Mark Cassino Photography - Mark's Blog

Nothing in the world
is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
nothing can surpass it.

The soft overcomes the hard;
the gentle overcomes the rigid.

– Tao Te Ching

Saturday, December 19, 2009. In the small hours of the morning snow falls gently to the ground. I wake up, watch, doze back off. The shiny black streets and sidewalks tell me that it’s too warm for snow crystal photos. Maybe later, maybe in the morning, maybe in dreamland.

In the morning a thin layer of crusty snow and ice rests atop automobiles and cold garage roofs. The gentle snow persists – why not try, just a few photos…

Here’s the best of a very brief excursion – and I like it. I think it is one of the best photos I’ve made all year, and I say that in December. And I like it because it is unlike anything I have ever seen before, or done before. It is a one drop oasis in the vast desert of sameness – and yep, my photos – so many of them – are right out there in the badlands. Sometime a drop of water is more refreshing than you expect.

A lightly different take on the photo can be found at the Story of Snow blog.

It’s interesting to see how photos change with time. Some grow more interesting, and more meaningful, others fade away, and still others become downright silly or embarrassing.

Of course – the photos don’t change. The photographer does, however. So often the perception of a photo is tainted by the impression we had when taking it, the subject matter, or even how we were feeling at the instant when the shutter button was snapped. All those things are distinct from the final image that is made, but still influence our own subjective impressions.

And sometimes our initial impressions of a photo may lead us to dismiss it, simply because it didn’t seem significant at the time that it was taken. That was the case with the photo shown here - Chicago Harbor . At the time it was taken, I felt that that the sailboats were order less and akimbo, the details of the lighthouse and break water were too insignificant, and that the water and sky lacked punch.

But after a little work in Photoshop the sky and the water started to work, and I started to like the boats, each heading in its own direction.

I might hate it in a week, but after pulling some 12x12 inch prints, right now I like this shot.

The seasons are changing with astounding speed. Just three weeks ago I was outside in the 25 degree temperatures, capturing the last snow crystal shots of the season. Two week sago I ventured into the Allegan forest, only to get stuck in almost a foot of wet, slushy snow on one of the side roads.

But then by the middle of this week I was able to snap a shot of a bee dancing in a crocus flower. Yesterday I ventured back into the Allegan Forest, only to find the snow all but gone – just a few traces lingering on the north side of hills and ditches. The roads were not only clear, they were dry, and very first blue hepatica already were blooming! Spring is indeed coming up fast.

I was glad to be able to get into the Allegan forest after the winter reprieve. While the small seasonal roads remained passable until mid January, once the winter snows began to fall in earnest there was no way to get back into the woods – at least not with my car. So the trips that I mad out there were all pretty superficial, just short excursions from the main roads, hikes back into the woods a bit. Usually I was walking (without snow shoes) in knee to thigh deep snow, which made even those short hikes difficult.

Yesterday I was able to venture back into some the Oak Savanna clearings. These are bleak places yet, but already the vegetation is starting to come to life.

The snow melt off was hurried along by a few days of heavy rains, so there was a tremendous amount of water run off. But the extremely sandy soil in the Allegan Forrest was already pretty dry. The thick moss that carpets the ground in many areas of the pine barrens was soft and spongy – by June it will be dry and crunchy.

 

My first walk around was in a section of Oak Savanna north of the Kalamazoo River. It’s a great place to get photos of all sorts of butterflies and dragonflies in the summer, and is also the home to a lot of interesting birds and, of course, deer. There wasn’t much happening here on this day – I did fine a hawk’s feather jabbed into the ground, and a few other feathers and small bones laying on the ground. Perhaps an unwary hawk swoped in to scavenge a bite from an animal carcass, and was nabbed by a fox or a coyote.

I then followed the road back to a bluff overlooking the Kalamazoo river. It must be turkey season, because there were several hunters blasting away in the woods. At the top of the bluff I found that a tree that had been hanging onto the sandy hilltop had fallen over since I was last there. This is a spot where people come to shoot skeets and have bon fires, so it looks like there will be an good supply of wood for future fires.

In the pine forest along the top of the bluff, I became interested in the details of the bark of the pine trees. I took several shots,, trying to capture the patterns and sometimes very bright colors found in the tree bark. These were not typical pictures of trees – but a fun and interesting subject for exploration nonetheless.

I then made my way down the steep trail to the river’s bank. The water was well into flood stages and the trees in the flood plain made for another interesting photographic topic.

But then as I was turning back, I was surprised to see blue hepatica already flowering on the hillside I had just climbed down. I assume that the steep, south facing hillside warmed up quickly, resulting in the flowers blooming at this early time. I was doubly surprised because the Allegan Forest, as former farm land, there are few solid patches of woodland wildflowers there at all. And these hepatica definitely were a week or two ahead of what I’d expect, since the harbinger of Spring (a few samples of which were also found in Allegan) is just starting to bloom in Kalamazoo.

But it was a welcome surprise and I was able to snap the first wildflowers shots of the year. Given my work schedule I won’t be able to devote the time and effort to wildflowers that I would like. But – I’ll be pursuing them as much as possible.

After leaving the river I made stops to several other areas within the forest. Like I said, the snow was gone but there were still several large mud patches in the roads. I delt with these by just revving up to 40 or 50 mph, and plowing through them - relying on the momentum of the car to carry me through the muck, which in several cases was deep enough and thick enough to snag the car.

I didn’t see any bees, and the first dragonflies of the year are probably just in the process of migrating up from southern Illinois and Indiana. But – they will be here soon.

Other photos from the day:

 

  

So here it is – the first full day of spring. Every March I hope to glean a shot of a honey bee in one of the handful of crocus flowers that bloom in the yard. This year was no exception, and with the sudden arrival of a warm front, I went out late this evening to see if the bees were buzzing.

One lone Apis mellifera was out, making her way through the crocus flowers. Last weekend I devised a new flash bracket to work with the Pentax K10D, and I wanted to try it out and also get a preliminary assessment of the K10D’s anti-shake feature for macro shots.

The bee didn’t hang around for long – was already past 7 pm when I stepped out and the sun was setting into a cloud bank, that is drizzling rain as I type this. I still used the Slik monopod, but the K10D and the flash worked well – a happy harbinger of future insect images to come over the next few months.

Last fall I noted that honey bees are among the first and the last of all insects to appear in spring and fall, and once again they made their arrival right on schedule. And to think that a few weeks ago I doubted that it would be even close to warm enough by now for a bee, or any insect, to appear.

I've been worried about the bees this spring. A new disease is killing off the domestic honey bees, so I wondered if I would see any. But I saw this one, and that makes me glad for now.

As I've noted many times before, you never know when you see the last bug - either the last of the season or the last forever. Its only in hide-sight that you say "Hey, that was the last time..."

This won't be the last time - but I worry that, with the plight of the honey bee, there will be a last time that I see a honey bee, Apis mellifera.

The flash bracket is one of the usual contrivances, made from hardware store L-braces and other bits and bobs. A photo of it, with the K10D and A*200 f4 macro, is shown below.

Home made is alright by me.

This little bee stands in stark contrast to the toy camera shots I posted yesterday. If you love subject matter then well gosh, here you got a cute bug and a pretty flower. But I love the bees just as I love the little dots and toy camera shots.

In the end, it’s all the same stuff..

As I mentioned in the last post, November is a bleak month for outdoor photography, at least in Michigan. The short days, the beginning of the extend periods of clouds and gloom, and the almost non-stop rain really defy the conventional wisdom of what makes for a good shoot.

Now that I no longer shoot full time, I’m constrained by the day job and the business aspects of photography more than ever. You have to take what you can get in terms of days and weather and light and shooting conditions.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing. We want life to be a big buffet were we can pick what we want when we want it. But maybe its better just to be given a dealt a card and be challenged as to how to play it.

At least that’s how I chose to see it this morning. As usual the weather forecast was wrong, and the anticipated snow / rain / sleet mix did not arrive. Though the day was gloomy and cold, I figured I would take shots that tried to express the idea of ‘gloomy and cold.’

Complicating matters is that the firearms deer hunting season started on Wednesday, and my favorite haunts, places I visit dozens of times a year in search of solitude, are now crawling with hunters.

So I headed out with no real plan, which is the worse plan of all. To cover all bases I brought a wide variety of gear – the digital SLR, the 35mm camera with half a roll of Delta 100 languishing in the chamber, the Pentax 6x7 medium format setup with 2 frames left on the roll I started last week.

After driving around for a few hours, listening to the news, stopping for coffee and breakfast, I had shot nothing. Not one frame. A big nada for the day.

So – back home. 

A squirrel was sitting on the empty bird feeder, digging for any last morsels he could find. I decided to fill up the feeders – for him and for the house sparrows – and while I was doing that I noticed an interesting composition of leaves in the birdbath near the feeder.

The leaves were rotting and the glare of the water affected the shots – far more than it affected my vision of the scene.. But I took several shots, and worked with the photo in Photoshop later to negate the surface glare (which in the un-processed image all but obscures the detail.)

Maybe we don’t have to stray too far to capture gloom and autumnal shadow.

In the back yard, next to the downright rotten jack-o-lantern I had carved for Hallowe’en, was a small sorbet bowl filled with water. I had put the candle for the jack-o-lantern into the bowel, and had pulled it out and set it aside a few days ago. Maybe November has me reaching for straws – but I liked the scene, and shot away.

Several other back yard shots proved to be pretty uninteresting. But here in the early November evening, I feel that at least I got something. And for today at least, something beats nothing.

This autumn has turned out to be wet, rainy, snowy and dark – not offering a whole lot in terms of opportunities for photographs.

The dragonfly days are long gone – it turns out that the trip I talked about on October 8 was the last of the year – I had hopped and expected for more, but the heavy snow fell shortly after that. I saw on dragon a week for so after the snow, but now I’m sure they are gone for good – well, till next May at least. A moth sat on the wall of my garage for the last 3 weeks. One day it moved about a foot. Otherwise it just sat there. A briefly warm day with high winds moved it on it’s way.

So that’s it for the bugs.

When I think of fall I think of glorious landscapes with bright colored trees and azure blue skies. Well, autumn can be like that. When it is it is often like that just for a few weeks at most, sometime just a few days. Getting in the right place at the right time can be a challenge. A suddenly drastic hard freeze, or major leave-sticking snowfall, can make the trees abruptly drop their leaves, leaving little chance to catch the color. A dry summer or wet fall can also mean a poor color season.

As I sit here this morning, the tulip tree outside my windows is a blaze of brilliant yellow leaves. It’s right on schedule since it always turns to bright yellow for Halloween. The other nearby trees, though, have either lost their leaves or are clinging to a few brownish / green bits of withered foliage. For them the season has passed.

It looks like the shots I took along the River Vista Trail at the Kalamazoo nature center will be it for fall colors this year. There are still a few places along the lake that seem to turn later in the season, and I’ll give those a try yet.

But for now I have decided to look back at pull some retrospective shots out of the portfolio. In part, this decision results from a project I’m currently working on, which has me culling together landscape shots.

I visited the River Vista Trail in 2003 for the first time. This is part of the Kalamazoo Nature Center, and the land bears the scars of past gravel mining operations. The soil is dry and gravelly, and the landscape rolls with hills that reflect the way the miners left it more than the way the nature made it. At any rate, it is one of the few areas I know of locally where there are truly sweeping vistas that can be photographed – typically Midwestern landscapes are all about finding the little slice of the landscape that rises above clutter and has something to say.

It’s hard to believe how much has changed, photographically, since 2003. Back then I had not yet moved to a digital SLR, and still had not made the transition to medium format film for landscape work. I had moved away from the limitations of transparency film for landscape application, and so all of these shots were taken on color negative film – Kodak Supra 100, to be precise.

Back in 2003 I scanned these, but then made the mistake of running them through an old image processing program that could not deal with 16 bit tiffs. My intent was to compress the TIFFS, since I was running out of disk space on the computer I was using then. The result was that the scans came out with wildly distorted colors – red skies and blue trees – which was interesting but not what I was looking for. I re-scanned a few shots, tried making a few large prints, and then just gave up on the project. 35mm, while better than digital, still lacks the resolution to make really large prints of highly detailed subjects.

But then – who needs large prints for everything anyhow? My attitudes have shifted a bit – these days I print the photo to the size it works at, and leave it be.

I’ve also developed a taste for B&W images. So after re-scanning the film from three years ago, I re-mixed several as mono-chrome shots. Using the channel mixer in PhotoShop – the standard process for converting images from color to mono – gives you a lot of flexibility. It’s very easy to simulate the effect of a B&W shot taken with a particular filter (like a #25 red) just by adjusting the channels.

And so, with the retrospect is the remix – and looking at the notebooks and storage boxes filled with thousands of negatives – I’m getting a sense that I could keep busy with photography for years without ever snapping the shutter again.

But what fun would that be?

Here are color photos from the River Vista Trail - followed by some B&W remixes:

Friday the 13th of October. An Arctic Blast swept through the area this week – unusually early. Several inches of snow fell before the first solid frost of the season. And I wondered when the insect photography season will come to an end…

A week ago I hiked the River Vista Trail at the Kalamazoo Nature Center. It was a warm autumn day, with clear azure skies and bright early autumn colors in some trees.

As I mentioned last week, I was clumsy with the film. Tore the headers off two rolls, goofed up a roll or 35mm B&W that jammed in the camera. I shot two 220 format rolls of Fuji NPS color film, three rolls of 120 format Efke 100, one 35mm roll of Ilford Delta 100, and a partial 35mm roll of Neopan 400. The two rolls of NPS came back from the lab earlier this week – I’m still working through developing the Efke and the 35mm rolls.

(For those who are interested – Rodinal has been the developer of choice for all except the Neopan, which I plan to dunk in some of the remaining Microdol-X.)

Since I screwed up loading one roll of the NPS, I only had about 30 color shots to work with. The five photos in the image stream are the best of the bunch. Of course, bracketing used up several frames for each composition.

 Color shots of autumn foliage are a little like deep fried food. You could deep fry your socks, and they would taste good. The same holds true for autumn scenics - put bright colored trees under a blue sky into the frame, and things are bound to come out OK.

Well, with the recent snows the leaves will probably drop off the trees while still green – hopefully I’m wrong, but that seems to be the outcomes of these early fall snow storms.

So last week’s trip may have been both the start and finish of the fall color season. It’s a short season anyhow – just a few weeks at most – and this year it has perhaps been cut shorter than usual.

More photos:

 

Last week Pam and I headed out to Annapolis, Maryland, to attended the artist’s reception for the Maryland Federation of Art American Landscapes 2006 exhibit. I was happy to see that one of my two pieces in the show – Weedy Sassafras – won an honorable mention.

The MFA show was extremely strong, and it was a pleasure to talk with the various artists and visitors on hand for the reception. The show was open to all media, and paintings dominated the selections with a good representation of photography and other media present as well.

Annapolis is a wonderful town, with 18th century houses, narrow streets, and lots of sailors and navy cadets hanging around. We had first visited in 2004 to attend another gallery reception – this one included Abandoned Perch – and in that trip did a lot of walking through the city, exploring the narrow streets and great shops and restaurants.

The historic district bristles with art galleries, and there is always something interesting to see. A few doors down from the MFA gallery, at 14 State Circle, was a retrospective of picture maker Marion E. Warren, a notable photographer of the Chesapeake bay area. The crisp, clean, and clear black and white images were marvelous. This work and the Harry Callahan exhibit in Chicago are the best photography I’ve seen all year. A sampling of Warren's Photos can be found at he wesbite d of the Annapolis Publishing Collection, and you can read more in two articles from the Bay Weekly - from September 2006 and an earlier 1998 article..

One thing notable in both Harry Callahan and Marion Warren’s work is how they really push the contrast in their shots – and are not shy about letting the shadows go to full black. Aesthetically, they don’t have a whole lot in common, but they do seem to share a similar approach to printing.

For my part – the trip to Annapolis time round was not very productive in terms of photography. We were only there two days. The first day was spent at Mount Vernon, which was enjoyable, and then at the reception in the evening. The second day was spent exploring Maryland’s east coast – an area that has lots of photographic possibilities (reminded me a bit of Allegan, only with better architecture) but the single day’s outing under cloudy skies lead to few images.

On the plus side, I wound up pulling out the several rolls of film I shot 2 years ago (cripes – two years ago I didn’t even have a digital SLR…) and since I’ve never scanned, evaluated, or printed any of the shots, it seems like a good project to finally get around to. (One good thing about this blog is it keeps me current on processing images.)

The shot of the Maryland Capital is from the 2004 trip. The last shot here – an Observation Blind from the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge may be the only good shot from the eastern shore trip.