Shadows, light, lines, patterns ... plus a blue heron with a turtle at Yates Mill Pond

It wasn’t until I got home from Yates Mill Pond Park on Thursday that I realized the vast majority of pictures I had taken earlier (yes, while on my regular walk) had vertical orientations. 

Ordinarily, there is nothing wrong with that. But with this blog, I try to present in the lead-off position (at the top) a photo with a horizontal orientation so there is there not a lot of wasted space up there. Worrying about wasted space is a concern that goes back to my days as a newspaperman in Indianapolis. It’s not critical in blog world, I suppose ... but it’s still something I try to avoid. 

My photography mission Thursday didn’t occur to me until I was on the far west loop of the Creekside Trail heading back to the start, about a mile or so away from the start point. But boy, did I find lots of compositions to photograph for the category of shadows, light, lines and patterns. 

And as for the bonus — the blue heron and turtle — that’s something I had photographed the previous day. I’ll save those photos for the bottom. But I was intrigued by the proximity of the heron to the turtle in the pond. My photos were taken with my iPhone 13 Pro, so the quality isn’t the best because of the distance. 

But the first three shots of the heron and turtle were taken with 1) a brief light on the heron’s beak just before 2) dipping the beak into the water, presumably for a snack, and then 3) coming up. The fourth photo is from several frames later, about 30 seconds after the heron did a very slow strut to get closer to the turtle. 

By the time I decided to leave the two and resume my walk, the heron remained in this position; I don’t think it intended to do the turtle any harm. 

The final two pictures are from the forest landscape that I grabbed during my walk later that morning.   

Check out my traveling photographer blog, Travelin’ Shutterbug

An evening at the IMA

For a while now, several photographer acquaintances who live outside Indiana had encouraged me to join a local photo club, which they said would motivate me to learn more, see more and shoot more. So a few weeks ago, when I sensed my direction and approach to my photography was stagnating, that's what I did.

The Indy MU Photo Club is a group formed through meetup.com and consists of mostly amateur photographers who take pictures for a creative outlet and are open to learning how to take them better. I imagine -- and hope -- that my association with IMPC will influence the variety and quality of images I post here in the weeks and months ahead.

On Wednesday, the first IMPC outing since I joined the group, we strolled the grounds of the Indianapolis Musuem of Art, a beautifully landscaped property north and west of Downtown Indianapolis that also happens to house the community's premier collection of art. It's also where, on the first Saturday of September, the local Penrod Society holds its annual (and hugely popular) fund-raising arts and crafts fair -- frequently and affectionately nicknamed "Indiana's Nicest Day."

IMA boasts a relatively new addition, one whose architecture is striking enough to warrant appreciation and photographs. It also has stately former residences serving as museums, three developed gardens and a massive fourth under development and scheduled to open this fall. If you noticed, I haven't even said much about what's actually inside the art museum display facilities themselves, but that's for art lovers to explore and discover; our photo group was interested only in what was outdoors, and what that looked like under the creative and selective light of a late-day sun.

An idea of the latter can be found in the accompanying photographs. But as shown by these samples here, the grounds have splendid foliage, flora, architecture, sculpture and a fountain where, if you catch the light just right, you can actually capture a rainbow.

Spring is in the vicinity

The crocus flowers in my garden have bloomed; these photos were taken just a few hours ago with my Canon 30D and Sigma macro lens (105 mm f/2.8).

I know the days of winter are numbered. Still, in the past, a return frost or even snowfall has cut short these beautiful flowers' blooms, ending their seasonal tease. I always find myself hoping that at least one time they'll be allowed to hang around for a while. In the four years I've grown these, I haven't been fortunate to see that happen, though. At the same time, the foliage for my hyacinth, daffodils and tulips has broken ground. If experience holds true, the hyacinth and daffodils will bloom next, with tulips falling in shortly thereafter.

Some of you also may have noticed the main photograph at the top of the homepage has changed to reflect the nearing change of seasons. That image also was taken with the Canon 30D and Sigma macro lens; it came during my April 2, 2007, shoot of the annual Spring Bulb Show at the Garfield Park Conservatory in Indianapolis.

Dissection of an image

The above image was the starting point of an odyssey that I'm sure a lot of photographers have experienced: Finding different ways to look at the same image. The "anatomy of a single image" below tells the story of one such odyssey -- some successes, one surprise and one "I'm not sure sure about this."

The top image isn't anything spectacular or unusual. It was taken inside the Garfield Park Conservatory in Indianapolis in a tropical plants exhibit. The foliage was dangling from a boulder from which a very modest waterfall was spilling. I got behind the waterfall and shot into the light behind it. Dodging the light was nearly unavoidable; the conservatory is a glass-surrounded facility, so no matter what angle I chose to shoot -- unless it were straight on -- I would have had to take into consideration the presence of backlight -- and decide whether I wanted to compensate for it by overexposing, or shooting for silhouette. I chose to overexpose slightly because that day, I wasn't interested in a silhouette; I wanted to capture the color in the foliage and the waterdrop cascade. I wasn't surprised afterward when I saw a lot of the reflective circles -- the result of flare. But I chose to use those to my advantage in this little project.

Again, the shot at the very top is the original image. Right below it is the same frame with a slight increase in the color saturation and contrast. Not a huge difference, but enough to bring out a little more red in the leaf and darken the dark green foliage shadow on the left. Next, I took the same frame one more time, boosted the highlights and increased the saturation (only a little less than the first time). The result is the image above. The red leaves, especially, are beginning to pop out in the frame, which was the objective in the first place. It's fascinating what just a tweak in highlights and saturation can do when you're looking to distinguish elements in an image file.

While studying those three images, it occurred to me that I could crop this frame into smaller segments and create several whole "new" pictures. First, I concentrated on isolating -- and accentuating -- the vertical nature of the leaf foliage itself. So I created a copy of the original image and cropped it to isolate just the leaf vine.

Again I went back to the saturation, highlights and contrast and tweaked with those ever so slightly to effect the vertical version at left. The one thing I didn't like was how the crop drew unwanted attention on the bright white spot in the upper right corner. I figured that if I really wanted to display this version, I could address the white splotch by applying a frame or border to the image, harnessing a bit of the white. Two things I did like about this version:

1) It gave more prominence to the hefty water cluster near the bottom of the red-leafed vine, the heart of the cluster falling right on top of the series of horizontal reflective circles.

2) It played up two solo reflective circles -- one just above the third leaf down, the other on the far left side of the frame, providing a sort of balance.

Next, I wanted to create an extremely horizontal frame. At the far left side of the rectangle, I placed the lower portion of the leaf cluster; on the far right, the green foliage with the white circular spot. So I created that crop off the original, went to the color curves and played up the reds ever so slightly and the greens a bit more and came up with the horizontal slice you see at left. I liked that it maintained the prominence of the water cluster; what I didn't like was that it possibly introduced confusion as the real subject, or focus, of the image -- was it the leafed vine, or the foliage on the right? My initial hope was to include the two for balance, and again initially, I thought that because the leafed vine would be in focus and the green foliage out of focus (beyond the depth of field), that it would be clear that the leafed vine was the focal point. But after making the crop, I wasn't so sure that got accomplished.

I saved the most enjoyable sectioning for last. It was the super-crop of just the horizontal row of reflective circles on the far left of the original image (the one dissected by the unleafed vine).

With only a few droplets in the image anywhere close to being in focus, it left me a challenge to find something to make this version appealing. So I pushed the color curves to the extreme -- and came upon this strikingly dual-shade purple abstract. It did fetch a few comments at my photo.net gallery (in the Manipulations folder). The only drawback to this crop was that the image file is so small -- relative to the original, anyway -- that I probably couldn't squeeze a print larger than 5x7 out of it, and that might be stretching it.