Category: Flora

Day 67 – Grape Leaves

GrapeLeavesw

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

One of the challenges in a project like this is getting to day 67 or 78 or 93 and not repeating yourself. There are after all a finite number of subjects. Though there are an infinite number of ways to treat them. I almost threw this image out because it was a little overexposed but I really liked the blend of colors so decided to play with it in Photoshop and came up with something I at least liked better. I was thinking to find a poem about art or creativity but was not successful. However, I think this quote from Leonardo says it all.

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 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 52 – Forgotten Grapes

ForgottenGrapes

Wine Tasting

I think I detect cracked leather.
I’m pretty sure I smell the cherries
from a Shirley Temple my father bought me

in 1959, in a bar in Orlando, Florida,
and the chlorine from my mother’s bathing cap.
And last winter’s kisses, like salt on black ice,

like the moon slung away from the earth.
When Li Po drank wine, the moon dove
in the river, and he staggered after.

Probably he tasted laughter.
When my friend Susan drinks
she cries because she’s Irish

and childless. I’d like to taste,
one more time, the rain that arrived
one afternoon and fell just short

of where I stood, so I leaned my face in,
alive in both worlds at once,
knowing it would end and not caring.

-Kim Addonizio

I came very close to spacing out my duty to post today. I have been taking a Genealogy class and today’s class was about organization. So I decided by files could use a little more organization and went home and went to work. Only when I went down to dinner did I realize I had not done anything about posting an image for today. So, I decided to just start with the last time I was out shooting and work my way back. Fortunately, I didn’t have to go far to find these forgotten grapes from the winery the other day. I just love the colors and I think they play well together. And, while I had rejected this poem for my shot of the vineyard I liked it much better today and it seems to fit the photo better as well. We’ll see how it goes for tomorrow with more rain in the forecast and more genealogy files to organize!

Day 50 – Vineyard

Vinyard

November

This is the treacherous month when autumn days
With summer’s voice come bearing summer’s gifts.
Beguiled, the pale down-trodden aster lifts
Her head and blooms again. The soft, warm haze
Makes moist once more the sere and dusty ways,
And, creeping through where dead leaves lie in drifts,
The violet returns. Snow noiseless sifts
Ere night, an icy shroud, which morning’s rays
Will idly shine upon and slowly melt,
Too late to bid the violet live again.
The treachery, at last, too late, is plain;
Bare are the places where the sweet flowers dwelt.
What joy sufficient hath November felt?
What profit from the violet’s day of pain?

-Helen Hunt Jackson

Drinking wine at my local neighborhood winery the other day I noticed how pretty the red leaves of the vineyard looked against the mountains. So I came back one morning this week to try and capture the effect. This marks the halfway point in my journey. I’m hitting my stride, I’m getting into a routine but I’m also looking forward to being done and I have so many images now (3791 to be exact) that I could easily cruise through the rest of the project. But of course that would not be in the spirit of the thing and just think, I could end up with another 3 or 4 thousand pictures before I’m done, which should be enough to get me through the winter in terms of creating new art.