SUNLIGHT AND HOSTAS

Recent warm weather and the occasional rain has really popped the hostas. Their leafy green clumps have shot up like magic. Some are already well over a foot high.

The photo was made a few days ago, just as the late-afternoon sun was starting to sink behind the tops of the tall sycamores on the island across from the cottage. Myladylove and I were sprawled in our pair of deckside rockers. Tired and fairly bummed. After working all day on various kitchen remodeling details, we'd come to the joint conclusion neither of us liked the paint color we'd chosen and just applied to one wall. We'd now have to buy something else and do the job over.

Looking around, I noticed how low-angled sunlight glowed through the semi-translucent leaves of a nearby hosta and made a couple of casual shots…click, click. Frankly the image turned out way better than I expected. Simple, straightforward, compositionally strong.

Wish I was even half this pleased with the kitchen wall.

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COLOR & LIGHT

Small, volunteer silver maple, backlit, with background river shadows.  

Photography is all about "capturing" light. Color is that fourth element of a scene or object besides shape, form, and texture. Light impacts and changes color. 

New leaves, riverbank ailanthus, backlit.

In nature, light is ever-shifting, depending on time of day, season, sky conditions, direction, even parts of a nearby landscape that might affect the quality or quantity of light reaching your subject. This, in turn, affects the light's color and thus the color of whatever you're looking to photograph—no matter if that light is reflected, direct, ambient, etc.

Shade-growing species tulips,
dramatically spotlit by a bit of sun.

The trio of images in today's post were all taken over the last few days—and all were shot within a dozen feet of one another, while sitting in my deckside rocker waiting for a passing warbler to come flitting along. They're nothing special so far as content goes…it was the light and it illuminating effect on the color of my subject that I was trying to capture. 

Light is everything in photography—the elemental magic capable of transforming the mundane into the sublime. Even turning that proverbial sow's ear into a silk purse—at least visually.

The trick is learning to see.

Often, when I can't seem to find a scene or subject to photograph—like when those warblers I'm anticipating fail to materialize—I shift my thinking and start searching for situations featuring light which, through its wonderful alchemy, has altered the commonplace into something beautiful or interesting—a moment worth recording and sharing. And just as soon as I flip this mental switch, I invariably start to spot one potential image after another.

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NATURE'S STAINED GLASS

To a lot of photographers, harsh, straight-on backlight can be a bane to making a picture, or at least an unwelcome difficulty to be worked around—either necessitating a move to change the angle of the shot, or by adding fill flash. A shutterbug's gotta do what a shutterbug's gotta do, I suppose.

When it comes to nature photography, my personal shooting philosophy is to keep things as natural and spontaneous as possible. I'll move around to work a scene or subject, but I'm also prone to try and make my first shots from the original angle, thinking there must have been something worthwhile there which caught my eye in the first place. Artificial light is employed only as a last resort.

Mind you, I'm not saying my way is the only way, or even the best way. Nor that you shouldn't adjust your shooting position, or even pop a flash now and then. Just that I try to minimize being a stage manager or lighting director. I prefer to embrace the conditions at hand and try to find a way to work with what I'm given, recording rather than creating. The creative part, for me, is finding the shot and getting an image that captures the essence of its attraction. Backlight becomes a tool rather than an obstacle…and sometimes the primary impetus for the shot.

The butterfly shot, above, is a good example. As butterfly images go, it isn't much good. You'd never use it to show someone what a common Buckeye Butterfly, Junonia coenia, looked like; it isn't even a "pretty" or "artsy" butterfly image. Nope, what caught my eye, and prompted the photo, was that dastardly backlight itself—strong morning sunshine streaming straight at the butterfly…and through its wings!

I saw this not as "Butterfly the Insect," but  "Butterfly as Stained-Glass." Nature's stained glass. 

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