A Sunday Stroll

Mrs. Muse and I headed out for a hike through the Julington-Durbin Preserve in Mandarin, Florida this morning. An absolutely beautiful fall morning, temperature in the low 70s. There is something new to shoot every week out here. I took my 150mm f/2.8 macro lens and shot these handheld. Working with a tripod would have improved the quality of some of the images, but half of the point is to get a little exercise... Enjoy!

To Every Thing...

...there is a season...

Reaching

A live oak retreating from the Atlantic breezes on the trail at the Fort Matanzas National Monument, South of Saint Augustine, Florida.

Shot with my Nikon D700 and Sigma 24-70 f/2.8 lens. Minimal processing in Lightroom.

Another Sunday in North Florida

Just another Sunday in paradise... we ended the day at the County Dock on the Saint Johns River in Mandarin as we often do. There are many such photos throughout this blog, but it's a scene I never get tired of shooting. It always changes. No two sunsets are ever the same, as cliche as the sunset photo has become in the digital imaging age. The biggest bonus is that the algae seems to be gone. No dead fish. At least for now. Nature is resilient, and will always prevail. Long after we and our polluting habits have passed to dust, my river will remain... Then there was this morning in the backyard...

There were probably 20 butterflies in our gardens when I went out to the porch for breakfast this morning. Fritillaries, swallowtails of several varieties, monarchs, and skippers. by the time I could grab a camera, they were out of there... but this black and white tailed dragonfly was hanging out on the blue porter weed.  Little did he (or I) know what was creeping up from behind...

I have no idea what the little brown guy is... a hornet, some sort of fly? I didn't see him until I uploaded the image out of the camera. Pretty cool piece of luck. So yes, just another day in paradise after a remarkably stressful work week. We both really needed the sunset and cool river breezes down at the dock tonight. That leaves us with one last paddle stroke into the sunset....

County Dock - After the Storm...

Another Sunday evening trip to the County Dock on the Saint Johns River, off of Mandarin Point.  The tide was in after a hard rain, and the ammonia smell of the algae blooms, while still present, was tolerable, and there were no dead fish in the water. In fact, the water was teeming with manatees -- a family of at least three, maybe four kept us well entertained for a good thirty minutes. Unfortunately I had only my 10-20mm lens on the D200 tonight, expecting to shoot the drama in the sky, not in the river, so no photos of the sea cows worth sharing today... On the other hand, the scene was beautiful as the cloudy remnants of the recent storm played agains the descending sun....

All of the images here (except the one above) are three-exposure HDR images, processed using Photomatix Pro. Some were also run through a Topaz Adjust filter to provide a variety of interpretations of the scene. So enough chatter -- I'll let the photos speak for themselves. These will help you understand why I'm in love with this river...

Unti next time -- enjoy your week, appreciate the world around you, and take good care of it....

Today in the Backyard

Today was one of those comfortable (even for Florida in July), lazy Saturdays when the choice between heading out somewhere or just hanging around the house was an easy one. We stayed put. Worked on the yard a bit --- and kept the D200 nearby with the 150mm macro lens. The D200 give the lens 50% additional reach thanks to the digital crop factor that I don't get in the full-frame (but preferred for most shooting) D700... The one humming bird that I saw was in and out too fast for me to shoot, but I did find the occasional target...

A dragon fly finding nourishment in the spent blossom of a canna lily (taken from above and behind). He was an excellent and patient model...

We have replaced a portion of our water and fertilizer-hungry Saint Augustine lawn with native perennial peanut. Now well established after a month in the ground, these self-sustaining little ground covering plants gift us with tiny bright yellow blossoms every morning...

This clown spider has taken up residence in the side yard, having woven a multi-level condo / insect trap that would make I.M. Pei proud. Even wide open at f/2.8 the breeze was blowing too hard for a perfect hand-held shot... but you get the general idea...

Getting eye-to-eye with the Dragon made him a little nervous -- so he took off, then decided I was probably harmless and came back, keeping those huge eyes on me as I moved around and closed in. The intricacy of the wings is amazing. Click on the image for a full sized view.

Just goes to show you that if you're patient and observant, nature will put on the best show on earth for you...

Nature Where You Find It

Temperatures up to the high 80s and low 90s now, and one day of hard rain... that's all it takes to kick start the blossoms in our back yard. So yesterday's photo outing did not require the expenditure of much energy -- just a walk out the back door with my D700 and the 150mm macro lens (still my favorite all-around glass)...

This is a beautiful, new magnolia blossom (magnolia grandiflora) in the woodsy northwest section of the yard. These fragrant blossom last of one day, then turn brown and drop off. This 60 foot tree is popping about twenty new blooms every day right now.

An orange and yellow Canna Lily -- the first to bloom this year in one of our south-east section beds. I transplanted about 50 of these from our center garden about 5 years ago to various beds around the yard. They multiply quickly and add a great touch of color wherever they grow...

And this interesting blossom is an African Lily -- one of the few non-natives that we have left in our Florida yard. They add nice filer foliage and beautiful intricate flowers. I shot this in full sun and processed the image in photoshop elements by de-selecting the blossom and using the "average" filter in the background (exposed at - 3EV in bright, direct sunlight in order to darken the background, leaving the result above after processing).

The Finest Season

I have always found Spring to be the finest of all the seasons. Not that each does not have its own special charm and beauty, not to mention necessity. But Spring -- whether in the southern New York of my childhood, the northern Ohio of my early adult years, or the northeast Florida of my last 25 trips around the sun -- has forever been by favorite...

Green Eyes

Here in northeast Florida, where we are not in the middle of the tourist vision of Queen Palm trees, mouse ears, south beach glamour, and year-round 70 degree temperatures, Spring is the wildflower season. To many these are weeds to be kept from copy-cat mid-western style lawns of manufactured Flora-tam grass. To me they are amazements... signals and signs that nature will triumph every time, despite our best efforts to subdue her.

Lyre-Leaved Sage

This has been a particularly abundant year for Spring native wildflowers here in metro-Jacksonville. You have no doubt read about our pollen storm following an unusually cold winter of extended freezes here in the extra-tropical north of the Sunshine State. That's Nature's way of self-preservation... while the non-local immigrant-planted warmth-loving invasive flora were frost-burnt to the bone beyond the point of no return, the natives turned on their reproductive afterburners to assure their future survival in this world of climate changed seasonal weather patterns.

Fleabane

So last weekend we hiked the trail down at the Julington-Durbin Preserve, a thin stretch of protection on property that used to be part of a cypress swamp, logged out long ago, to photograph the spring crop of tiny, flowering native wonder. I used my 150mm macro lens in order to get up close and personal with the blossoms, some of which were no more and an eighth inch in diameter.

Southern Fleabane

What a fantastic time to on the hoof in the recovering, ever more rare, natural sand hills and wetlands of north Florida...

Wildflower Macros

Friday was my birthday, so I took the afternoon off from work and headed out to spend the rest of the day in my favorite environment, engaged in a favorite activity. Kay and I drove to the Julington-Durbin Creek Preserve a few miles from out house, Camera in hand...

I brought only my 150mm macro lens, planning to shoot the northeast Florida wildflowers that would, no doubt, be arriving in abundance after the wet, warm weather of the previous day. I hadn't planned on the huge, remarkably fast flock of Tree Swallows that was all over the pine flat. Wrong lens to shoot them, but I did get one lucky shot off (above), as a solo speed-burner zipped by... then on to the wildflowers.

The yellow guy above is a bud-heavy goldenaster. They are everywhere in the piney flatlands and in many local lawns right now. The opening blossom is about 1/4 inch in diameter.

The purple bloom above is a viola septemloba (literally purple flower with five petals).

This last one,as near as I am able to guess, is a dwarf huckleberry. Beautiful little quarter-inch white bell-shaped blossoms on stems covered with bright green, waxy leaves. More north FLorida wildflower images can be found on my website here.

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.

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.