Category: Nature

Day 66 – Big Leaf Maple

BigLeafw

November

November comes,
And November goes
With the last red berries
And the first white snows,

With night coming early
And dawn coming late,
And ice in the bucket
And frost by the gate.

The fires burn
And the kettles sing,
And earth sinks to rest
Until next spring.

-Elizabeth Coatsworth

I have to say I have been trying for, well, 65 days to find the right combination of weather and opportunity to get over to the Applegate Valley to photograph. I did find some good fall color today. Though the wineries were definitely past prime, the big leaf maples were quite showy. I ended up with nearly 100 images so you may see more from this trip down the road. I wouldn’t mind going back either. No one seems to be writing poems about big leaf maples but I like this one about November.

Day 65 – Flower

Flower1w

Flowers in a Vase

A bunch of flowers
Sat in a vase
Colourful and lonely
A mind looks at them
Wondering
What is it they have to say
Are they a thank you
Or a gift of love
Are they an apology
Or given in remorse
Perhaps they are for nothing
Given to bring a smile
The mind looks on
Wondering for a while
The flowers sit in their vase
Unmoved by thought
Or the reason given to them
A little water at their base
To keep them fresh for a while
They are the end of the day
Just flowers in a vase 

-Matthew Holloway

Another busy rainy day. So I took the flowers I bought yesterday into the studio and played for awhile this morning. Then took the results into photoshop and added some textures and french ledger script for visual interest. All in all I think it worked out pretty well. And though it is only one flower in a bottle I thought searching for flowers in a vase might be more productive, and so it was.

Day 64 – Red Shouldered Hawk

Red_Shouldered_Hawk

The Hawk

“CALL down the hawk from the air;
Let him be hooded or caged
Till the yellow eye has grown mild,
For larder and spit are bare,
The old cook enraged,
The scullion gone wild.’
“I will not be clapped in a hood,
Nor a cage, nor alight upon wrist,
Now I have learnt to be proud
Hovering over the wood
In the broken mist
Or tumbling cloud.’
“What tumbling cloud did you cleave,
Yellow-eyed hawk of the mind,
Last evening? that I, who had sat
Dumbfounded before a knave,
Should give to my friend
A pretence of wit.’

-William Butler Yeats

On a tight schedule this afternoon I just realized I needed to get something posted now! So, I had to fall back on yesterday’s trip to North Mountain Park. When I saw this hawk all I could say is “I know you’re not a red-tailed but I don’t know what you are.” After consulting my bird book and looking at photos on line I could only conclude that he is a red-shouldered even though I couldn’t see his shoulders, the breast and tail colors all match. As for Yeats, I want so much to like him but I’m not sure I do. After the second reading I like this poem better than after the first because I realize there is some deep hidden meaning which may require a third or fourth reading and may not have too much to do with hawks.

Day 63 – Belted Kingfisher

Kingfisher

Kingfisher

Silent,
Solitary
Fisher sits; watches; waits;
Still as statue, the king;
Fish spied:
He dives.

-Alys

Finally a sunny day. I was in the neighborhood of North Mountain Park so loaded up the big lens and went hunting for birds. I was pretty happy with the shots I was getting of Juncos and sparrows and mourning doves. Then this guy showed up and I knew he had to be the star today.  Lots of poems about Kingfishers, not many good ones. I liked semi anonymous Alys’ short poem found on Hello Poetry which would qualify as a Haiku according to my Haiku teacher.

Day 61 – Mushrooms

Mushrooms

Mushrooms

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.

-Sylvia Plath

One of the challenges of a project like this is finding something new and different to photograph. I found these mushrooms growing out of a stump yesterday on my photo walk. I was going to go out this afternoon until I realized it was too windy to get anything to hold still. So, I fell back on yesterday’s abundance. It is getting to be a real dance with the weather. I may have to grab a bouquet at the market tomorrow so I have something to shoot in the studio…though I suppose I could find something around here if I set my mind to it.  Hmmm….

Day 59 – White Rose

WhiteRose

White Rose

White Rose

Blooming in November

Autumn Splendor

-Jeanne Hoadley

I’m taking a Haiku class at OLLI and we have been assigned to write one Haiku a day for the next week. So, I am afraid you are going to be subjected to my Haiku for a few days. I took the new lens out for a walk around the neighborhood and found a surprising number of flowers still blooming. But this white rose looked so elegant and played well with the velvety lens though I was plagued by too much wind (hence the ghosting around the edge of the flower.) I look forward to finding time to get back to the rose garden with my new toy.

Day 58 – Raindrops

Raindrops

There will come soft Rain

There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

-Sara Teasdale

I have a new toy. For those in the know it is a Lensbaby Velvet 85 lens which is designed to give a rapid fall off in depth of field and a velvety feel to the out of focus areas. I could not wait to get outside to try it out this morning so I had to squeeze it in between rain showers. I have to say, I am very happy with my purchase so far. As for the poem, it is not really about Autumn but I really liked it anyway.

Day 56 – Frosty Leaf

FrostyLeaf

Frosty

I wake at sunrise
And watch the world around me wake as well
The frosted tree tops remind me of the cold winter to come
The colorful leaves half fallen into the front yard
Reminding me to take in Autumn while I can
Because soon the snow that is falling will stick
Soon the remaining leaves in the trees will fall too
The cloudy skies with a bright pink background remind me that soon there will be no sun detected as the grey clouds will cover my little town for 4 months
The pesty mosquitos from humid summer nights have all died out
Beaches are closed for the winter
And those damn frosty tree tops reminding me of a long cold winter to come
In the beginning the new change will be blissful
But like everything else after time
It gets old

-Madeline Rose

We had our first good hard frost this morning. With another storm moving in tonight temperatures are forecast to stay above freezing for awhile but as Ms. Rose alludes, it is a harbinger of things to come. After looking at the pictures I got this morning with the mirrorless I can see that I need to get out the big girl camera with macro lens and tripod to capture the delicate patterns of the frost on the edges of the leaves. I’m sure the opportunity will arise in the next 44 days.

Day 55 – Tree Abstract

Trees2

The Presence of Trees

I have always felt the living presence
of trees

the forest that calls to me as deeply
as I breathe,

as though the woods were marrow of my bone
as though

I myself were tree, a breathing, reaching
arc of the larger canopy

beside a brook bubbling to foam
like the one

deep in these woods,
that calls

that whispers home

-Michael S. Glaser

Not feeling quite up to par today so I decided to create art from the files. This started as an intentional blur shot in Lithia Park where there is a grove of trees all planted in neat rows. I layered on some textures to give it a little more interest and depth.

Day 54 – Rainbow

Rainbow

“Rainbows: The gift from heaven to us all.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

Well I did feel like I’d been given a gift when I looked out my office window on what promised to be a dreary gray day with not much to recommend it photographically. So, I grabbed the camera and ran outside getting just a couple of shots before it faded away. I can also tell you that there are many many bad poems about rainbows on the internet and no good ones that I could find.