If trees could speak

Well worth 3:50 of your time. 🌳🌱🌲

_____

Ancient One

Ancient One

As I walk through the forest
the trees start to sway
to the music they hear
coming quietly
through my earphones

—-

The apple trees
shed their blooms
upon me
while laughing quietly
at my surprise…

—-

In a corporate boardroom
a $50B deal is made.
Far away, a baby laughs.
A grasshopper leaps.
Which one is most important?

Hugs,
M&M

Shooting Fall Colours… sort of

Hi Folks:

If you live in the northern hemisphere then autumn is upon you, and if you’re fortunate enough to be in an area that has deciduous trees, then they’re likely in the process of turning the glorious colours of fall – reds, yellows, oranges, browns… (NB: if you want to know why the leaves change colour in the fall, click here). This is a great time of year to be a landscape photographer, and it’s easy to become seduced by all of those colours. However, it’s also a good time to look at the underlying skeleton of your photographs, and one way to do that is to remove the colour and move to a monochrome palette. (Yes, this is an attempt to put off the ‘learning to see in black and white’ post I keep thinking I should write, but for now this will serve well as placeholder. 🙂 ) By shifting away from the colours of the leaves we can look at shapes, at form, at movement, at textures, at light and shadow… All of these essential components exist in colour images as well, but they can get moved to the background of your compositions if you’re not careful.

The images below were all shot in nearby Beacon Hill Park on the same day. All were shot with my cell phone as I was walking through the park, and they all share similar processing in Lightroom. They all reveal what lies behind the colours that are so wondrously revealing themselves right now.

Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. It’s important to remember that unless you have a camera with an achromatic sensor (since there are only a few companies in the world that make them, if you had one, you’d know) with digital you’re always capturing colour information even when you’re shooting in B&W. As such you can adjust the luminance values of the various colours (shown as grayscale) to change the contrast and overall look of a B&W image either in camera (when shooting jpg, by choosing a different recipe) or in your raw file conversion software.

Photo of the Month – Cathedral Grove

Hi Folks:

March has been a busy month for us, but we did take one day toward the end of the month and head ‘up island’ to Cathedral Grove.  A part of MacMillan Provincial Park, Cathedral Grove has been ‘gentrified’ to provide easy access to a stand of several-hudred-year-old Douglas fir and cedar trees.  Unfortunately many of the trees are suffering from root rot/fungal infection, and a heavy wind can bring down a rain of branches.  Fortunately for us, on the day we were there we had sunshine (it only rained while we were driving), little wind, and not many other people.  I made over 400 images that day, almost all of them for HDR/panoramic images, and collapsed that number down into less than fifty composites.  I’ve joined them all up but have yet to push them around in Lightroom.  I do have a couple, however, and thought I’d share them here.  Both are 3-shot bracketed exposures (HDR, at +1/0/-1) and converted to B&W in Lightroom.

The Sentinel

The Sentinel

Ancient Watchers

Ancient Watchers

Okay, that’s it.  Now go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. You can find more of our posts on photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find links to over 200 other sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.

Plastic Salmon

Hi Folks:

I wandered off to the grocery store today, and as is my wont, decided to take a shortcut. Now to me, a shortcut is something that takes a fifteen minute walk and turns it into two hours or so. Sometimes longer. Fortunately Marcia is a very wise and patient woman; she knows this about me and loves me anyway.  I can still use “I’m new to the area and got lost” as my backup excuse, but that’s not usually necessary.  Never works anyway… mostly because I never get lost.  As Tom Brown, Jr. says, “You’re only lost if you’ve got a place to go and a time to be there.  Otherwise you’re just wherever you are.”  And so off I go.

Most human-created trails are anywhere from 1 to 4 metres wide, and to me that’s not a trail, that’s a superhighway.  When I see a sign that says ‘Please stay on the trail’, I figure deer trails, rabbit trails, and sometimes even mouse tracks qualify.  It’s a dance that the woods and I have.  The trees are always glad to see me, although they do sometimes get over playful.  Can’t count the number of times Marcia has pulled cedar fronds from my hair.  Then there are the hat-eating trees, but that’s another story.  Anyway, I digress.

I was wandering along this trail I found near Colquitz Creek, and looking for the eagles I was told had moved into the area, but it was getting late in the day and the eagles either haven’t yet arrived or had moved off for the day.  When I got down to the creek the first thing I noticed were the bits of plastic bag stuck in the branches:

DSCF7187

This image was shot at a really high ISO and certainly isn’t going to win any awards, but you get the idea.  As I got closer I noticed what appeared to be a bag in the stream itself, stuck to a branch:

DSCF7183

Again, the file quality isn’t so high…  I stood there shaking my head for a moment, watching the stream tugging at the bag, but as I watched it I also noticed it was moving too rhythmically, as though the bag was too hydrodynamic.  That’s when I realized it wasn’t a shopping bag after all, but the underside of a salmon carcass, caught by the gill flap.  You can’t see it very well from the image, but I’m a biologist type person so you can take my word for it.  No, I’m  not going to go on about the huge amounts of plastic floating around the waterways of the world.  There are many, many other sites that describe this issue, and so I’ll leave it to them.  What I want to talk about is the salmon forest.

It’s something that scientists have only figured out in recent years, but it’s a fascinating cycle in itself.  Pacific salmon, as most people know, are anadromous.  Maybe you haven’t heard that word before, but my grandmother said it’s important to learn one new word every day, so there you go.  You can compare it to catadromous if you like, or you can hold that one until tomorrow!  Basically, anadromous fish are those that are born in fresh water, but then move out to the ocean to live their lives.  In the case of the Pacific salmon, they navigate the ocean currents for four to seven years or so before returning to their home streams to spawn and die.  Not all of them make it to the spawning grounds, but they all die just the same.  Some of them are eaten by bears, wolves, eagles, ravens and gulls, some of the leftovers provide food for mice and shrews, and as the salmon decompose they become hatching places for flies, for fungi and many other species.  And as their bodies return to the earth, they provide nutrients to the forest around them.  Carbon, nitrogen and other compounds from the salmon are taken up by roots and become bound up in the fibres of the trees and other plants.  As they grow, these plants help to regulate the water cycle of the streams, provide shade to keep the waters cool and so on.  It’s an amazing cycle of life and death.  Humans are part of that cycle too, both in the salmon that we take for food (whether personally or commercially), but moreso in how we care for the streams, the rivers and the oceans that the salmon call home.  It’s our home too, after all.  BTW, if you’re not that intrigued by scientific research papers, you might want to have your kids read to you from ‘Salmon Forest‘ by Dr. David Suzuki and Sarah Ellis.  Highly recommended, and don’t be surprised if your kids know more than you do.  Children are like that.

So, I struck out with the eagles today, but I found lots to see just the same.  I’m still learning my way around here, both in this city and in this part of the coastal rainforest.  So many new plants and animals for me to learn.  I won’t try listing all of the plants; aside from a few canines the only other mammal I saw was a single gray squirrel (have you ever tried singing to red squirrels?  Do it right and they’ll actually get quiet and close their eyes for a moment – then they catch themselves at it and get all upset!)  Birds there were aplenty though.  I saw several flocks of Black-capped Chickadees, and a couple of squadrons of Golden-crowned Kinglets.  Their little voices are so quiet!  I came across two Rufous-sided Towhees, a bird I’d never seen before except in photographs.  Their call reminds me of the Gray Catbird from out east, although I’m sure they’d disagree.  As I was walking along I saw two groups of trumpeter swans going north, about 16 or 17 in total, and about 40 Double-crested Cormorants going south.  Either they dislike each other’s company or each group thought they knew something the other didn’t.

By the time I was heading back it was full dark and the Grandmother was hanging bright and beautiful in the sky again.

Grandmother Moon

Grandmother Moon

There was a wonderful halo around her that got me thinking about a story from the People about a time when the moon was kept in a box in the lodge of a man and his daughter and how raven managed to steal it and put it back in the sky.  I made a fractal once that reminded me of that story…

Raven Steals the Moon

(click on the image for a slightly larger version)

The moon will be full for another day or so… if you get a chance, go out and say hello to her!  I know she’ll appreciate it.

*

Love, Mike.