November 2008
And that's pretty much fall
The west coast of Canada is not known for
it's fall
colours. Most of our trees are coniferous and don't change
colour. The most common deciduous tree here is Alder and while it
can go a bright yellow on the way to dropping leaves, you won't see
red. We decided to walk around Van Dusen to take in a bit of fall
colour from species that don't (normally) live here.
The last few days it rained so many trees have gone from full and
colourful to sparse with pretty carpets.
The garden has a corner with a number of
mature
Japanese Maples. These trees have spectacular colours. We
had a line up of photographers wanting to take advantage of this
particular tree.
One of those techniques I've seen done well
but never
had a chance to do myself is the "leaves on the water" long
exposure. Van Dusen has a number of small streams that cross the
property and one happened to be next to a beautiful maple. The
proper time depends on the speed of the stream, so with a bit of
experimentation I figured this is a 15 to 30 second flow. My
first trial was linear flow (water in straight section) but I found
that getting compelling composition was hard. I turned my
attention to a pool where the water swirled. The swirl had a
period of at least 20 seconds (slow moving water) so unless you were
looking for it, you wouldn't see the leaves moving. With a bit of
experimentation, I got a picture I was somewhat happy with.
Rainy Windows
So I was looking to make one of those "rain drops are lenses"
pictures. We had a rainy afternoon so I had no shortage of wet
windows to work with. I got out the tripod and took a shot.
Didn't work out very well. I was able to get the
lens effect (barely) but nothing compelling. I think a few things
are going on. The worst problem is that water on glass forms a
half lens which behaves like a really wide angle lens rather than a
normal lense. If this was water drops on a spiders web or screen
door (where there is a bulge on both sides), this would have worked out
better. Making abstract photos seemed to be easier. I did
learn one more thing- the resulting image in the drops will be upside
down so make sure your composition takes this into account.
I was snapping away and I noticed a mosquito on the glass. He was
still alive (you could see him moving) but he didn't seem to care when
I put my camera up close. Cool - I have a photo of a live
mosquito.
Tags: fall colour(12), VanDusen(12), stream(4), swirling(4), macro(4), tree(3)
People: Helen(2)
From: John Harvey Photo > November 2008
From: John Harvey Photo > Blogs for 2024 to 2005 > November 2008
Hi, Lovely images. The colours in the Japanese Maple Trees are stunning. My favourite has to be 'Helen in the Leaves', great perspective and isolation ... makes me smile :-)
Colin Hall
Friday, February 19th, 2010 at 09:20:21
Last Modified Saturday, January 21st, 2023 at 23:47:03 Edit
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