Yet another look at tulips

At the risk of overdoing the tulip pictures here, I post these images captured on an early, overcast Friday afternoon in the circular garden of my backyard. These tulips have finally bloomed in a color -- or colors -- I haven't quite been able to nail exactly just yet. There's definitely some orange, but also some raspberryish hue. It reminds me of a marbled sherbet color I've seen, and that's the best I can come up with. I get more intrigued by these each spring when they come up, and this is the third year for them. There's also a small patch of these in my front garden, and their colors, too, are finally emerging.

These were taken with a Sigma 105mm f/2.8 macro lens at aperture value (priority) f/8, ISO-800 and shutter speeds ranging from 1/80 to 1/200. For about the last 10 minutes of my shoot of these tulips, a very light drizzle began to fall, so ... if you notice droplets on petals of some of these, that's the explanation. 

And to Tanya, the former work colleague who gave me these to plant: Your little horticultural babies are doing quite nicely. 

 

Hamilton County Courthouse: Noblesville, Ind.

Today, I visited Noblesville, Ind., the seat of Hamilton County, which for the past couple decades, has been the fast-growing county in the state. It is home to two of the state's fastest-growing communities as well -- Fishers and Carmel (for you non-Hoosiers, we pronounce the latter "CAR-mull," i.e., accent on the first syllable, not on the last, as they do in California). Fishers and Carmel are just north of the Marion County line, and Marion County is where Indianapolis, the state capital, is located. Noblesville also is growing quickly, but because it's more centrally located in the county (i.e., father north of Indianapolis than Carmel and Fishers), not nearly to the degree that Carmel and Fishers have.

While I was in Noblesville, I had a 20-minute window where I decided to capture some pictures of the Hamilton County courthouse, and because it was such an overcast day, I decided to do so with bracketed shots with the intent to process them afterward with high-dynamic range (HDR) software. I started the shoot on the east quadrant of the courthouse square, and worked my way clockwise from there -- south next, then west and finishing on the north end.

The shoot graphically demonstrated to me the limitations of the wide-angle lens (I used a Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5 for this shoot). A lens with a wide range of field is needed to best capture structures close up, but to do that with a normal wide-angle lens -- because of its construction -- means lots of distortion. The only recourse is to stand back -- the farther back you stand using a wide-angle, the less distortion.  But, you get unwanted and expansive foreground and other clutter. On Friday, I elected to see how distorted things would be with closeups; I didn't want the expansive foreground and other clutter. To avoid distortion -- and get structures on the same plane as the camera body when doing closeups -- one needs to use a tilt-shift lens, which professional architectural photographers. Distortion can be a neat effect in many closeups, which is why the wide-angle will always be an important, valuable lens. But when it comes to architecture documentary imagery, tilt-shift lenses are definitely the way to go. 

So here are the courthouse images, leading off with the left side of the west quadrant at the top of this post. Below are the other views, beginning with east, then followed images taken in a clockwise circle around the square, including the separate Museum of History building, which is at the extreme southwest quadrant.

I conclude with the Hamilton County Government and Judicial Building, an annex to the courthouse structure that is on the opposite side of Eighth Street from the courthouse on the west quadrant.

Red tulips finally show color;1st blooms from red bud seedling

The Flash Bus Tour and unplanned downtown Indianapolis reflections and patterns shoot Tuesday weren't the only photographic highlights of the day. When I returned home from those experiences, I was delighted to note that the red tulips in my fence-line garden had bloomed. The cool temperatures were keeping the petals close together; there wasn't an open-bloom show yet. But beams from a 6:15 p.m. sun hit the blooms at just the right angle to present some brilliant red hues.

The light orange tulips in my back circular garden look like they're a day or two away from opening. The same kind of light-orange tulips in the front garden may take a day or so more than that; they don't get the same amount of sunshine that the bulbs in the backyard get, so it normally takes them longer to show, so I'm not surprised about that.

These are shots of the red tulips from Tuesday evening. I'll be back with shots of them fully opened when that happens, presuming I can do so before a wicked storm comes through and shreds the petals.

And ... on top of the red tulips giving me their first show of color, Tuesday also proved to be the first day my now 3-year-old red bud tree, in the circular garden, has sprouted flowers and blooms. The conception of this tree is a first for me. For the past five years, I've spent a lot of time pulling countless seedlings of red bud that planted themselves helter-skelter after floating into my yard from my next door neighbor's red buds. Three years ago, I stopped short of pulling one particular seedling that was in the circular garden. Having been without backyard shade since losing a nice-sized tree to disease a good 10-12 years ago, I decided to leave that seedling alone and see how it would fare, leaving it to nature to decide whether it lived or died. It's withstood a lot, and seems very strong. It's now taller than me, too, so ... barring any unforeseen health hazards, it appears it's here to stay.

I like the fact that the red bud, in a way, reconnects me to the early years of my career in journalism -- and photography. Not long after graduating college, I edited a weekly newspaper in Columbus, Wis., which calls itself the Red Bud City. I was there for only one spring, but I remember the beautiful array of red buds lining Dickison Boulevard in that town. Even though I took most of the pictures for the Columbus Journal-Republican (now just the Journal), paper then, I wasn't nearly the photo fanatic I am now, so I didn't take any images of those red buds.

 

A day when the most joy came from a longtime acquaintance

 

I've always had a sense that there were a lot of photographers out there who never accomplished more with their skills because they couldn't "solve" the labyrinth of artificial light. They resigned themselves to being "available light only" shooters -- or somehow convinced themselves that "resorting" to flash or strobe photography was beneath them.

I wasn't one of those. I would just plain tell anybody who would ask me that I'm simply overwhelmed by the math involved with flash -- the metering (which involves f/stop and shutter and distance); the dialing up or down of a flash's power by various mathematical increments (1/3, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, whatever); the degree of light intensity one flash would emit versus another, and how that relates to the distance the light is to the subject; or the different number of "groups" a wireless flash setup involved to control the main (key), fill, background and accent lighting (actually, that math isn't too bad -- it's just one, two or three ... or A, B and C).

And then there is the "how" of setting up a wireless flash system. You need the equipment -- a pocket wizard, for example -- to direct all the units. Then umbrellas (which come in various sizes) and light stands or other gear associated with lighting above and beyond detachable flash -- such monolights, accent lights, soft boxes, snoots, ring lights. OK, you don't have to have all of them, but your degree of ease and professionalism -- or even savvy -- is directly proportion to the gear you have to work with -- and, most important, the skills you acquire to handle it all.

Well, I decided I wanted to get past that large blockade, and start by taking things one step at a time. On Tuesday of this week, I took a day off from work and bought admission to the Indianapolis stop of the Flash Bus Tour, a daylong seminar on flash photography featuring Joe McNally and Dave "The Strobist" Hobby Flash Bus Tour 2011. Both also keep (McNally and The Strobist) blogs, although Hobby's "The Strobist" blog is by far the better known.

These two guys are among the best-known flash-savvy photographers in the country, for sure -- and perhaps even the globe. McNally has had his worked published in an array of prominent publications (including TIME, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, National Geographic, New York ... the list goes on and one). Hobby was a longtime photographer for the Baltimore Sun before leaving a few years to work freelance. He's since launched a local (Howard County, Md.) photo-news blog, HoCo360, that is in its infancy stage.

I did walk away feeling I was able to sort through a little of the confusion. If I actually owned umbrellas and light stands, for example, I would be far more comfortable today to set them up and use them for a shoot, using my Canon Speedlite 580EXII as a master/commander/key light and my Speedlite 420EX as secondary/fill/slave. If I also had sunlight, I'd have a third light source and could play off that to determine how to use the two flashes ... or even just one of them. Sometimes two, or even one, can be enough.

Saying all that, and feeling like I'd made a decent dent into better comprehending strobe lighting, would you be surprised if I said my happiest moment Tuesday was the walk back to my car from the Indiana Convention Center, when I stopped and grabbed a couple dozen shots of interesting things I was finding among the urban landscape and skyscape?

Well, it's true. With a 39% full moon high in the rich, blue, nearly cloudless, late-afternoon sky, I was juxtaposing it every which way I could maneuver -- between the spires of St. John's Cathedral, off the windows of several glass-facade structures and alongside Regions and Chase bank buildings and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument at Monument Circle. I also caught some amazing reflections of other things off glass facades and an interesting pattern -- cast by the Chase building -- onto the AT&T building a half-block away.

Yes, despite my ground-gaining on the strobe flash education front, good ol' available light photography of the lines and patterns and reflections Downtown is where I derived my most joy Tuesday. I start (at the top, and immediately below) with two shots of a reflection off the glass facade of the building on the northwest quadrant of Monument Circle. The one above -- where the window divider also reflected a reflection of the moon onto another pane of glass as well as the monument's spillover reflection onto the masonry -- fascinated me the most.

Enjoy the images.

Above: You may have to squint to find it, but that IS the moon between the two spires on St. John's Cathedral.

Above and below: The Hyatt Regency and its Eagle's Nest restaurant. The Hyatt is the building I like to call "the Big Honeycomb."

Above: Benches in the plaza across from the convention center. Even though it has no moon or reflection, this shot actually was high on my list of favorites from the day.

Above: A reflection of a portion of St. John's facade off the convention center windows.

Above: A strobist wannabe, doing a blind capture of his reflection in a storefront window at the corner of Capitol Avenue and Washington Street.

Above: A helicopter and the moon, objects the eye sees as the same size, yet they are some 240,000 miles apart.

 

 

Above: The federal building in one reflection ... 

... and the Indiana War Memorial in another. 

 

Above: The ATT&T building, catching fascinating patterns in reflection from the Chase building (below) a half-block east.
 

Above: The moon between the flag and Chase Bank.

Above: A very feint moon in the panel to the right of the flag -- reflected, along with Regions Bank, in this facade on the west side of Meridian Street.

 

 

Above: One more look at the moon, hovering to the left of the Regions Bank building.

Just about orange tulips

This post is a simple one, and the length of text will reflect it.

 

My next-door neighbors have some beautiful orange tulips blooming right now (none of my tulips has shown color yet), so I took a few minutes Sunday to preserve in photographs that bulb show before the nasty weather system heading our way moved in, possibly threatening the petals.

Here you are, pure and simple: orange tulips ... and a couple of buds.