Tag Archives: macro

Up the Hill

Although the weekdays this winter have been really good (because of my desk lamp and my lunchtime walks), the weekends have been very difficult. This one has been no exception. Not only has the weather been overcast these last days, but Alex’ recent illness left him unwilling to toerate bright lights. I spent yesterday in a dim house, and by today it was starting to tell on me. I felt unfocussed, off-rhythm, and deeply depressed. I wanted to curl up in a corner and simply cease to exist for a while. (This does not mean I wanted to die. I simply didn’t want to exist.)

Martin, saw me sitting by my light box, leaning my forehead on it like it was my only friend. So, though he was unwell, he sent me out of the house while Fiona napped and Alex played video games. I decided to do something energetic and definitive: I would climb Arthur’s Seat, and take some pictures on the way.

So I did. There wasn’t a lot of light even out of doors, but what there was, I got. (I also took 75 pictures. Luckily for your bandwidth, dear reader, my usual 33-50% good photo ratio did not hold up! I was just short of 20%, partly because of the low light.)

Photos of big stuff

My camera isn’t much on the big shots – I feel that it makes them all look like snapshots. (Or maybe I’m not a landscape photographer…) But I got a few wider-angle pictures that were special enough to post.

On the way up, looking north.

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Taken 7 January 2006

The moon rose over the ridge as I left. (Note that this photo has been cropped)

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Taken 7 January 2006

Coming down the hill, toward Newington.

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Taken 7 January 2006

Rock shots

Stone from the wall by the Commonwealth Pool

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Taken 7 January 2006

Fragmented rock at the summit

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Taken 7 January 2006

Stone from the wall by the Pollock Halls

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Taken 7 January 2006

Plant shots

A single thistle head in the grass

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Taken 7 January 2006

Gorse blossoms

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Taken 7 January 2006

Dead thistle heads.

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Taken 7 January 2006

Gorse against the sky

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Taken 7 January 2006

Bramble leaves

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Taken 7 January 2006

Moss and dead grass

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Taken 7 January 2006

Stone in the hillside

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Taken 7 January 2006

Seed heads against the sky

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Taken 7 January 2006

First Day Back

Back at work today, moved onto a project that I’m not expecting to be as fun as the one I’ve been on for the last 18 months. (That is a high standard – very little I have ever done professionally has been so enjoyable.) The rest of my gang is still together, launched onto something else, leaving me with the strong impulse to sulk and kick the furniture.

Rather than do that, I took a walk to the Botanics at lunchtime, getting my dose of daylight and my usual smattering of photographs. There were some OK ones, which I don’t intend to post, and some entirely uninteresting ones. But four really stood out.

Fern leaf, belly-up on the grass.

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Taken 3 January 2006

Pattern: the dead leaves of a palm, still hanging from the trunk (this photo has been cropped, a thing I usually don’t do.)

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Taken 3 January 2006

Lone bamboo shoot

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Taken 3 January 2006

Bamboo thicket…another “pattern” shot.

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Taken 3 January 2006

I also stopped by the California Bay Laurel again, just to smell the leaves. Then, completely accidently, I found the Botanic’s only tan oak (Lithocarpus densiflorus), which I had planned to search for this month. Just walked straight to it, thinking, “That looks like tan oak.” And so it was.

A Day at the Beach

So the last day before I go back to work, the New Year’s Bank Holiday, we decide to go to the beach for the day.

Actually, we managed about 45 minutes on North Berwick beach itself before the kids got too cold. And with everything shut for the bank holiday, we didn’t even get to take refuge in any warm place but the car. Martin did a bunch of photography with the big cool camera while Alex threw rocks in the water and Fiona walked around exploring the sandy world. (There was also a certain amount of climbing on rocks, running about and shrieking, and generalised beach fun.)

Nonetheless, I did see a couple of things that just needed photographing, and as usual, the camera phone came through!

Rock and seaweed

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Taken 2 January 2006

Roseate seaweed

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Taken 2 January 2006

Rocks and sea glass. (I am particularly fond of sea glass, for long complicated reasons.)

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Taken 2 January 2006

I love the dark trails in the sand under this bit of seaweed.

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Taken 2 January 2006

Yeah, yeah, more seaweed. But I like it.

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Taken 2 January 2006

I did a bit of colour messing with this shot – but only a tiny bit. I love the textures, but I know I may be alone in that.

Taken 2 January 2006

This is the prize shot. I tried it with the big fancy camera, but actually, this one from the phonecam is the best of the day. In my opinion.

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Taken 2 January 2006

(And, by the way, happy new year.)

Snow Pictures

Although we didn’t get the snowstorms that the north of England has been enjoying (?) the last day or so, we got a dust of snow last night. Today was cold enough that that dust didn’t go away. I was out in it, getting some zippers for making sofa cushion covers, and believe me, it was cold. (Yes, yes, for Edinburgh, a mild day for the arctic, or Toronto, but I’m a Californian and a wimp at that.)

I took a walk through the Meadows, looking for things to photograph in the snow, but found more on the city streets.

Cobbles on Buccleuch Street:

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Taken 28 December 2005

Leaf from an Edinburgh University courtyard:

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Taken 28 December 2005

Ice crystals between the cobbles:

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Taken 28 December 2005

But the richest venue for photographs turned out to be the walk back from the bus to my house, over the football pitch and beside the weedy path:

Dead grass in the snow:

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Taken 28 December 2005

Live grass in the snow:

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Taken 28 December 2005

The blades corkscrew in the cold:

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Taken 28 December 2005

Snow on the weeds:

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Taken 28 December 2005

The Nature of Photography (and the photography of nature)

Due to a combination of factors (longer lunchtime walks, better camera phone, encouragement by commenters), I’ve been taking a lot more pictures of late.

I’ve been in love with photography since I was 15 or 16, when I got a 35mm camera (a Pentax ME Super) from my parents along with free run of the darkroom. I spent a year or two exploring the world as seen through a lens, and inhaling vast quantities of extremely interesting chemicals.

One of the things I learned early on is that other people don’t see the same things I see. Yes, we both look at a tree and go “Big thing, brown on bottom, green on top.” But something in me is also going “Oooh! Oooh! Pattern and regularity of leaves as they grow, shapes of trunks and branches! Wow!” Seriously. For every tree unless I consciously shut it off. I walk through the Botanic Gardens with my mouth open, or smiling irrepressibly, when I go alone. I also get that feeling from a lot of repetitive patterns and textures. (Ask Martin about my reaction to the hobbit cloaks in the Lord of the Rings films.)

But I found, showing my “Oooh! Oooh! Pattern!” shots to other people, that they didn’t get the same buzz. My mother once said it looked like I’d just pointed the camera at everything and taken a picture. The two decades since then have been spent, at least in part, trying to find ways to show other people what I see all the time. I do things like choosing a contrasting element against the patterned background, or photographing patterns with other redeeming features, such as good colour saturation.

But the other day, I found a link to a set of photos by professional photographer Jim Brandenburg. Although I’m intrigued by the specific challenge he set himself – 90 days’ photography permitting only one exposure a day – what really delighted me is that some of his pictures are ones I would take myself (if I were his technical equal). He can use pattern, and pattern alone, to lead the viewer into the shot. His quaking aspen shot, the Patterns of Branches, and most of all his picture of Norway Pine grove are all part of what I have been trying to capture for twenty years.

I’m not discouraged to have seen these shots – far from it. I’m excited by the chance to learn from them. Maybe I can find other ways to lead people into the world I see, and show them how beautiful it is.

Today, at lunchtime, I made my first attempt at a “pattern” photograph that did not use a contrasting foreground element to focus the viewer.

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Taken 20 December 2005

On an unrelated note, I also got my camera to do this ghostly image (entirely untweaked, I promise you!). It’s of the disused Scotland Street tunnel, which has one brave plant trying to eke out a single-leaf existence in its shadows.

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Taken 20 December 2005

Treespotting

I think I need to set more challenging objectives for my lunchtime walks. I found two of the three madrones (Arbutus menziesii) on the first day of searching. The hunt did take me into a bed that I hadn’t wandered through before, but actually, one of the madrones is visible from the road outside the gardens.

Anyway, the proof:

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Taken 13 December 2005

One of the reasons I like madrone so much is its papery bark. On the younger branches, it peels off in entire sheets, exposing the green underbark. On older wood, it alligators like a charred log, which is much less dramatic.

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Taken 13 December 2005

The thirteenth was an overcast day, which made it difficult to take photos in natural light (I don’t use the camera’s light). The ones I got were either against the sky (this one has been lightened considerably to bring out the red in the leaves),

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Taken 13 December 2005

…or lucky shots, still enough not to blur but slow enough to get the tremendous colour saturation that comes from overcast day photography.

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Taken 13 December 2005

I will have to pick a more evasive plant for my next quest.

Found it!

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been engaged in an occasional search to find my favourite California native plant, the California bay laurel, in the Botanic Gardens near work. As you can see from the link, although the website has a bed location, it does not have a clickable link to the bed map. This made me wonder if the entry were old and outdated. Was the tree still there?

Even if the bed map entry was correct, I wasn’t sure where in the bed the tree would be. That bed happens to include a building as well as a number of plants, so it’s not the easiest place to search. Particularly for a plant I wasn’t sure was there.

But today, I found it.

The proof:

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Taken 12 December 2005

I knew the tree before I saw the label, of course.

The bay laurel grows in all of the places I spent my childhood. It’s an integral part of the species mix up at my parents’ cabin, where it was a traditional headache cure for the native Americans in the area. It grows on the UC Berkeley campus, and indeed I got into occasional trouble for climbing it there. And for many years, one grew just outside my bedroom window in Piedmont.

The fragrance a broken leaf brings me right back to those places and those times. I brought one back to the office (bad of me to take it, I know). Each time I smelled it, I had another tiny flashback to my past, and another microburst of homesickness. The mix of bitterness and memory reflects the nature of the bay laurel itself.

Bay laurel is in the family Lauraceae, the same family as European bay, laurus nobilis, (as well as cinnamon, avocado and sassafrass, but that’s another story). Bay laurel has about a third more resin ducts in its longer, narrower leaves than its European cousin. The fragrance and flavour are slightly different between the species: the California bay is sweeter and sharper, the European slightly more bitter. It can be used in cookery much the way its relative is, but one should use only part of a leaf where the recipe calls for a whole bay leaf. Californian bay is also more of a tree and less of a hedge than its European counterpart, and is useless for topiary.

Soup, anyone?

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Taken 12 December 2005

(Next target: Arbutus menziesii, also known as Pacific Madrone.)


(While downloading pictures from my camera, I also ran across this one from last week.

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Ivy stems.

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Taken 8 December 2005

Rainy Day Walking

It was a damp and muddy Monday for a lunchtime ramble. I was going to go to the Botanics to try to track down a California bay laurel (the tree I miss most from California). I stopped on the Rocheid Path to take some pictures and chat to a chance-met colleague, and never made it to the Botanics.

Fallen leaf on mossy wall.

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Taken 5 December 2005

Golden leaves and black stems.

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Taken 5 December 2005

I don’t know what this wee plant is, but it’s cute.

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Taken 5 December 2005

Surprise! We’re in the middle of a city!

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Taken 5 December 2005

I know that not all of these pictures are worthy of Ansel Adams. My camera is extremely limited in what it can do, and even with a good camera I can’t always capture what it is that I find beautiful. I simply hope that the delight I felt in seeing these things comes through in the images.

Tuesday Walk

It was a lovely day, cold but bright. The autumn is turning to true winter, with bitter winds, with the last leaves dropping from the trees. But with the bright sunshine, I hardly cared about the cold. I walked along the Rocheid path by the Water of Leith, then through the Royal Botanic Gardens back into Canonmills and back to work.

The last leaves on the oak tree on the Rocheid Path.

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Taken 29 November 2005

Piece of a wrought iron fence, Arboretum Avenue. Sunlight and shade.

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Taken 29 November 2005

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Taken 29 November 2005

Holly leaves, Aboretum Avenue. I love the shapes of these leaves, but I think I need a better background next time..

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Taken 29 November 2005

Red leaves with the green, Royal Botanic Gardens.

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Taken 29 November 2005

With a walk like that, on a day like this, the world is a good place.

Phone Pix 2

I changed my phone a few months ago, leaving my old Nokia for a new Sony Ericsson K750i. The ostensible reason was that the Nokia’s keyboard was wearing out, and I could no longer reliably answer calls. The real reason, of course, was that phone camera technology has moved on. Martin got a better camera phone, and all of a sudden I wanted one.

The new phone coincided with a greater emphasis on my lunchtime walks. The past few years, I’ve tried to be rigourous about going out at lunchtimes, since noticing the effect a midday walk has on my Seasonal Affective Disorder. Between the weather and my work patterns, this autumn has been a particularly good one for walks – possibly one of the reasons I have not sunk so deep into myself thus far this year.

I tend to go along the Water of Leith Walkway, through the local park, across the Botanic Gardens or by whatever other approximations of nature I can find in an hour. These times refresh my spirit, and my new phone has been a good tool to make myself see and appreciate the things I pass.

Here are the best of the bunch:

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Taken 19 September 2005

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Taken 19 September 2005

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Taken 29 September 2005

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Taken 17 October 2005

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Taken 18 November 2005