You may remember me writing a few weeks ago about the Monarch butterfly caterpillar we found in the milkweed outside our front door, and its turning up again a few days later as a chrysalis clinging to the siding of our house.
Well, our friend kept hanging there for the better part of three weeks. The chrysalis gradually shifted from bright green and opaque to darker and somewhat translucent, until this past Saturday it looked like this:
If you examine the larger version of that photo, you can see the telltale markings of our butterfly friend’s wings inside the chrysalis.
This past Sunday I noted the chrysalis was still there as I departed for my morning’s photography walk…and when I returned less than three hours later, this is what I found on the side of the house.
Our friend stuck around a while–my understanding is that they have to let their wings dry before they can fly–and then I assume they departed for Mexico. I hope they enjoy safe travels; that’s a long trek.
What an exciting thing to see again…and for the first time!
Taken at Chestnut Ridge the other day. More from that hiking session here. (Life got better when I discovered (a) that macro photography exists, and (b) that my camera has a special macro-focus mode.)
We went to a meet-up for greyhound owners yesterday (under the auspices of the adoption group who recovered all these dogs from elsewhere). It was at Knox Farm State Park, one of my favorite places. Naturally, photos were taken:
There’s one in every crowd.Hobbes, looking Hobbesian.So far, Hobbes likes to run more than Cane ever did.Not a greyhound, obviously. I like this composition, though.
The prompt “Drop something blue from your gallery” was going around social media today, which seems as good a basis for a blog post as any, so:
I tend to contrast my overalls with my top more often than not–a dark top will call for lighter overalls, like faded denim or Hickory stripes, or vice versa–but sometimes I like to match it up. Today I wore my blue Ren-faire shirt with my blue Berne overalls, and I rather like the effect.
On Labor Day, The Wife and I went down to Canalside in downtown Buffalo to hang out a bit, and afterwards we stopped at Wilkeson Pointe on the Outer Harbor. We hadn’t planned on the second stop, but we wanted to see more closely the big kites that were flying there. They were like giant airborne cephalopods, brightly colored and vibrant.
Yesterday’s photography location was Hunter’s Creek Park. Officially named “Sergeant Mark A. Rademacher Memorial Park”, the location is more generally referred to by its original, and now informal, name, which comes from the creek that runs through it. Hunter’s Creek Park is one of the most rugged parks in the Erie County Park System, with its most dominant feature being the gorge through which Hunter’s Creek runs. This being the case, the park is a “conservation” park, which means that aside from the two small gravel parking lots at either end (the park roughly runs north-south), there are no facilities at all. No shelters, no rest-rooms, nothing. Just trails, some of which are very popular with mountain bikers. The larger Conservation Trail, which is a part of the even larger Finger Lakes Trail System, partially runs through Hunter’s Creek Park.
Here are a few of the photos I took yesterday. More in this Flickr album.
As soon as you enter the trail you’re enclosed by vegetation that feels like a tunnel. It’s an amazing feeling: there’s no transition at all. One step down the trailhead and BAM, you’re in the wilderness.
The gorge’s walls are loaded with temporary waterfalls like this. I imagine this only runs in spring, with snowmelt, or for a few hours after a heavy summer rain. There are also many gullies for feeder-streams, just all of which are as dry as this, which run into Hunter’s Creek. You have to be careful when hiking here. Steep drops abound.
A study in shadows. I like this shot a lot. I thought about flicking that dead leaf aside, but I chose not to. I’m generally averse to modifying the scene that nature provides for me.This is new since I was last here, a few years ago! That’s a launch platform for mountain bikers. You can see the steep drop to the right, and at the bottom of that someone made a ramp to jump over a big log, and farther on a smaller ramp for another jump. I actually set up at the bottom, shifting my camera to Shutter Priority mode and dialing up the ISO so I could attempt a biker-in-midair shot if an opportunity presented itself, but no bikers came along in the few minutes I waited. Alas! Maybe next time.
I love how this turned out. Ditto the previous shot. It only took me a few months of owning this camera to learn that it has a Macro Focus setting for close-ups of small objects like this!
This is not a pose! I’m actually taking the preceding shot here. I just decided that, needing a self-portrait here, I should set up my phone to take my picture while I took the intended picture with the main camera. Two birds, one stone, you know the drill!
Even though it’s now September and everyone is mentally filing away Summer 2023 into the memory bank–and in a way they’re right, as “Meteorological Fall” has already begun–the summer isn’t showing signs of giving up just yet, as The 716 is in for a stiff dose of very hot weather this week, and yesterday was pretty warm for hiking purposes. If I wasn’t carrying along my good camera I might well have dipped myself in one of the creek’s deeper pools! I’m better at managing high heat than I used to be, but I’m unlikely to ever really love the heat, and I welcome the return of the cooler temps we enjoyed last week. Fall will come, after all, and I tend to file “Temps above 80 after Labor Day” along with “Snow after St. Patrick’s Day” in my head: even though they happen every year, I find them annoying.
But photography is about the light, after all, and the light is most definitely taking on a more autumnal feel now. It won’t be long before the trees do, as well.
I took this quick photo of Carla and Rosa, enjoying the sun by the patio door, last week. It was just a quick “Hey, that’s cute, let me grab my phone” kind of thing; I didn’t put any effort into composing the shot in any way. I just liked the way it looked.
There’s nothing wrong with Carla’s right eye; it just looks like that in the picture for some reason.
Looking at the result, with the shadows cast across their bodies by the upright parts of the sliding door, reminded me of a conversation I had with a photographer friend years ago, and a lesson he tried teaching me that I didn’t understand at the time.
His name was–still is, I’m guessing, though I’ve lost track of him over the years–Robert, and he was an artist who was skilled in a number of different mediums but who ended up working as a photographer. He was an artistic photographer, that is to say, and his main focus was on the human body. He worked to create images on film (or, later, digital, I suppose) that captured and celebrated the human form in a way not unlike the statue-carvers of Ancient Greece and Rome. Robert chose his models carefully and coached them into poses that made their bodies look astonishingly perfect. Apparently one of his models, upon seeing the result, commented along the lines of “You make us into gods.”
The lesson about light went roughly as follows: Robert emailed me a photograph of his, in which a lovely young model is standing in bright light that is streaming into a dark place…but she is also standing behind a ladder. Thus the rungs of the ladder cast strips of shadow onto her body, and they did so in such a way that the shadows weren’t so much cast onto her body as draped across it, like strips of cloth. He angled the camera in such a way that the shadows were not straight blocks of anti-light, but organic-looking shapes of darkness that followed the model’s curves, the way her body rose here and fell there. It wasn’t just that light was present, it was the way the light was shaped by its blocking of the ladder and by the careful position of what the light was falling on.
I found this interesting at the time, but I don’t think I appreciated it nearly as well as I’m starting to now, as I begin exploring photography in a much more intentional way. I haven’t been getting out when the light is considered “best” by pro photographers–sunrise, sunset, and overcast days–but being in forests can help, as the trees themselves make the light dance and fall in interesting ways.
It’s quite a transition, going from thinking in terms of capturing a scene to thinking in terms of capturing light.
My Sunday Photography Walk was at Buffalo’s Outer Harbor again, with a side-trek into the Tifft Nature Preserve. Photos here…but these are my favorites from the day’s work:
This next is my favorite photo from yesterday. This makes me think that maybe my time practicing photography is not actually time wasted!
