be filtered by rotating the polarizing filter to block that angle. 

Colors Revealed

The degree to which a polarizer can filter out the glare is related to the direction of the light, being most effective when it is at 90 degrees to the subject. On the other hand, when the light comes directly from in front of the subject the effect is essentially nonexistent. Polarizers are often used on sunny days to darken the blue sky and highlight the clouds, but its real magic comes from its ability to penetrate the glare and when the light is right colors can explode in your images.






 

Shade

Tulip Tree Flower in the Shade

The other approach to both reflections and high contrast is to retreat to the shade. Shielded from the sun's glare, the sky acts like a gigantic soft box which can wrap light around your macro images and portraits. 

Full Shade

With the mix of light from the blue sky and the green of trans-illuminated foliage, color balance can be a challenge, but when shooting in RAW the color balance can be finely tuned. The sun can also be filtered or blocked with the use of a diffuser or your own shadow. Once again, the key is to get the diffuser as close as possible to the subject and to watch for distracting hot spots of bright light around the edges.








Trans-Illumination - Glory in the Brilliance
 

When all else fails, the bright sunlight can be used as a source of trans-illumination. Even the dullest foliage flowers come alive when strongly lite from behind and the back-light can create a shimmering rim light around the edges.

YUK

Yesterday, I stopped by Madame Sherri's Castle in Chesterfield to explore my old favorite in the "miserable" brilliant midday light.  The direct view was predictably horrible. but then I circled around to the back.  The light was lovely as it illuminated the insides of the arches with a golden glow and the thick summer foliage came alive with the shimmering back-lighting.  180 degrees and I found a treasure.  The secret is not to give up on the light and adapt to what nature provides.

The Arches revealed

So the next time we are plagued with bright midday sun, avoid the nap, accept the challenge and find out why everyone else thinks clear skies and bright sun is so inexplicable beautiful



 
I've tried to suggest how our photography can accommodate what may be seen as the extremes of light, the glorious golden hour and the harsh midday sun, but the key to shooting in any light is to recognize what nature is providing and to modify our subjects and approach to get the most from the conditions.

Sometime the Context Can Be As Simple As a Wave
Kiawah Island Sunrise, South Carolina

Next week I will discuss a few more of my favorite "lights', including, overcast, fog, and extremes of weather. Hopefully this exercise will make it easier to face that room of students this fall and allow them to capture better iPhone images of their ham sandwiches. 
 

Check out Part 2 of "Working with the Light" discussing some of my favorite "lights", overcast, fog, mist and extremes of weather.


Jeffrey Newcomer
Partridgebrookreflections.com

Spring Flowers

Walker Farm, Dummerston Vermont

 It's a Little More Colorful Than the Noble Lichen



There are times when life gets in the way of blogging. I remain committed to getting an article out every week (usually Sundays), but this has been one of those weeks when other responsibilities have made it difficult for me to generate my usual fresh, incite-full and voluminous content. The good news is that there is a very good reason for my time pressure. Our daughter Abigail is moving from DC to North Cambridge to be with her

The Depth, Spofford NH

boyfriend, and, needless to say, Susan and I are thrilled to have our daughter moving closer to home. Now if we could only get Jeremy to evacuate dreaded NYC for friendlier digs. Anyway we are getting ready to head down to Washington by the end of the week to help Abby with the move and that has become a significant but happy distraction. As a result I will focus this week's photographic musings on something quick and easily at hand, spring flowers.


Don't Ask Me the Name!
  
Flowers are easy to discuss because they are bursting forth everywhere and because I can summarize my entire understanding of the topic in three words. "Flowers are pretty". That's it, don't ask me to identify everything, all I can say is that flowers are natural miracles of structure, color and texture, and that they are a joy to photograph. The blooms are especially wonderful subjects for Macro Photography and I have been out with my 100mm Macro capturing all I can.


Walking Nellie

Day lilies Keene River Park

Whether cultivated or wild, flowers are everywhere this time of year, and I have been shooting along forest trails as well as at local gardens and parks, and my daily walks with Nelly through Spofford Village routinely yield colorful subjects. The trick is to wait for the wind to drop and to balance f-stop, shutter speed and ISO to achieve adequate depth of field. It is seldom possible to get everything in focus, but, if the stamen is sharp, the rest can fall out of focus without loosing impact. Interestingly I have captured some of my best floral macros with my compact Canon SX-50. The SX-50's small sensor

Lady Slippers - I Know These!

has a substantially larger Depth of Field than does my lovely full-frame monster and at times the sharpness seems to wrap around the petals. Flowers captured in natural settings are spectacular, but controlling the environmental conditions can be a frustrating struggle. It can help to shoot early in the morning or late in the afternoon when the light is soft and the wind light, but after spending hours waiting for the wind to calm, I begin to think about ways to cheat Mother Nature.

Rhododendron with Canon SX50

Flowers Served on a Platter
 On occasion a local whole-sale florist in Marlborough, New Hampshire lays large pallets of flowers on their parking lot and last week I dropped by in the evening to shoot the display in the soft light. With careful adjustment of angle the flowers can appear as if they were growing in an open field. The trick is to approach from low enough to avoid revealing the trays, baskets and pavement underneath. Of course shooting across the tops of the flowers makes capturing sufficient depth of field a challenge. This week there was a mild breeze and to avoid turning everything into a pastel blur I had to use faster shutter speeds and wider apertures than would have been best for maximum depth of field. Thank goodness for focus stacking. I used 7 stacked images to capture the field of blue image, which meant that, during the early editing, I had 14 image layers including the blended layers and non-blended correction layers. It can all be a strain on my computer's RAM, but fortunately, after the blending and clean-up, I could flatten everything to a single layer. My Marlborough florist doesn't bring out the pallets every year, but, when they do, it is an opportunity that I try never to miss. It may be considered cheating, but I have captured some of my best "flower field" images from this location, and, after all, the flowers don't know that they are in pallets.





The Big Greenhouse Cheat
 

As in previous seasons, I have been liberally cheating with photography of the flora in the protected environs of local greenhouses. Greenhouse photography tends to be screened from the wind and the soft diffused light eliminates reflection and glare. Once again the key is to avoid artificial distractions in the background








Walker Farm
 

 
Every spring I await Susan's announcement that it is time to get our spring plants at Walker Farm. Walkers is across the Connecticut River in Dummerston Vermont and is a wonderful place which, throughout the summer, has some of the best produce in the region. In the spring it also stocks trees, shrubs and flowering plants of all varieties.

Grand Finale, Dummerston, Vt

While Susan is loading up, I run to the green house to grab shots of the beautifully cultivated flowers and ground cover. This year I was a bit self-conscious about lugging my tripod around the flower beds and I paid the price. It was difficult to steady the camera at the slow shutter speeds that would have permitted the high f stops required for optimal DOF. I tried to find flowers that I could keep on one focal plane and focused on the center of the blooms.







Don't Try This at Home
 I also tried some hand-held focus stacking. Everyone, including me, will tell you that focus stacking requires a tripod to keep the view consistent. Having no tripod, I lined up my composition, broadened my stands and ran through the series of variably focused exposures. I did the best I could keeping the frame steady by fixing my center focus square on one spot in the scene. Photoshop, being the miracle that it is, did the job of aligning and blending remarkably well and I had very little clean-up to perform after the process. The picture of the mixed flowers was assembled from 5 hand-held, focus stacked images, but "DON'T try this at home". Focus stacking still requires a tripod!

Mountain Laurel, Ann Stokes Trail, Chesterfield NH

With what little time I've had this week, I have been trying to process a few of my flower images. I love working with the colors and textures to create macro floral "landscapes". When we get back from DC, I will return to these, but before that I have to get my daughter safely back close to home. Yea!

Jeff Newcomer
partridgebrookreflections.com