ZIMBABWE SCULPTURES

On Sunday, the 16th, we decided to see a Frida exhibit at Salt Lake City's downtown library.  We ultimately did not go to the Frida exhibit but in the process came across a sculpture garden in front of the library that included a number of sculptures created, I believe, by one or more Zimbabwean artists.  Following are a few of the sculptures that we saw.

Because there was quite a bit of urban clutter in the background, I opened up the aperture fully to f/4 to blur out the background as best I could.  This cost some resolution for a portion of the sculptures, but the price was worth it in terms of reducing background clutter.  Of the two shots above, I liked better the more frontal view in the second shot but liked better the darker background in the first shot.

I chose a much tighter shot for the following sculpture.

I should perhaps have closed down the aperture to get more depth of field for this shot, since I had virtually excluded any background.  However, the eye is drawn to the facial features in the center of the image, so the lack of focus in the periphery is not really an issue and, in fact, adds some overall depth to the shot.  Unfortunately, the resolution for this photo is a bit "soft."

I really liked the following sculpture.

The fact that the subject's hair was left as "unfinished" adds to the power of the sculpture, as does the melancholy in the subject's downward cast expression.

Here is a tighter shot of this sculpture.

Here is the last of the sculptures I shot.

I like this shot for a couple of reasons.  First, the background is really not a distraction.  In fact, the yellow of the fall color adds to the overall interest of the shot.  Second, the face in the foreground is really quite sharp, creating a nice line between the lighter face in the front and the darker "neck" behind it.  Despite the fact that this is a single sculpture, made out of one piece of stone, the subjects do not appear to be sympathetic to one another.  Pretty powerful.

ANTELOPE ISLAND RANCH AND 1948 DODGE TRUCK

Antelope Island, situated in the Great Salt Lake, was formerly a ranch owned by the Mormon church and known as the Fielding Garr Ranch.  The main ranch buildings are located on the eastern shore and toward the south end of the 15-mile long island.  It was an operating ranch until 1981, at which time the state of Utah acquired the island and converted it into a state park.  The Utah state park service maintains the ranch buildings and grounds, which give the appearance of a ranch that was simply abandoned with everything left in place, including a fabulous 1948 Dodge truck.  I found myself taking a lot of photos of the truck.

It isn't clear if the truck is operational, but it has clearly seen better days, both outside . . .

. . . as well as inside.

I especially liked the various colors of patina that the bare metal of the truck presented.

I liked the simplicity of the door handle shot, though it might be more powerful if the image were more tightly cropped around the handle and lock.

There were other interesting objects scattered around the grounds that offered photographic opportunities also.  Here are a few.

I felt the above shot worked better as a B&W.  However, in the following shot the fact of the missing tine got "lost" when the image was converted to a B&W, so I left it in its original colors.  I thought that the texture of the corrugated siding provided an "historical" feel to the shot.

The pattern of this wrought iron piece against the white background appeared to provide some interesting opportunities, and it clearly worked better as a B&W.  However, I was disappointed in the shot because I could not get a proper balance across the overall image without partially rotating the image, which would have presented problems because of the concrete blocks.

ANTELOPE ISLAND

Geri and I are in Utah this week visiting our son, Jeff, and his wife, Bei.  I brought my camera for the trip, so the next several posts will feature photos from our visit.

Two years ago when we came for a visit we took a trip to Antelope Island, which is an island in the Great Salt Lake.  The island runs north and south and is perhaps 15 miles long and about 3-5 miles wide.    It was originally owned by the Mormon church and run as a ranch but is now owned by the state of Utah and is a state park.  On Thursday, the 13th, we made another visit to the island.  On our previous visit the seeing had been terrific, and I had gotten some great shots of the lake and the surrounding mountains.  On Thursday, there was a good deal of haze in the air, which made photography a lot more difficult, especially in the middle of the day when we were there.  Following are a few of the landscape shots I attempted.

The dark haze on the horizon is visible in both these shots.  Pretty disappointing.

When I blew the above photo up, I realized that one of the guys in the boat was taking my picture as I was taking his.

The Great Salt Lake exists because it sits in the Great Basin, which includes much of the states of Utah and Nevada and portions of the states of Oregon, California, and Colorado.  The Great Basin is surrounded by mountains and other land that is higher and there is no outlet to the ocean.  The floor of the basin in the region of the Great Salt Lake is very flat, so in most places the lake is very shallow for a substantial distance from the "shore."  In working with the photos that I shot, I found that it was best to crop them to exclude much of the sky, which was pretty featureless the day we were there.  The width of the photos also accentuated the flatness of the terrain and the line of the horizon, such as it was.

We did take a short hike on the west side of the island where there were some hills with elevation.  Here are a couple of shots I got on the hike.

Although they are difficult to pick out, there are a number of people on the beach in the shot above

Again, I felt that cropping the above photo into a linear shot helped.  It also helped, I thought, to include the foreground vegetation to provide more perspective.  Despite the viewing conditions, the land does have a stark beauty.

This, obviously, is a photo of Jeff taking a photo of Bei.

There were some opportunities for wildflower shots also.  This is probably the best of those that I took.

I did remember to take this shot with the lens wide open (f/4) to isolate the flower from the background.

Named Antelope Island, the island does include a population of antelope, and we saw quite a few during our visit.  The antelope tended to be on the move most of the time and kept their distance, so capturing a good shot of them was a challenge.  Here is one taken from behind--not the most becoming, although it was quite a sharp shot.

And here is the best of the other antelope shots that I got.

This antelope was quite a distance from our car, so even with a 300 mm lens, this involved quite a bit of cropping.

American bison (buffalo) were introduced on the island in the late 1800s as part of a ranching operation and have generally thrived.  When we visited the island two years ago, it happened to be the day of the annual "roundup" at which time the bison were herded into pens on the island to be inspected and marked.  We were a little earlier this year, so the bison were just lounging, grazing, and doing whatever it is that they do when undisturbed.

Bison, despite the fact that they are generally not fast moving, pose their own photographic challenges for a number of reasons.  First, they generally have their heads down to graze, so that they are obscured by the tall grass.  Second, they are quite dark against the lighter background of dead grass, making for difficult exposure choices.Their coats on the front part of their bodies are generally heavier and lighter, and it is difficult to capture this unless one overexposes the overall shot.  Third, the animals are huge and I was not comfortable getting too close.  Here are a few shots that illustrate these issues.

It is pretty common to see one or more birds perched on the bisons' backs.

Here are a couple of better shots.

At one point on our hike, we encountered a bison standing about 15 feet off the trail.

After initially thinking I would simply walk past the bison on the trail and hope that he would just move away, we decided to move off the trail, giving him a wide berth.  Here is another shot of this bison as we passed by.

On our drive we came across another group of bison walking parallel to the road and got some better shots of the animals backlit by the afternoon sun.

In the shot below, I liked how the bison was framed by the yellow shrubbery behind it.

Eventually, this group of bison chose to cross the road ahead of us.

This brings up the obvious question:  Why did the bison cross the road?

LAKE MICHIGAN SUNRISE

Now that the days are getting shorter, I am starting to have enough time, even after working out in the morning, to get to the lakefront before sunrise.  Friday morning, October 7, promised to be clear, and about 20 minutes before the sun came up I headed to the lakefront at Concordia University.

Although the sky was clear, there was enough humidity in the air to obscure the line of the horizon over the lake.  Nevertheless, the sky was turning an interesting color, so I started taking some shots.  There was a small tree at the edge of the bluff, and I thought for my first shot it would be good to frame the sky with the silhouette of the tree.

It would probably have been better to have positioned the camera to eliminate the vegetation to the right of the tree.

On the other hand, for this next shot I eliminated the tree and focused on the grass and shrubs.  I also decided to crop the shot to eliminate a portion of the sky and to emphasize the horizontal components of the scene.

Here are a couple more shots that incorporated silhouetted shrubs (weeds, actually).

I liked a lot the simplicity of this last shot.

For the next shot I eliminated everything except lake and sky.  I also cropped it to emphasize the linearity of the shot.

A little too simple.  This shot would have had more power had there been a clearer line at the horizon.

Finally, the sun broke the horizon.  Here are a few of the shots as the sun rose (or as the horizon fell away, if you will).

I have not been able to identify the dark object to the lower left of the sun in the shot above.  It did not appear in any other photos.

The above shots were pretty disappointing.

Here is one final shot of the scene down the lakeshore to the south.  I liked this shot quite a lot.

It seems evident that I did a better job with the shots that did not include the sun than with those attempting to capture the actual sunrise.

There were a large number of birds in the sky in the early morning.  I left a few of them in the shots but "eliminated" most of them in post-capture editing.

I also need to work on color balance.  If I had put the camera on auto white balance, it would have been "fighting" the natural color of the scene.  In the end, I felt the color in these shots was pretty close to what I was seeing.

I will definitely plan to do this again.

WET FEET, DEAD FLOWERS, AND BACKLIT LEAVES

On Thursday, September 29, after yet another rainy day, I decided to take advantage of a break in the rain to take a few more nature photos in our neighborhood and headed back to the natural grounds of our friendly Unitarian Church to see what might be available.

On the way I spotted some cattails in an open field just east of the road and stopped to see if I could capture something interesting.  As I said, it had been raining for several days (six in a row, in fact).  The cattails were actually about 10-15 yards off the road, and there was a fair amount of vegetation obstructing my line of sight.  So I needed to get quite close to get a decent shot.  What I thought was an open field turned out to be what in Wisconsin is referred to euphemistically as "wetlands" or "marsh," but what growing up I would have referred to simply as a swamp.  In no time I was standing ankle-deep in cold water in my running shoes.  Moreover, I did not have any solid ground to stabilize my tripod.  Here is the best of the shots that I took before I decided that I should move on.

I did like that the background consisted of three sections--the light of the sky, a far band of trees, and a near background of brush.

Once I got to the church, some of the early shots I took were of a dead cone flower.  (Am I getting desperate for subject matter or what?)  I was attracted to this flower because of the way the dead petals drooped below the "blossom."  This first shot was taken at f/13.

What I do not like about this shot is that the background above the flower is a little dark, creating some conflict with the flower.

Here is another shot after I had repositioned the camera slightly to eliminate that background distraction.

The following shot was taken at f/25 in an attempt to maximize the crispness of the flower, front to back.  (Notice the difference between the two shots in the crispness of the spikes at the back of the flower.)

This last shot is nice, but there is a bit more clutter in the background.

Next I spotted a dying leaf that was backlit by the sun.  I took a series of shots, including some aperture bracketing.  A breeze had sprung up which caused some annoying movement of the leaf and spoiled a number of the shots.

Here are two of the better shots that I got.  The first was taken at f/7.1.

The leaf "pops" well from the background, and I think the backlighting helps a lot with that effect.  However, there is some clutter in the background that is a bit distracting.  

The following shot was taken at a wide open aperture of f/3.5. 

The background has pretty much been taken out of the photo, resulting in a more or less total isolation on the leaf.  What I like about this shot is that it is a little underexposed, emphasizing the backlit color of the leaf.  Unfortunately, the backlighting was stronger on the top portion of the leaf than on the bottom portion.  I think the small branch running behind the leaf adds a lot of context to the photo.