Winter Evening

The up and down weather around western NY prevented me from getting out for a hike again this week. It seems every free day I get is the one where it is 38F, dark, and raining. All the nice crunchy cold days with the sparkling white snow and the crystal blue skies pass by my office window – so near and yet so far. Oh well (at least we escaped the ice storm that trashed communities further east – been there, done that).

My day off started out with a few inches of snow on the ground, but it was quickly scribbled out by a warm (relatively) rain. By late afternoon however, Mother Nature decided that on second thought maybe the snow was a better idea so the temps started falling and the rain changed to snow. When Evening arrived he found all the tree branches outlined in white and a fresh clean coverlet of snow spread over the ground. It’s like the rain never happened.

With the light waning fast, I decided I had to get out and feel the air for at least a few minutes. I took my camera supposedly to take some shots of the Christmas lights on the house - I got sidetracked.

An owl beckoned me over to the woods and I just wandered for a little while. The farm yard light glowing through the trees eventually drew me back out of the darkness.

I once photographed some trees illuminated by street lights back when I was in college. They were just snaps and didn’t turn out that good so I haven’t done it since. The scene before me now begged me to take another shot at it. The bright light perched high on its telephone pole showed up the new snow with brilliance and surrounded everything with deep inky shadows. Just the kind of dark/light play I like.

I had been thinking about photographing trees at night ever since I saw a show of O. Winston Link  nighttime railroad photos at the George Eastman House. As usual the computer images do not do the prints justice. Link was so meticulous in his staging and lighting that the images don’t seem staged at all and the darkness surrounding the scenes serves to accentuate the power and romance of the great engines.

While not up Link standards, some of the shots aren’t too bad in a “shot from the hip using existing man-made light” sort of way. The light was a mercury vapor so everything took on a green cast. The ones I converted to black and white (hey, black and white from me; will wonders never cease?) obviously got rid of the green cast. The one I left in color, I adjusted with the white point tool – it did pretty good, but I can still see a bit of green in the building walls which I really don’t mind.

I found out that this is a situation where I really needed to use the camera’s histogram function and not to rely on the preview screen. Everything looks happy and bright on that little screen when viewing it in dark surroundings, but when I got home I found most of the shots to be under exposed. Good thing I bracketed my exposures and got a little help from my computer to bring them back from the dark abyss.

I think I might try something like this again sometime.

MDW

Fly Fishing and Photography

 

OK, I’ve not added a post for a couple of weeks. Some bad weather and the Thanksgiving holiday have prevented me from getting out to the forest for any photos or inspiration.

Oddly enough one thing I have had time for (while doing some waiting) was to read a small book on fly fishing – The Art and Science of Fly Fishing by Lenox Dick. It may be a bit of a stretch, but let’s see what I can find in common between fly fishing and photography.

This book is very light on things like how to tie flies, complicated high tech tackle, and fancy casting methods. The author states right in the introduction that the two most important factors in fly fishing are “the ability to read the water and proper fly presentation” and later he reinforces the point with “Flies are fascinating and fun to experiment with, but they are third in importance to reading the water and proper fly presentation”.

By “reading the water” the author means being able to look at a stretch of water and figure out where the fish are likely to be feeding. Some important locations are in the calm areas on the lee of large rocks or other obstructions, the entrance and the exit of deep pools, and along undercut stream banks.

By “fly presentation” he means understanding how to cast the fly to the correct spot and how to let it work with the current so that it appears to the fish as a real bug and not some artificial lure that you tossed into the water with a plop and then yanked about randomly.

Understanding the water and understanding how to work the fly comes not from a set of rules but rather from study and patient observation of the lives of the fish and of the bugs. Dick includes a chapter on entomology describing the life cycles of the more important “flies” so that the reader can get a handle on when (time of the year and time of day) and where (near the bottom or near the surface) fish will be feeding on the little buggers. He also suggests netting live bugs from streams you plan to fish in order to match your fly to the size and color of the real thing.

Familiarity with a good fishing spot is important too. A local angler can observe a stream when the water levels are low to spot rocks and shelves that are submerged at other times of the year. Long study allows one to ferret out less obvious and less accessible areas that are overlooked by the casual fisherman.

I’m not a fly fisherman, but I have a collection of hunting, fishing, and general outdoor books on my shelves. I picked this one out sort of randomly. I expected long chapters covering the minute details of gear and casting. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Dick took a more holistic approach to the subject that obviously comes from spending more hours standing in streams catching fish than from reading books by the fire or from practicing his casting in the back yard.

I see a parallel to nature photography here. Certainly a nature photographer needs the right equipment and a good understanding of how to use the technology to his/her advantage, but the technical aspects are not as important as some make out. Beware speding too much time wrestling with the fine points of one brand of lens over another at the expense of experience, knowledge, and “feel” for the subject itself – nature. Equipment should be third on the list of priorities.

Spend more time observing the forest than perusing catalogs. Return to favorite areas over and over to learn the subtleties that casual walkers miss. Read fewer books about photographic techniques and more about trees and water and bugs. Spend more time dreaming  about light and visualizing images than about new gear.

MDW