Tag Archives: nature photography

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Empty Spaces

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“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form” states the Heart Sutra, one of the best known ancient Buddhist texts. The essence of all things is emptiness.”
― Eckhart Tolle

The space between atoms. The space between stars. So much of the Universe is made up of distance and empty space…at least in one perception. But perhaps our Big Brains can turn that around and imagine that spaciousness is a thing that something can be full of. Vastness. Expanse. Capacity. Potential.

I have been silent on this blog for a few weeks. I have been doing some Grief work and spending more time in the company of humans than in the company of my camera. I went to visit my brother at his new home on the coast yesterday. I had Patti’s Challenge in my mind as I walked from his house to the beach, and I brought my camera along.

If you’ve ever spent time along the shores of an ocean on a completely cloudless day, you will have had a glimpse into the spaciousness of our position in the Universe. No matter how much you may have filled your immediate environment with Stuff (things, people, thoughts), there is still empty space available to contemplate. There is still an expansiveness available. I find a hopefulness in that, and it feels natural and healing. Especially in a time of catastrophic chaos and dire predictions.

I wish you Peace, Lens-Artists, and the Beauty of seeing possibility through your lenses.

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Tell Us Why

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Tina of Travels and Trifles is an award-winning photographer. Her challenge this week is a tough one: “choose up to a MAXIMUM OF TEN images which are your all-time favorites. No matter the subject or how long ago they were taken, you need to TELL US WHY you chose them. If you select images for their sentimental value they should still be strong from a technical perspective.“

This one always gets great reviews, and I’ve posted it a few times. It’s got the “WOW!” factor of an exceptional landscape that shows depth, scale, color, and unique geographical features. Steve is the human scale model in the lower third, perfectly placed. I love how it turned out! I also love that it was an absolute WOW moment in real life. We’d driven a long way from Wisconsin to the Badlands of South Dakota, and this was our first view of the Sage Creek Wilderness, where we’d be camping. We pulled over at this vista to stretch our legs and take a look. And yes, WOW!

This one is a shot that I was really excited about. I had just bought myself my first digital camera for my 50th birthday and was learning how to use it. We were out on the Ice Age National Scenic Trail when these sandhill cranes suddenly took flight just yards away from us. I quickly shot off my new Canon without even looking at the settings, and this is what I got. I was thrilled! The clarity, color, wing position, composition with birds and clouds…everything came together in an instant without any forethought. What luck!

I think I did a pretty good job depicting this iconic Wisconsin landmark. I got the rule of thirds in the composition, great Fall color, and an interesting sky. After I posted it, someone contacted me asking to use the image on a Memorial Service leaflet. I consented proudly.

I was both thrilled and terrified when my son asked me to do his wedding photo shoot. Outdoors, to boot. I’d never studied portrait photography, never even played around with it much. The weather was perfect, fill-in flash helped eliminate shadows, somehow I got the lighting to work with their very contrasting skin tones, but the fact that they’re both ridiculously photogenic was my absolute best strategy. It all worked out beautifully! I love the old-fashioned lace and the Mona Lisa smile in this one.

This one may be my technical best. I took a long time playing with exposure settings to get the water to do that impressive silky thing. Then a Lens-Artist Challenge taught me how to soften the image in post processing (thank you, Bren Brashley!) to create a dreamy look that I really love. This is Alsea Falls in Oregon, my new home state, so it also represents a journey.

These four just prove that there are plenty of fascinating things in the natural world that make great images when you capture them in their ordinary splendor. Color, depth of field, cropping, and getting close make them stand out.

This final one is my favorite as a photo journal; it really tells a story. There’s mood and action, reflection and great light. Plus, it’s my daughter on the Oregon Coast, so it’s sentimental to me.

I hope you enjoyed seeing my favorite photos…again. And learning why I think they’re special. I love seeing your favorites, your travels, and hearing your stories. Thanks, Lens-Artists!

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Recharge

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The guest host for this week, Egidio, creates a very relatable and inspiring challenge showing how he feels Recharged by being in Nature. I completely agree, shouting “Yes!” to every quote, every landscape, every story in his beautiful post (do visit and see for yourself!). Nature is my first choice for re-connection to Life Force. But when I’m really depleted, especially by all the busy-ness of the hamster wheel that is my brain, I not only have to be in Nature, I have to be in my Body.

My first approach to getting into my Body in order to Recharge is meditation and yoga. My breath reminds me of the gift of Life and focuses my attention on the renewal that is available every minute of the day.

photo credit: Dharam Kaur Khalsa

I gaze at the forest outside my bedroom window and enter into the time warp of slow breathing and mindfulness, becoming aware of every part of my body as I stretch and balance on the mat.

When I am ready for a full-body Recharge, it’s time to step up to more input from Nature and sensory stimuli. Kick off the shoes, run barefoot in the cool ocean water, breathe in the salt spray, be dazzled by the sunlight on the water, and when possible, bring along a Friend.

To be honest, though, I am not a runner. My full-body, joyful, sweaty exercise is Dancing. I go to a couple of Ecstatic Dances each month so that I can be immersed in a musical journey of my own movement and rhythmic response. I feel music in my body in the most instinctual way, having had only a smattering of dance teaching but enough observation to imagine worlds of cultures emanating from my imagination through my arms and hips and feet. My over-worked brain lets go of logic and embraces mood, emotion, attitude, and community bonding. In this freedom, I am Recharged, Reborn, Re-imagined. At the end of the night, though my feet are throbbing, my “batteries” are full and pulsating with Life.

I don’t have ANY photographs of Ecstatic Dance. My hands and eyes and imagination are focused on being in the Moment, alive and active and engaged. I am not the observer with a lens. I am the Art in Motion. You’ll have to imagine the cosmic lighting, the moving bodies, the charged atmosphere of angles and surprise that might create a visual image. Better yet, go find some dancers who are welcoming and JOIN IN! You may get a battery jolt you’ve never experienced before.

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Black & White or Monochrome

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Anne, our Challenge host this week, instructs, “Black and white is the result of only using black or white and ‘shades of’. The ‘shades of’ meaning grayscale… Monochrome photos contain variations of only one color and nothing else. Meaning, different shades of one color like blue, red, green, etc.” My side-by-side comparison of Fern Frost gives you the ability to see what you think of the two. Do they seem to evoke different moods, different levels of curiosity?

There is a real challenge in finding subjects that are monochrome. I must say that I don’t often look for compositions or subjects that feature color as their distinguishing attraction. The LA Challenge of primary colors was one that my photo files just couldn’t address. If only GREEN were a primary color!

Thanks for the challenge, Anne, and for inspiring me to look at color composition differently!

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Framing

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Palace of the Governors, New Mexico History Museum

“The frame through which I viewed the world changed too, over time. Greater than scene, I came to see, is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

I suppose the framing of a photo subject provides contextual information about the surrounding area. Imagine this deer framed by a fence, instead of by pine boughs.

And how does the framing of the Golden Gate Bridge affect the mood or message of this monument?

Often, in the practice of mental health, it helps to ‘re-frame’ a thought – to examine the story I’m telling myself about a situation and see if there’s a different way that the story could be told, from a different perspective, with a different contextual focus. It’s amazing how profoundly impactful frames can be, shaping and informing how we view a subject. I suppose, as photographers, we can use that tool to tell the story we want to tell.

Thanks, Amy, for challenging us to examine our frames this week.

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Work in Progress

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“Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.” — Ella Fitzgerald

“I am a work in progress dressed in the fabric of a world unfolding.” — Ani DiFranco

“Think about how long it took for the mountains to get there and look so beautiful. Think about how long it takes for this tree over us to grow. We’re so impatient. Think about it. This leaf here took forever to become that perfect leaf. We’re that. We’re work in progress. That’s actually being alive.” — Daphne Zuniga

What’s the difference between a process and a work in progress? I looked it up:

Because processes are sets of actions, they’re typically short-term. In a manufacturing context, work in process usually only remains unfinished for a brief period before becoming a final product. The term “progress” refers to measurable change over a period or movement toward a destination or outcome. – Indeed.com

I resonate with Ella’s passion to sing, with a photographer’s desire to share the visual beauty of the world, with an individual’s quest to belong to a more just and compassionate world, and with a group’s strides to reach the summit of a particular peak. I also want to be at peace and engaged in the present moment, to be joyful in the process, to be mindful of and grateful for being alive. There is so much process and progress going on in the world!

Thanks to Ann-Christine for this wide, wonderful theme.

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Overlooked

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“What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. … In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.”
― John Lubbock, The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live In

Alcove House, Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico

Imagine looking at a canyon wall, eroded by wind, formed of crumbly volcanic tuff. Would you see in it a choice place to build a home, defensible from attacks, high above the river floods, cool in the summer and warmed by the afternoon sun in the winter? Would you see the path up to the sheltering alcove? And what would you be looking over once you got up there? Also, imagine that it is the year 1150 A.D. Can you look with an archeologist’s or anthropologist’s vision and imagine the ways of the people who lived there?

My friend, Ranger Steve, pointed at the canyon wall. “Do you see that petroglyph up there? What do you think it is?”
“Um…a person’s head? A bear’s head?”
“WHAT?”
“You mean that round, red spot above that pale place on the rock?”
“NO! Not a pictograph, a petroglyph. Carved into the rock under the overhang, above where that cholla cactus is.”
“Ooooh, THAT. I didn’t see it before. Um…a horse bending its head down to drink, maybe?”
“A lot of people see that. It’s probably a parrot, actually.”
Thick-billed parrots now are found primarily in Chihuahua and Durango, Mexico, but used to range north to Arizona and New Mexico. I completely overlooked that possibility!

I was doing a botany hike with a learned friend recently. She was pointing out and naming the plants along the trail, and I kept finding what I call Bonus Bugs. This tiny, pale spider was well hidden in the blooming Bear-grass.

She examined the leaves of a small tree and discovered these spiny little balls. They’re not part of the tree at all, she told me. They’re probably the egg sacs of some insect. Or maybe the tree’s protective reaction to the injury inflicted when the insect deposited the eggs? I don’t know. It’s another one of those innumerable natural mysteries that go overlooked every day. The truth is probably very important to the tree and the insect, though.

Here I want to recommend a book I’m reading: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. When European settlers came to North America, they definitely overlooked the ancient and intricate relationships already established on the continent, relationships between many species that were reciprocal and mutually adaptive for sustainability. The wisdom in this book is astounding. The poetry of story and reverence in the writing is profoundly delightful. I believe it is a book to inspire revolution and a new way forward.


Thanks to Janet of Sustainabilitea: This, That, and The Other Thing for hosting the challenge this week!

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Simplicity

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“If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

The presence of water.

A healthy diversity of insects.

Plants that produce food.

Yesterday, I went walking with a friend who writes biology curriculum for Montessori schools. We went to Iron Mountain in the Cascade range, one of my favorite places to climb for a stunning view of volcanic peaks. However, we didn’t climb much. We walked quite slowly, noticing the incredible biodiversity of plant life. She identified orchids smaller than my pinkie nail (Twayblade orchid), and we took lots of photos.

“If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
― Albert Einstein

I often think of Life as incredibly complex – this great, interconnected web of diversity and specialization. However, when I slow down and sit with it, Life is as simple as being breathed. We are as we are.

And that’s what I might say to a six-year-old.

Many thanks to Mr. Philo of Philosophy Through Photography for this challenge. May we live simply and simply live.

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Spiritual Sites

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“Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” – Exodus 3:5, NIV

Sand art – a labyrinth? a mandala? – at Nye Beach, Oregon

Tina leads the challenge this week with an amazing array of Spiritual Sites from around the world. Spirituality is truly universal. I went to a workshop at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship here, and we tried to come up with a definition of spirituality. What we landed on was “the dynamic of being in the process of being in relationship and being aware of it”…or at least that’s what I wrote in my notes. For me, that just means that I am trying to be aware that I am in relationship to EVERYTHING, and I want continually to try to make these relationships more harmonious and mutually beneficial. At the top of my awareness is my family relationships. That’s where I began my spiritual journey, as an infant. Ancestors and family members are often honored at spiritual sites. There is a church in California where I was married and where my sister, my husband, and my parents are buried. It is a very meaningful place to me.

From an early point in my spiritual journey, I was also aware of the sacredness of Nature. Since 2014, I have been particularly aware of my relationship with Wilderness.

“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” 
– The Wilderness Act of 1964

(Gallery top left to bottom right: Headwaters Wilderness, WI; Black Canyon of the Gunnison Wilderness, CO; Guadalupe Escarpment Wilderness sign, TX; Sturgeon River Gorge Wilderness, MI; Sage Creek Wilderness, Badlands, SD; Ojito Wilderness, NM; Drift Creek Wilderness, OR.)

The first overnight backpacking trip I did in wilderness was at Strawberry Mountain in eastern Oregon. After two nights camping in the wilderness, we reached the summit. I was immensely happy! The relationship I had formed with my hiking friends, with the alpine lakes and trees, with mountain goats and wildflowers, and with my own mind and body, made me feel the energy of being alive and dynamic in the world in a gloriously spiritual way. I sat down in the lotus position on holy ground…and my friend snapped this photo:

May you reverence your connections to your inner and out worlds and find peace, love, and joy in your spiritual journey.

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Fragments

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Our guest host, Brian of bushboys world, sets out a poetic challenge this morning in wisps of memory, a fragrant breeze, a wistful thought, a glimpse behind a curtain of time.

Fragments begin an exploration of extrapolation…what is mssng? How to fll t n? Perhaps all photography is fragmentary. No image captures it all. I am reminded of an exercise I once did in art class. We were given a small card with a simple configuration of lines. We were to paste it onto a bigger piece of paper and create a larger drawing around it. In other words, we were given a fragment and asked to reconstruct a whole, using as much imagination as we could muster.

I love Brian’s invitation. It’s as if he said, “Once upon a time….your turn.”
And off you go, Lens-Artists! I look forward to seeing what has sparked your imagination.