Alien Egg?

I was walking  along the rail trail, south of Little Falls, looking for Spring flowers and sundry wild life.  Now that I recognize what the Wild Ginger (Asarum canadense) plant looks like, I'm seeing tons of it.   This North American native perennial is large and lush, somewhat reminiscent to a violet, though much bigger.   The trick is in finding the flower, which is low to the ground and well hidden by the leaves.

I had to pull a couple of its leaves out of the way to get this shot.    For all the world, it reminds me of an egg from the Alien movie franchise.  See the facehugger ready to pop out?

The flowers are supposed to bloom from April through June, so I'll probably have more opportunities to photograph them.

According to Wikipedia, the pollinated flowers develop into a pod that later splits open and is eaten by ants.

I also learned that this plant has aromatic properties similar to real ginger.  But although it was used by native Americans as a medicinal herb, the plant contains aristolochic acid and asarone, both of which are carcinogens.

One group of early American settlers (witch hunters) called Wild Ginger (wartchase) and believed witches used it to rid themselves of warts so they would not be recognized.

Ohwha Tagoo Siam

This kōan from my deformative Boy Scout years, circa 1969, has stayed with me.  Recite the mantra:
O-wha Ta-goo Siam!

Say it over and over again, and you will be enlightened.

This week, I've been packing my telephoto lens every morning in the hope of catching the WVU Rowing Team at practice on the river, near where I work.   Luck has not smiled on me.

What I did manage to get is nothing worthy of Nat-Geo, but it will have to do.  Here is a Canada goose (Branta canadensis) proclaiming its stand-on vessel status.

The next shot is less crisp, but it spoke to me:

What is said is "Don't paddle away from me when I'm talking to you!"

Where to Begin?

Where to begin?  Or where to continue?  It's been since October of 2015 that I've posted anything here.  You may have thought that I was dead.  In a way, you were close.

But I don't want to use this as a forum for personal demons.  It would be far better for me to use this space as a blog for my imagination and as an outlet for creativity.

'Nuff said.   Let's do it.

Mr. Blue Sky

There's something odd about Valley Falls State Park near Fairmont.  It seems that the sky is overcast whenever I go there, and that's despite the fact that the sky is clear elsewhere.

The fall colors were probably at their peak on Sunday, and at least the sun was breaking through in places.  Some think that sky adds to the drama of the picture.  Some think that it's a shame that it was overcast.

This is for them:

I have had some experience with using PhotoShop to fix a dull sky, but I had always steered clear of situations where there was a lot of feathery detail like heavy foliage.  You should see the challenge that such a shot would present:  the foliage is difficult to isolate and mask.

I found and tried this tutorial: Photoshop Tutorial: How to Replace a sky in photoshop cs5.  The trick was to use channels, isolating the one channel which presents the greatest contrast between the foliage and the sky.  In this case, I worked with the blue channel.  You then progressively tweak levels to further isolate the difference between foliage and sky.

While the results are nice, I can't help feeling cheap.  I've cheated in some way, improving upon nature.

On that pensive thought, here's my SYTL: ELO - Mr. Blue Sky (official video - 2012 version)

Something from the Oven

Took a recent set of pictures of the Henry Clay iron furnace at Coopers Rock State Park.  This isn't quite an HDR shot.  Rather, it was created with an Adobe Lightroom plugin called LR/Enfuse.

LR/Enfuse does a nice little trick with a number of bracketed shots, creating a well-balanced lighting effect without the intensity of a high dynamic range picture.

While shooting there, I met a photographer from Pittsburgh, who was also shooting the furnace.  We swapped lenses, so I got to try his Tamron 28-80 mm lens.

I learned that this opening has a special name -- it's called a tuyere. That's the name for an entry through which the blast of air enters a furnace.  If you're interested, here's where I got my old iron furnace anatomy lesson:  http://www.oldindustry.org/OH_HTML/OH_Buckeye.html#Description.

Revisiting Illustrator Revisited

Previously, I shared an Adobe Illustrator drawing that I was thinking of using as a subject in the framing/matting course that I'm taking.

I showed it to one of my Ukrainian friends, and her daughter made lots of useful suggestions.  As a result of the suggestions, I completely overhauled the color work of the original, collapsing a variety of disparate colors into a very limited palette of art history colors.  The results are not unpleasing.

First of all, the daughter thought that the white background of the original was too glaring.  Rather than fussing with mat color schemes and conspiracies, the suggestion was to just use a harmonious background color and frame directly to that.  After experimenting with the creamy-yellow color that's in the flower petals, I tried the green that's in the leaves.  That received several thumbs-up.

I just ordered an 8"x10" print through Superior Photo.  I can't wait to make this one of my first framing projects.  Prior to this, all of my classwork has been with cutting mats.  That experience has been frustrating, to say the least.  It was almost an epiphany for me to realize that I didn't have to mat this particular work.

Bang, bang!  Maslow's hammer came down upon my head.

Illustrator Revisited

I'm taking a ten-week adult learning class on picture framing and matting.  Most of my effort is with my photographs, but I thought that I might resurrect one of my Adobe Illustrator drawings from a few years back.

I took one of my favorite pysanky designs, the "piven," which is a stylized rooster.  This is it, in the front-right.

Going the extra mile, I touched up some of the rougher areas around the cock's comb and tail feathers.  The nicest effect that I tweaked was making the flower stems on the bottom look like they were passing through the scroll work of the "feet."  Previous attempts had the stems breaking at the junctures.  This left tiny gaps that you could see in the blown up image. This time, I copied portions of the scrolling and placed them in a layer over the flower stem.

When I mat this, I'm thinking of a couple of concentric rectangles.  Even the $2,000 mat cutters in class can't do oval cutting.  The inner quarter-inch mat would use the light green color from the picture, and the larger outer mat would use the reddish brick color.  Something about the way that this browser is rendering the artwork is making the brick color look like cherry-red.  I sure hope the final printed copy remains brick!