There was a challenge to post a monochrome picture of yourself going around social media the other day, so…here I am!
Butterflies, Caterpillars, and the Bokeh Buddha
We have a mulch bed with a bush in it right outside our front door, and in recent years, milkweed has taken up residence there. Many folks would rip out the milkweed, but not us! We know it’s a haven for pollinators and for Monarch butterfly caterpillars. (See two years ago!) We didn’t see any caterpillars last year, but lo! we had one this year.
He was there for a few days, and then we lost track of him. We assume he found a nice place to make a chrysalis, and has by now completed his metamorphosis into a Monarch butterfly. We hope.
(I very well may be misgendering this caterpillar, right? Hmmmm.)
In addition to that caterpillar, the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens has this summer dedicated one of its rooms to butterflies. We visited this exhibit twice, and here are a few of the denizens there:
I really like that last shot. It’s not the sharpest image I’ve ever taken, but I like that it captures the gossamer threads of the spiderweb beyond the butterfly.
Finally, one of my favorite subjects in the region is this Buddha statue in the Botanical Gardens’s tropical display room. I take pictures of this Buddha every time I’m there (well, both Buddhas, there are two, but this one is the larger). Granted, it’s getting harder to get creative with shooting the same thing every time we visit, but…still, I do it. Here the Buddha isn’t even the focus of the image. I like the way this one turned out.
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Buffalo Streetscapes: Men at work
Last week I did one of my favorite things, on the last day of my August vacation: I went on a long photo walk in the city of Buffalo. I spent a chunk of that walk in downtown Buffalo proper, and one shot I took that I particularly like is this one, of two men on a crane lift working on something on one of the buildings. I had to look up the building, actually: Convention Towers, on the south end of the Buffalo Convention Center. At the end of the street, dominating the background of the photo, is the edifice of Buffalo City Hall.
This is the jpg as it came right out of the camera; I have not yet done any editing on this photo. (Or any of the day’s photos…right now I’m behind on all my editing!) So, a better version of this will be forthcoming. For now, here it is! (And for the embiggenable version, go here.)
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A guest in our milkweed
A much hoped-for phenomenon has come to pass: there is a little friend making a major change in his life, and he’s doing it in the milkweed outside our front door.
(OK, he hasn’t started his actual transition yet. But it’s coming!)
On a photographic note, there’s no way I could have captured this just a couple of years ago. Photography continues to excite and energize me.
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Happy 716 Day!
Abstract
Light is active.
There’s a small visual memory that I’ve been carrying around for years, in my head. I have thought that it would turn up someday in a story I wrote, and who knows, maybe it still might…but right now it’s relevant to my photography journey. It has to do with light and the things it does.
It may have been close to twenty years ago, maybe more, but I was driving on Union Road in Cheektowaga, NY, maybe on my way to the Walden Galleria or the Borders Bookstore there (before it eventually closed, obviously). It was a warm summer day, and while I was driving, one of those quick in-and-out thunderstorms rolled through. You know the type, the ones that announce themselves with a sudden darkening of the skies, some lightning and thunder, and with a few big fat drops coming down before the skies open up. And the storm is over as quickly as it came; ten minutes or so of rain, another five or ten minutes of slackening and clearing, and then the sun is back out and you’re looking at the back of the storm clouds as they depart.
And everything now is wet. The whole world, it seems, has been momentarily soaked.
That was the case as I was driving that day. Storm barrels through and leaves, and the sun comes back out and everything is soaked.
But after such a storm, everything also has been suddenly cleaned and made shiny again, and the pavement itself is gleaming and shiny with the brilliant post-rain light. And on this particular day, as I drove up Union Rd. behind some other guy, I saw something amazing that I’ve never seen since: because the car in front of me was kicking up spray from the water still on the street, and because the bright afternoon sun was shining through that spray, that sunlight was getting broken up into a spectrum. Two tiny spectrums, that is–one for each tire.
Put another way: it was like the car in front of me was driving on rainbows.
I had never seen that before. I had never seen light do that before.
And I’ve never forgotten that. I thought it was a detail I’d save for use in a story someday. I never thought it was a lesson my brain was filing away for when I’d find myself in a place where recognizing light as an active force would be desirable.
One constant recommendation I see in photography content aimed at beginners and novices is to shoot at “Golden Hour”: the hour or so surrounding sunrise and sunset, when the light is bright and golden and rich and amazing. And yes, this is great advice. Everybody should shoot at Golden Hour when they can. (That last, “when they can”, is something I’ll need to address another time.)
There’s another time when I think the light is frankly astonishing, and that’s right after one of those rainstorms. Maybe you won’t see rainbows under the wheels of the car in front of you, but you’ll see amazing gleaming and reflections that you won’t see any other time. You’ll see color that’s somehow cleaner, more perfect, than at just about any other time. You’ll see light doing things that you won’t see any other time.
Last week I was on the roof at work. I’m required to go up there a few times a month to check things out, verify that there is no existing damage to the roof membrane, check the functioning of rooftop-mounted HVAC systems and exhaust fans, stuff like that. Well, while I was up there, on a sunny day, one of those ten-minute storms raged through. I just hung out in one of the machine houses while it went on by, dumping water on everything, and then sure as anything, the sun was back out. I continued my walk, eventually moving along the part of the roof at the front of The Store, the part that overlooks the parking lot.
What I saw amazed me, so I pulled out my phone and took a quick shot and did a quick edit in Snapseed.
It wasn’t just the way that the sun was gleaming off the cars that had been suddenly washed by rain to a high shine. It wasn’t just the way the colors of those cars popped as if they had been painted by some master. It wasn’t just the way those gleaming surfaces reflected off the wet pavement.
It was all of that, at once.
We often think of “the light” as a passive thing, but no…in this moment the light was active. It was dancing in the clean air after the storm. And I saw it.
So I guess that was the lesson from all those years ago: not that I had seen something that might be useful in a story or an essay, but that I had seen that light doesn’t just shine. It dances and bobs and weaves and flits and does all that kind of Carl Sandburg stuff.
Not a bad lesson for a photographer to receive, huh?
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How can you tell if a dog is enjoying her life?
Dave and Twiggy
According to the signs at the Botanical Gardens two Saturdays ago, those are the names of the persons who were getting married at a ceremony at the Gardens while we were there. Sure enough, as we arrived in one of the rooms bordering the courtyard, there was the wedding, just finishing up. How did I know they were just finishing up? Because we arrived in this room as “Ladies and gentlemen, I now present Mr. and Mrs. ____”, at which point the groom kissed the bride.
I, of course, armed with Miranda, saw a good opportunity for framing up a good shot.
A minute later I was at the other end of the room (the Orchids and Tropical Plants room), and our newlyweds did their recessional, which meant that they were walking toward me in the room, and when they reached the back of the courtyard, they paused for another kiss…which gave me another opportunity to frame them up:
Truth be told, I like the second one better than the first. They’re not partially obscured by their guests in their seats, and I was able to use the string lights inside to offer a bit of added symmetry.
I’ve noticed, as I practice photography, that I really like framing. I’m always on the lookout for good opportunities for framing, and the windows at the Botanical Gardens, with their old weathered glass and wood, offer up really nice opportunities for framing. I’m mildly amazed that Dave and Twiggy’s paid photographers weren’t inside getting good framed shots of their own. What were they thinking! Amateurs!
(I’m kidding there, by the way. I’m sure those photographers are professionals who know way more about wedding photography than I do.)
Anyway, congratulations to the happy couple, and thanks for providing a novice photographer a nice opportunity for practice!
