October 2020
Welcome to October 2020, the haunted month of a haunted year… What a crazy time! I’m just grateful I have my health, all the people I love have theirs too, so…cheers to that! May it continue…
This will be a short one, I kind of struggled a bit this month and overall I think it falls short. The fall colours hit but I could never quite sync up the timing between its glory and my freedom. Still, I think a couple more intimate shots worked out (though a tad more direct light would have improved things):
The ballerina…
“Friends”
For this next one, I liked the lines made by the mushrooms on this broken stump, remaining horizontal regardless of the direction of the trunk. There’s probably a philosophical message in there somewhere…
Later that day the sky became smoky again in the west, which led to a colourful evening:
I waited until the sun drifted into the trees. I kind of like how the trees appear to be holding up the light, like a streetlamp in Lothlorien, for all you Lord of the Rings fans:
I have no stories like the last couple of blogs, but I did observe some interesting bird behaviour. Back in spring I mentioned how the juncos were all over the ground, hopping around in a feeding frenzy. The bookend to that event is what they do in the fall when the “big bluestem” prairie grass is in full seed.
The seed heads are about 1.5m off the ground. I was walking through a field of it, and saw all these juncos hopping up and down like jumping frogs, leaping up to land on a seed head and shake it while it bent under the few grams of their weight, then dropping off to feast while their friends jumped for another frond. It was hard to catch in action, because focussing through the grass would put any camera to the test. These aren’t great, but it maybe gives the idea:
In retrospect I should have taken time to video, but somehow that’s still an afterthought. Clearly the spring feast is whatever they missed in the fall, made softer and more tender by the months of freezing 😋
Speaking of which, a few days later the frost came, shining in the morning light. I kind of like how the light streams in here, but the arrangement was tricky to get and I don’t think I quite managed to pull it off:
The placement of the elements isn’t quite right. I always struggle with these images, trying to find the proper balance between foreground focus and background blur. Ideally I’d like all the foreground (focus) elements to be on the same plane relative to the camera, but that’s not always possible, especially as I was wedged between two tiny poplars and nudging one would invariably send ripples through the other. I would have liked to have some separation between the left leaf and the branch, but making that happen caused the right leaf to slide behind the middle, so I had to settle for something less ideal.
Then the frost melted and left behind this deceptively simple scene:
I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, it’s a couple of rotting sticks fallen in some dead crap with a bunch of fungus. I could go find some more, right now, in the kiddie park across the street 😎
On the other hand…well I worked on this for about 45 minutes, so at least I was committed 😁 and there was a plan of sorts. It’s one of the first times I’ve really studied a scene like this and tried hard to implement all the stuff I’ve learned about light, what catches the eye, how the eye moves through a scene, etc.
Pulling back the curtain on this supposed wizardry, the idea is that Western eyes tend to move through a scene left to right and top to bottom (because that’s how we read). The eye is also naturally attracted to light vs dark, so most people study the bright areas before moving on to the darker. The left side of the image is lighter, and the brightest point is roughly around the top left third (so we got rule-of-thirds going here too). In theory the eye will rest on the top left fungus (which is a pretty cool looking fungus), and so that makes it the main subject. Ah, but here’s where I deceive! Because I think the bottom right fungus is far more interesting in terms of shape, texture, and colour. So my evil plan was to grab your attention with the flashing lights, hope your eye slid down along the brighter branch, leaped over to the darker branch because of the bright fungus top centre, and then travelled down the darker path (with a little bus stop at the small bright fungi centre-right) to finally come to rest at the intended destination. For me that was the true main subject, the other was a decoy, like one of those angler fish in the deep deep ocean.
Did it work? And was it worth doing on this picture? Honestly, I’m not even sure some of this stuff I’ve been “learning”…about how the eye moves, etc…is actually true. A lot of people seem to think so, but my own experience is that …sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. Still, I don’t suppose it can hurt to have more intention while crafting.
Let’s wrap this up with simpler stuff: snow. We finally got some. I was up before dawn in the city, and no more than 10 minutes out of town the ground was progressively more covered. Kind of exciting, though I admit I’m not quite ready for it…spring was yesterday! Still, my favourite thing about snow is that it softens all the clutter. In this case, making the lines of all the fallen logs really stand out:
On my way back from that hike, the sun finally poked through giving a classic scene. I just really like the muted colours:
And that’s it for October. I may skip November if I can’t get out more and maybe settle for an early December entry. We go camping this weekend, and have our first real snow falling as I type, so that will likely be an “event”, and perhaps some good images will come of it.
Cheers, and I hope you all stay warm and healthy!
