September photo competition: Farms and gardens - 02 September 2011 - New Scientist

A theme with relevance and beauty is chosen for New Scientist's September photo competition. Check out the link!

September photo competition: Farms and gardens - 02 September 2011 - New Scientist

Sunflower patterns

Harvest of the sunflowers. Most are to be kept for the birds, coming winter (if we are advised to feed them again; at the moment, because of a contagious bird disease, we'd better not stimulate their getting together). But birds don't wait: some of the flowerheads were already mostly eaten (first picture).

For photographers (and mathematicians!), sunflowers are irresistible because of the patterns that the seeds make in the flowerhead. And as usual: patterns come out better if your eyes are not distracted by colours, so the second picture comes in black-and-white.

Pokeweed revisited with bonus

Ladybird on pokeweed
Originally uploaded by DFW-Photo

Looking at the same spike of the Pokeweed that I showed here a week ago, it looks quite different now (overview of the plant below), with all berries that were ripening last week already disappeared (eaten by birds?) and the last few, at the top of the spike, blackening now. But the bonus this time was the orange ladybird (there must be umpteen kinds of ladybirds!) scourgng the little berries for aphids and the like. Problem for the photographer: such a little insect is faster than you think, and it always seems to sit at the wrong side of the spike.
Info for other photographers: although this photo was made in subdued daylight (it was a cloudy day), I used a (normal set-up) flash to get the highlights. More importantly: the flash enabled using a short enough shutter speed to avoid blur due to the wind.

Silly season is over, and so is the rain

The French just started their month of holidays, but I’m back again, back to photos and blogs! Hope you all are on the net, too!

It rained this morning, but after the rain the diffuse light filtering through the clouds showed all details of the plants in the garden to their utmost advantage. Subtle colours on the Phytolacca esculenta (pokeberry) are my sample picture of that. These weeks I find the pokeberries fascinating with their berries changing from green to blackish-red.

The raindrops on the leaves make the sights in the garden even better. Alchemilla mollis (Lady’s mantle) is famous for the way it keeps drops of rainwater—or dew, for that matter—on its leaves for a long time. How come some kinds of plants do, and others don’t? No idea! But I do know another advantage of Lady’s mantle: it has short, stiff stems, so that the leaves do not move with every whiff of wind; I tried to take a picture of raindrops on fern leaves (to have something different than the eternal Lady’s mantle macros), but they would not hold still for long enough, even though there was just a tiny little bit of wind around the house.

Magnolia in Spring--Far to Go to Reach Imogen Cunningham

Really irresistible, this spring: temperatures are much above normal since some time and all plants and flowers are just exploding! After a day of hard work in the garden, the magnolia tree looked gorgeous in the sunset. Even better is the purity of a single magnolia flower in close-up. But a snapshot like mine is far from the perfect photo Imogen Cunningham once made of a magnolia--I swhowed her photo a long time ago already.
Still, I'm not dissatisfied with this snapshot, the more so as it was taken with the 'second camera', the Panasonix Lumix TZ5, and without a tripod. Not bad at all, this little compact camera! But that's something I said before, too ;-)

Daffodils in spring

Ain't they sweet? Two looking at each other, the third looking in a different direction. Menages à trois are always risky ;-) Daffodils have something human, with their big trumpets acting like faces or noses.
Yet even without such strange thoughts, they remain irresistible objects for photos, every spring again! The backlight made them even better. Enjoy your weekend, whether it be in spring as in our neck of the woods, or whatever is your season (this might be read in the southern hemisphere, after all).

Alea iacta… Another competition

Not sure if I'm testing myself or the juries, but I just sent in three photos to a national competition, the BNAFV's first-ever 'Foto Online'. At first I though I would not do it, expecting thousands of photographers to take part. But a few days ago we got a reminder saying that there were 180 participants. Well, then I could give it a go—basically with the same photos that I submitted for the regional contest less than a month ago. I redid the black-and-white one for which I got the comment that is at too grey and 'murky'; tried to strengthen the drama and contrast in the air. I still like the picture of this strange building in Almere, and am curious if I'll get similar comments from this national jury.

The other one from the regional contest that I submitted, was the allium (from our own garden, taken as a test-picture on the first evening that I had my Alpha700), again because I like it and also a little bit because someone in the audience found that it deserved a higher grade.

And you're welcome to comment too, of course!

Thistle in black-and-white

As promised in the previous entry: the first photo with my new camera. Photos of plants and flowers I can make in our own garden--thanks to my wife's green fingers. And thanks to nature's whims, because I don't think that the highly decorative thistle in this picture was intended to be there. Never mind; it is there.

Is this not a picture that might appeal to Imogen Cunningham? Her modernist flower and plant photo's of the 1920s are among the best in almost two centuries of plant photography that I know! I hope that the Trust won't mind my reproduing a little example of her most classical magnolia flower photo. Looking at that example, I guess that she might have tried to come closer than I did: there are three main buds in my picture and she would have chosen a single one, but I liked not only the variegated leaves, together with the composition of a minor "strong point" in the upper left and the major point of attention on the right.

As for the technicalities: the picture was made with the camera + macro lens on a tripod in natural, diffuse light. Postprocessing was just a few minutes of Lightrooming. I converted to black-and-white, reduced the greens and surrounding colours (and for good measure increasedg the reds and magentas, though I did not see much of a change doing that), and finally I increased the contrast with the tone curve, to ensure some deep blacks and then have the full range till almost pure white.