27 Sep 11. Whether it be the weed in the sidewalk, the tree in the side of a rock cliff, or any such similar activity, I have always been amazed at the ability of plant life to break down those things in the world that seem impenetrable. I know I'm not alone in this area as I can think of a few songs where this activity has been central to the theme of the story being told by the singer. It is a reassuring thing to know that eventually, no matter what we construct, nature will eventually render it back to its original beginnings. Of course we won't be around to see it happen fully, but it will happen with time as has been wonderfully documented in the book 1491. The image for today is of a stone retaining wall supporting the road near Paradise in Mt Rainier and shows the very early beginnings of the process. How these plants ever get their initial foothold on a shear wall like this is just amazing, but you can see it happening all over the park. I rather assume that it can be seen as either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on personal perspective, but I see it mostly as reminder that nothing man made will endure for long in the big picture. ISO 320; 1/250 sec @ f / 8.
28 Sep 11. About the time I started house sitting this past summer I noticed a pond that I have to pass to get there was beginning to sport a nice crop of water lilies, and as I like to photograph these lovely plants I kept a close watch on the progression of the flowering. At what I thought was their peak I took a\ couple evenings and spent some time trying to shoot them. Not the easiest task as the pond is on the side of a very busy road. To further complicate things there is little parking and once parked you are very close to both the road and the fence surrounding the property containing the pond. So you have to shoot at road's edge, through a fence, and with considerable competing vegetation between you and your subject. But that just made it a good challenge and over the course of a about three attempts I came up with a couple of shots I rather liked, especially so due to a few of the blossoms being considerably more red that the more typical yellow, pink, purple, or white. A couple of dragon flies would have been really been a nice addition but as none were present I would have had to fake then and that I didn't want to do. ISO 200; 1/200 sec @ f / 6.3.
29 Sep 11. Those of you who keep track of the images I send will likely recognize this shot as being very similar to one I shared a couple of months back. It is in fact another from a series of shots taken of the same insect on the same piece of clover. This time I've zoomed in a bit closer and done significantly more cropping out of the green background. The initial impact will be that the bee and clover are much larger when in fact they are only slightly larger, the effect being attained by forcing the clover head with bee to full fill the frame. If your original image is sharp enough to withstand a large amount of cropping, this is a cheap trick for simulating the use of a long telephoto. You won't get quite the distance compression that is a tell tail sign of a long tele, but for images of this type it doesn't really matter. This approach is best accomplished on a tripod with a subject that is not moving else the incorporation of a very fast shutter speed to ensure critical sharpness in at least one plane of the image. ISO 200; 1/400 sec @ f /10.
