SERENDIPITY 2013

Serendipity is usually defined as the accident of finding something good or useful while not specifically searching for it.  Here are some unexpected positive photo surprises from this past year.

I only visited the Milwaukee County Zoo once in 2013, on a mild day in January.  And while the photo of the tiger in the following shot was not an accident as such, I was extremely fortunate that the tiger happened to be lounging directly behind the glass separating him/her from the patrons.  Moreover, the glass was relatively clean, letting me get this shot.  It also helped that he/she was basically looking right at me.

2013's winter was relatively mild, but on one bright, crisp February morning following an overnight snow, I took my camera over to Virmond Park hoping to shoot some snow scenes.  I was focusing on one stand of trees and shrubs that were frosted by the snow and cold when another individual also enjoying the morning walked into my composition.  I only got one shot but her presence really helped to establish perspective for the scene.

During our stay in Arizona in March we visited the Heard Museum, well known for its Native American art and artifacts.  But I spent at least part of my time taking photos of the museum itself, which is gorgeous.  In composing a shot of one of the building's exterior corridors of archways, I took momentary advantage of the fact that one of the museum employees was sauntering down the far end of the corridor.  I was lucky that I was able to capture his silhouette against the light at the end of the corridor and its reflection in the polished floor before he reached the end and disappeared.

On our return from Arizona we stopped for one night in Amarillo, Texas.  The land in that part of the world is as flat as possible, and I wasn't sure there was anything to shoot, but when I took my camera out for a few minutes, I realized that the water towers across from our motel were being lit by the late afternoon sun but were positioned against a bank of dark clouds.  Light is everything.

I regularly visit the Milwaukee Art Museum both for the art and for the architecture, and I have way more photos of the Calatrava addition to the museum than I should.  But the following shot at least is different.  It is of the entranceway to the museum leading off from the pedestrian walkway that extends from the west across Lincoln Memorial Drive.  I was just lucky (at least in my mind) to see the abstract being created by the almost, but not quite, symmetrical reflections in the glass doors.

In June I "discovered" Pioneer Village, a little historical park in Ozaukee County where a number of mostly 19th century buildings have been restored or reconstructed and are available for visitors on weekends during the warm weather months.  One of the buildings included a screen door and I realized that my best shot was to set my focus, not on the building's artifacts nor on the general scene outside of the building, but on the screening of the door itself.  Sort of a novelty shot, but I thought it worked.

I got the following shot while I was waiting for a red light in downtown Milwaukee.  I was lucky to see that the late evening sun was shining through a pedestrian walkway that connected the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts and a parking structure to the north.  The shadows cast by the walkway against the marble-sided building included pedestrians making their way from the Center to the parking structure.  I happened to have my camera and was able to get off a couple of shots through the open window of my car before the light turned green.

One of my sisters marked a birthday that ends in a zero this July, and my other sister and I flew to Denver to help her celebrate.  We stayed at a Holiday Inn that, while otherwise indifferent, included an atrium that was interesting both for its design and, I thought, its color palette.  I certainly wasn't planning to take any photos of my hotel, but I did have my camera and got the following.

I spent a fair amount of time this summer roaming around Milwaukee's near south side looking, with mixed success, for photo opportunities.  On one of those excursions, I spied an abandoned building in a largely forsaken industrial area on a dead-end road.  The exterior of the building was covered with graffiti.  I took the chance, parked my car in what I felt was a vulnerable spot, and took my camera to the building.  I wound up feeling the site was a jackpot of photo opportunities, even though it was in a very "sketchy" area, and returned three or four times over the course of the summer.  Here is a fairly representative shot from this site.

On another excursion to Milwaukee's south side (Walker's Point) on a Sunday morning, I had decided to get some shots of an older building that had an unusual, triangular shape.  Just as I was setting up, a young man, who seemed to have either mental health or drug abuse issues, decided to sit in the alley next to the building.  I am reluctant to take photos of individuals without their permission,  and I certainly was not going to ask this guy, so I took a quick shot, hoping he wouldn't be looking.  This is what I got.  He seemed to be smoking something and having a heart-to-heart discussion with himself.

On a foggy day in the early fall, I was hoping to get some shots of the apple orchards and pumpkin patches on the west side of Mequon.  On a whim, I turned onto a side road and came across a beautifully maintained horse farm and spent my time there instead of the apple and pumpkin farms.  Here is one of the shots that I got.

On another foggy morning (fog is an important friend of the landscape photographer), before sunrise, I returned to Virmond Park, hoping to take advantage of the weather.  While rooting around for shots, I came across a spiderweb that was decked in dew from the fog.  The air had been still, but now a breeze was springing up and I was concerned that it would interfere with getting a crisp shot of the web (which it did to a modest extent).  But while I was worrying about the wind, the sun came up and added a sun-like flare to my shot.

On that same morning, when I was finished with the spider web, I realized that the sun had indeed crept over the horizon, and I got a photo of the actual sun peeking from below the branch of one of my favorite trees in Virmond Park.  So, while I went out to take advantage of the fog, I was able to add the early morning sun.

In early December, on my way to what proved to be a very disappointing photography excursion, I spotted what I thought might be a tree farm adjacent to one of the freeways northwest of Milwaukee.  I was able to locate it through Google Maps and returned a few days later.  And, despite concerns about trespassing, access, and background distractions, it all worked out.

Finally, early on a very foggy day a couple of days later, on my way back to the tree farm, I passed some dense woods and, on a hunch, stopped and was rewarded with some shots that had a mysterious character in the natural blue light of the early morning.

So, while the above photos weren't exactly mistakes that turned out well, they were shots that succeeded in ways that I had not anticipated.  Maybe it just proves that if you have your camera with you and take enough shots, you will experience some happy surprises along the way.

John

STOPPING BY WOODS ON A FOGGY MORNING

Recently we were blessed with a dense fog that lasted through the morning, and I had the opportunity to take advantage of the weather by doing some photography.  I included some of those fog shots in the prior two posts involving a tree farm and horse farms.  Even before sunrise that day, to take advantage of the conditions, I was driving to the tree farm that was featured in my post of December 5.  However, on the way I passed a large woods in the western part of Mequon that is owned privately and decided to stop and get a few shots before moving on to the tree farm.  The woods were separated from the road by a wire fence, and it would have been difficult to take clear shots directly from the road.  So I ventured on to one of the private lanes leading from the road into the woods.  Whatever homes were located on the property were set back at least a few hundred yards from the road, and I just hoped that no one cared that I had parked my car just off the lane and was walking around in the woods.

So here is one of the first shots that I got.

Both the early hour and the fog combined to reduce the amount of available light, and because I wanted to achieve as much depth of field as I could, I had the aperture set at f/13.  The exposure for this shot was one second, so I was shooting with a tripod.  I liked this shot for the "knot" of small branches on the left side of the image.  By the way, I really didn't modify the white balance in post processing for these early shots.  The blue light was simply a function of the early hour.

Here are a couple more early shots in which I featured as foreground some of the leaves that were still clinging to their branches.

On my way back from the tree farm an hour later I had only a few minutes to catch a few more shots in the woods before an appointment I had to attend to, and here is what I got.  Note first the vast change in the color of the ambient light.

I have mixed feelings about these shots.  I did like the shot that featured a single maple leaf, but I was shooting handheld at this point and using a larger aperture setting.  As a result I was winding up with a shallower depth of field, particularly with respect to the more distant background trees.  As to the last shot, I thought the small horizontal branch helped.

After my appointment, the fog had still not lifted, so I made a third trip to the woods to get a few final shots.

I think there is a little too much going on in the above shot, and the configuration of the leaves doesn't have the balance that I was hoping for.  I thought that the following shot did a better job of creating balance between the foreground leaves and background trees.

I like the above shot because of the unusual symmetrical configuration of trees in the foreground.  The fact that I included the leaf-strewn floor of the woods also helped to create context and depth for the composition.  Compare it to the following shot that is elevated above the floor of the woods.

Interesting but as more of an abstract.

Finally, I spotted a pretty much dead evergreen whose bare angled limbs were providing a nice contrast to the vertical trunks of the surrounding trees.

It was at about this time that someone drove by on the private lane leading into the woods.  They slowed down, I waved, and they drove on.  I am thankful for their understanding.

John

HORSE FARMS

One of my recent landscape photo locales has been the Oldenburg Farm, one of the horse farms on the west side of Mequon, where I live.  Recently, I took a few photos at the farm when coming back from a visit to a tree farm that was the subject of the prior post.  Here is one of the shots that I got.

The colors were muted by the little bit of fog still hanging in the air and by the overcast sky, but the heavy frost on the ground helped the scene, and I liked the pastel quality of the smaller mid ground trees that were also coated in frost.  I also liked the column of smoke on the far left of the image.  Actually, I had to crop this shot down on the left because there was a large truck on the far left that I wanted to exclude and was just able to preserve the column of smoke.  A technical note: I had inadvertently set the lens aperture at a wide open f/4 on this shot, which cut down the exposure time but also reduced depth of field.  Even so, the image seems sharp enough where it counts--in the fencing.  So I was happy.

Here's another shot on the farm looking south.

I was looking to feature the large bare oak, despite the big gap in its branches, and was hoping that the fog would allow me to get more separation from the trees in the background.

A few days later we were blessed with a very dense fog, so I returned to the Oldenburg Farm, hoping to take advantage of the weather.  Here is a shot that illustrates just how dense the fog was.

This photo actually features that same oak in the upper center of the image.  And actually I had to work a lot in post processing to bring out any detail of the tree.  But I did like the play between the fences and the fog.  Initially, I thought I would crop out the darker tree branches appearing in the upper right corner of the image, but then decided that I didn't mind them as an element.

Here's a photo of the farm's entry road lined with trees that are now bare of leaves.

And here is a shot of just the right side of that entry road.

The fence nicely creates a line of perspective for the eye to follow . . . into the fog.  One of the things that makes this farm particularly attractive is that it is so beautifully maintained.

There is another horse farm a little farther to the west that also features nice lines of fencing, that I assume are used for walking the horses.  One of the double rows of fencing is perpendicular to the road, and I have been thinking of investigating whether those fence lines would offer anything of photographic interest.  I stopped by on the morning of the dense fog, and this is what I got.

Initially, I thought the tree might be right in the middle of the fencing leading into the fog, but such was not the case.  In fact the tree actually helps to make the shot work, I think.  I wanted to place the perpendicular fencing off-center to create negative space on the left side of the image.  However, I also took a vertical shot in which I centered the fence, and I thought that worked as well.

I was fortunate that I had the time and opportunity to take advantage of the weather to get these shots.

John

TREE FARM

On a recent (mostly unsuccessful) photo trek to the Horicon Marsh, I spied what appeared to be a tree farm just off the freeway.  After my return home I was able to locate the farm through Google Maps and decided to return to try some photography.  So earlier this week on a chilly but mostly sunny morning I returned with my camera.

This place is about 20 miles from my home and I fretted about a number of things.  It might be inaccessible or fenced off or posted with no trespassing signs.  Or worse, someone might ask me to leave.  Or the area could simply not work for some reason, for example, because of farm equipment or buildings or because of utility wires.  But such was not the case.  There was a service lane onto the land, no signs, no one to tell me to get out, and no utility wires.   The trees appeared to be of similar age and had been planted in very uniform rows, offering compositional opportunities.

Some of the shots I got were looking down the rows, as in the above shot.  While others showed the trees in a more random fashion, as in the following.

There was a heavy frost on the ground, visible in the above shots, which actually added to the scene.  There was also just a bit of fog that served to add depth to the compositions.  The early morning light also helped.  I had brought my tripod but thought there was enough light to shoot handheld.  Most of the photos were shot at f/11 to preserve good depth of field.

Here are a few more shots.

One thing I learned was that the direction of the shot relative to the sun had a major effect on the color, with photos shot into the sun being much warmer than those shot with the sun at my back.

I cropped a few of the shots to emphasize the tree trunks.  I converted the following into a black & white.

I took most of the shots horizontally, but here is one of the few vertical shots that I thought worked OK.

And here are a couple more shots looking down one of the "rows."  I left them off-center to add a little interest.

Lately, I have found that I am retaining only about 10-15% of the shots that I take.  However, on this shoot I found myself wanting to keep almost a third of the shots.  I felt that I had hit a jackpot of sorts.

A couple of days later, we were "blessed" with a dense fog that persisted into the late morning.  I decided to return to the tree farm to see what the fog might offer.  I think I was a little disappointed.  First, the fog was extremely dense, and in fact I could not see any of the trees until I was within perhaps 50 yards of them.  Second, the fog completely eliminated any background, as in the following shot.

Something had been lost.  I realized that some background was important to the overall composition. The shot and the one previous to it have a similar composition, but the farmland behind the first adds a context that has simply disappeared from the second shot.  A lesson learned.  Here are a couple more fog shots that I thought worked a bit better.

I did like the "ghost" trees in the second shot.  Because of the fog and low light conditions, I shot these with a tripod.

The foggy morning wasn't a waste, however, as I got some other landscape shots that I thought took nice advantage of the weather.  I will be posting those next.

John

HORICON MARSH NOVEMBER 2013

The Horicon Marsh is a large (32,000 acre) wetlands area about 60 miles northwest of the Milwaukee metropolitan area.  It is notable as a wildlife refuge, particularly for migratory birds.  The northern two-thirds, the Horicon National Wildlife Refuge, is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, while the southern one-third, the Horicon Marsh State Wildlife Area, is owned and managed by the state of Wisconsin.

Tuesday, November 19, promised to be one of the last really nice days before the onset of winter, and I decided to pay a visit to the marsh with my camera, my first.  My objective was not the wildlife but the landscape.  I had a great time but realized that I have a lot to learn about shooting landscapes in such settings.

Here is an early shot of a recently constructed boardwalk extending across the marsh.

This image has its problems.  First, there is flaring visible in the image extending toward the center from the upper left.  In addition, it's not much of a shot artistically.  However, it does provide a feel for what the marsh offers--vast flat cattail marsh areas leading to low "islands" that are populated with trees.  The boardwalk, I should add, is unusual in terms of visitor walkways in the marsh.  Most of the trails are formed of earthen dikes that have been built across the wetlands.

In addition to the dense cattail areas, there was a fair amount of open water in areas, and I was hoping those would present the photo opportunities I was hoping for but which I struggled to take advantage of.  Here is an early shot.

I liked that shot includes a "bend" in the waterway, but otherwise it just doesn't have much going for it, including that there really is no focal point.

Here is another shot that has a number of things going for it that the first shot did not.

First, while the earlier photo was taken around 1-1/2 hours before sunset, the second was taken perhaps only a half hour before sunset and the difference in light is notable.  Second, although I tried to include a foreground element in each shot, the cattails in the lower left of the second shot are more interesting, perhaps because the image includes their reflection in the open water.  The foreground weeds in the first shot are just that, weeds.  Third, I was lucky that there were a couple of ducks heading off for an evening "paddle" in the second shot.  They're small, but they do provide a point of focus.  Finally, I liked the relatively large expanse of water in the latter shot, creating some welcome negative space.  I considered "removing" the isolated clump of weeds in the lower center of the image, but decided it added something.

Even though the day was sunny, the temperature never rose above the upper 30s, and there was a bit of ice on many of the open water areas.  Here is a casual shot of some cattails sticking out above the thin layer of ice.

Too simple, but it has a bit of a zen feel that I liked.

The flat expanses of the marsh were punctuated by occasional trees, either singly or in clumps, as in the following shots.

The dead tree in this shot was quite distant and I was using my telephoto lens to bring it in.  I felt that the shot didn't quite work, though it might have been better if I had shot it from closer to ground level.

I was a lot closer to the tree in the following shot.

Not a great shot, but it does a pretty good job of reflecting the stark quality of marsh's landscape.  My regret is that I should have left a little space between the right margin of the image and the tree's one nearly horizontal limb.  Also, I should have taken the shot from a slightly lower angle so that the point where that limb connected to the trunk would have been above the line of the horizon.  These are the little things that I just don't notice at the time but that become obvious in post processing.

There was a nice clump of trees that I spied from the end of a "dike" road that extended to the center of the marsh.  I was able to get a bit closer on foot to take the following shot (one of several; this was the best of the lot).

I very much liked the nice arch that the trees made collectively.  My regret was that the cattails in the foreground were a bit of a distraction.  If only I had been a foot taller.

Finally, I noticed the following tree just to the side of the same dike road.

This is a shot I took an hour or so before sunset.  I really liked the tree's asymmetrical character, including how it arched toward the road.  In terms of problems, I would have preferred to take the shot from closer to ground level so that nearly the entire tree could be silhouetted against the sky.  However, the cattails were so dense and high that I would have had to clear out a very large swath of them to get a clean shot of the tree.  Not an option.  My other complaint concerns the jet contrails in the sky.  Not much I could do about that, however.

Here is another shot of the same tree that I took perhaps 40 minutes later, only 20 minutes or so before sunset.

A better shot, I thought, for a couple of reasons.  First, the color of the sky was much richer (and the contrails weren't as prominent).  Also, I positioned the shot so that the arch of the tree extended over the little clump of trees in the distance in the lower right.  Just a bit more interesting, I thought, although I lost some of the emotional effect of looking directly down the road.

I was extremely impressed with how well maintained the marsh is in terms of visitor amenities, at least the state owned portion that I visited.  These included a large and beautiful visitor center, friendly personnel to answer questions and provide suggestions, maps, and well maintained trails.  And, unlike the state parks, there was no admission fee.  I will look forward to my next visit, and hopefully I will be able to learn from my initial experience.

John