24 Oct 11. It being that season of the year when all things bright and beautiful put on their finest display of color, I like to spend a fair amount of time attempting to capture as much of it as I can. Most of the time we generally turn our attention to the trees and shrubs for their brilliant displays, but many of the flowers do likewise, and one of our favorite fall flowers is that of the Princess Plant, Tibouchina urvilleana. For the past couple of years we have been admiring this plant in the local nurseries and finally purchased one in the Spring of 2010. It sat on our steps doing nothing (we actually thought we had bought a dud) until early September when it rather suddenly began putting out flowers for perhaps two months; not realizing we had bought a semi-tropical plant we left it outdoors and the first frost, sadly, killed it. So Sunday we decided on another copy and now we have it indoors for the nights and will be putting it outdoors during the days as long as the weather permits. It would be nice to keep it indoors all the time, but as the beast completely fills up our front porch entry, it needs to find a spot outdoors during the day, if possible. The main thing that attracted us to this plant is the absolutely beautiful purple flowers that for some reason photograph as deep blue, so I've adjusted the color in this image to actually match that of the plant as close as I can, plus I've done a "bit" of gardening so that all you see are the petals and not the competing materials surrounding it. Otherwise this is a straight from the camera image. ISO 200; 1/60 sec (with flash) @ f /10.
25 Oct 11. Taking a chance that I may disappoint those of you who don't appreciate the macro/flower stuff and sharing another image of that type for today.As a child I was terribly allergic to roses and as such really had no appreciation for them. Through the wonder of modern medicine I am now only minimally allergic to them and as long as I'm not around a concentration of them, such as photographing in a rose garden, which I don't, I'm O.K. As the allergies subsided I began to appreciate roses initially just in their bud stage, but now I can appreciate them transitioning between bud and full flower, but I still don't quite enjoy the fully deployed blossom. For most of my life I considered them a late spring early summer flower, but since returning to our neighborhood in the PNW I've come to realize that a lot of roses put on their show in the fall, and now as I walk around the neighborhood I'm seeing more and more of these beautiful plants which I occasionally try to capture while either as buds or just slightly more deployed. This image started out as a grab shot over a neighbor's cyclone fence, then was cropped to get just the flower and eliminate a lot of other garden "vegetation," had some noise removal applied but no sharpening of any kind as I rather liked the soft approach to this thorny plant, and finally underwent some cloning out of a few leaves in the lower left that had just enough presence to make you wonder what was actually in that corner and I didn't like that distraction. ISO 200; 1/160 sec @ f / 8.
26 Oct 11. Arriving rather late in the afternoon, early evening if you prefer, at the Baker Lake Lodge last Friday I decided to try my hand at getting a shot or two of Baker Lake as one of the participants said the light on the lake, just across the highway, was quite nice. I headed out taking some time to shoot along the way and in the process rousted up a couple of Ruffled Grouse, the first I'd seen in over 4 decades in this part of the country. Eventually I made it to the lake and was very disappointed to see this very tiny body of water situated below a small earthen dam. But I met a gentleman from one of the local communities with whom I had a nice conversation, and then, after he departed, tried my hand at capturing the lake with Mt Baker in the distance at its far end. The lighting was harsh, and it was disappearing fast, so I elected to use the HDR approach to getting the image(s). That evening at dinner I was informed by other participants that what I shot wasn't the "real" Baker Lake, and they invited me to join them the next morning to go shoot it. I eagerly accepted the invitation and we tried that very thing early Saturday morning; the picture I sent a couple days ago was what we saw of the "real" Baker Lake. While we were trying our luck with the morning shoot a somewhat spontaneous discussion arose concerning the use of HDR photography that took the better part of 15 minutes. Part of that discussion had some intense moments and I'll pick up tomorrow with that topic along with a shot taken during the discussion. ISO 200; 1/13 sec @ f /18 (middle of 5 exposures).
