Salvaging a Cold, Wet Weekend....

It had been our intention to go "primitive" (no electricity, no running water) camping in Florida's Seminole State Forrest this weekend. But.... with rain and temperatures in the 30s forecast, we turned old and wimpy and decided to camp out in comfort with family and friends in Winter Park (FL) instead. While this meant we were not going to have the chance to spot any bear, deer, or big birds, we did manage to capture the images of a few feathered friends outside of the kitchen window...

The photo above is a Downey Woodpecker, hunting a bug meal in a small tree. Below is what we believe to be a Carolina Warbler in the same little tree a few minutes later....

TUrned out to be a great weekend after all -- not much photography, but very much time with family and friends that we don't get to see often enough... simple!

Down The Digital Orton Path

Michael Orton was a pretty ingenious guy. Experimenting with film photography, he took two shots of the same scene -- one perfectly exposed and the other overexposed (too much light) by a number of stops. Back in the old darkroom he's expose the perfectly focused, correctly lit shot to the photo paper, then expose the over-exposed (lighter) version, but shift the focus (make it blurry) on the same piece of photo paper. Basically he performed a double exposure of two versions of the same scene... now we get to do that digitally...

Click on the image to view full size (copyright Paul Garfinkel, 2010 - All Rights Reserved!)

This photo is from our outing at the Julington-Durbin Preserve last weekend, right at the creek. I took the original image, and using Photoshop Elements, digitally overexposed an exact copy of the it, then added a gaussian blur filter. The copy was virtually unrecognizable. I then placed one image over the other and blended them using the "multiply" filter, flattened the image (turned two layers into one), lightened some of the shadows and voila!

An Orton process tends to add a dreamscape effect to landscape images. More fun can be had by experimenting with the duplicate file -- desaturate the colors, remove the colors completely, shift the hue of the image, remove or add one color only, increase or decrease the amount of blur or try different blur filters (motion blur, for example)... have fun and create some art!.... simple.

Transitions

Sunday was the perfect north Florida late February day. Temperature near 70, deep blue southern skies... After eight full weeks of winter and a couple of freezing nights in the last week it was welcome relief. We hit the trail at the Julington-Durbin Preserve at the south end of Duval County, early enough to enjoy the warmth, and late enough for the angle of the sunlight to come slashing in at about 45 degrees.

I love the backlit effect the natural light provides in the late afternoon, piercing the translucent shell of a recently ruptured seedpod. Even though this is Florida, almost everything here is the color of this pod -- gold and brown. Here and there we are getting early previews of the spring to come -- red maple seed pods and some early blooming redbud -- but most of the vegetation has been frozen to a crisp by an unusual number of nights in the low to mid twenties.

I shot this photo with a Sigma 150mm macro lens -- the actual seedpod is about an inch long. Looking forward to the transition to spring, which will start here in the next couple of weeks as the azaleas spring to life. Change is truly the only constant....

Orange Bracket Fungi and Aperture 3

This photo, shot a couple of weeks ago at Alpine Groves Park in northern Saint Johns County, Florida, demonstrates nature doing her business in perfect style. The orange bracket fungi are important in the process of recycling felled trees in the north Florida woods...

Nature's clean up crews are part of the absolute perfect beauty of the natural world, and framed with the first green leaves of Florida's February pre-spring weeks makes wonderful art. Now the rest of the story...

I downloaded the 30 day trial version of Apple's Aperture 3.0 photo processing software onto my iMac. I've tried earlier versions and have always found them to be extremely s-l-o-w. Ever hopeful as a Mac fan that their product updates will improve functionality -- I was quick to try this one out. Lots of new features that are great for processing at a professional level (200 new features, to be precise). So.... the image above? Processed in Adobe Photoshop Elements. I, along with other reviewers that I have read, have found Aperture 3 to be slower than ever, not to mention unstable. A simple saturation fix, that happened instantaneously in Elements on a 9 megabyte file took a full 30 seconds of waiting and watching the ball spin in Aperture. It's like waiting in the line at the bank behind the sweaty guy who can't find his checkbook. Time to change lines... Maybe the next version will run efficiently. Not holding my breath.

Belated Valentine's Wishes..

Okay, so I've been remiss in my posting -- missing in action -- lost in cyberspace...Yep - all of that. Many, many things on my plate these days so I'm looking for, and taking the easy path here...

Here's a photo of lichen on a tree at Alpine Groves park just south of Jacksonville -- I had started an extended rant on the subject of civil discourse (lack of it, actually), and may in fact finish it one of these days... but for now -- the road less traveled by. A small natural hug. Non-adversarial, natural, interesting, not controversial, apolitical. Just a heart. Maybe a reminder. Look for the good -- act on the good. Sometimes you find it when you're not looking... simple.