Best of Summer in Central Ohio

For those of you who regularly read my blogs, thank you! I am always humbled and grateful that people take the time to read my writings and look at my photographs. My blogs can sometimes be heavy reading. I write what I feel. Sorry. These are heavy times for me. I'm going to give you and me a break. This blog is going to be about my photography.

The summer came and went quickly. I didn't get out to shoot nearly as often as I usually do. I didn't go out as often primarily due to the heat and rain. I don't handle the heat well and I'm not allowed to get wet. Climate change is so real and global warming has changed central Ohio. My grass remained green and growing all summer. I had to cut my lawn twice a week for most of the summer. It used to go dormant in late July and would remain that way until the fall. I've tried to grow watermelon for years. The growing season wasn't usually long or warm enough. This was the first year it worked for me. I got a couple of large, beautiful watermelons in my garden. We are definitely in a new growing zone. Very weird. We also got a ton of rain. I hope we can figure out a way to get this water to the western United States. Perhaps once we end our dependence on petroleum, we can fill all of those pipes crisscrossing the country with water. I would love for the Navajo and Hopi to get some of this much needed water.

Indian Mound Reserve

My first summer excursion was with Bruce to Indian Mound Reserve in mid-June. The main attraction is the waterfall. The area is surrounded by woods. For my current aesthetic, the woods is less inspiring for me than meadows, grasslands and gardens. I can be inspired in the trees under certain conditions, like in fog or rain. The following images were taken of the falls, in as slow an exposure as I could shoot, hand-held and leaning on a railing.

These are photographs from the woods. I'm all about the color. Orange is just not a color I ordinarily see in the woods in summer. If I see it, I'm shooting it. For me the berries look even more interesting and beautiful when they are from slightly out of focus to totally out of focus. If you're paying close attention to my work, you're noticing that I usually shoot with a very narrow depth of field and that I prefer to shoot with my subject backlit. I love what light does to a subject when I shoot into the sun. My walk-around lens is a 24-105 mm zoom that I can dial down to 4.0. This lens covers a lot of my territory, particularly when I am not familiar with the area and not certain what I am going to be shooting. There are times when this lens doesn't allow me to get close enough to what I am shooting. Lenses are unable to achieve a focus under a certain distance. That's just the way they work. It is part of the physics of photography that I don't even try to understand. I just know it works this way because I am frustrated when I can't get the shot I want. When I know what I am trying to achieve and go to the places I know I can find it, I use my 100mm macro lens that has an f-stop of 2.8. I love this lens and I love being able to shoot with this narrow depth of field. If I had the talent, I would be painting impressionist abstracts. I really love this style. As all of this artistic talent went to other members of my family, I do what I can with photography. I'm grateful I have the photography. I create my impressionist abstracts by seeking backgrounds for my subjects that attempt to achieve that look. I am often more focused on the background than I am on the subject. There are times when I would prefer to have nothing in my image in focus. Sometimes only the smallest part of the image is in focus. When I shoot into water, none of the image is in focus. In photography world, something in focus is the norm, and I'm trying not to be too abnormal.

In the last two images from Indian Mound, I was attracted to the way the sunlight was illuminating the edge of the leaf that was bending skyward. What you can see in these two images is my experimenting with the color temperature that most accentuated this contrast of light. The first was worked cool and the one below it I worked in a warmer temperature. My impressionist abstracts are about seeking a pattern and, where possible, to create movement. I've also found that shooting with water as a background, I can achieve a unique look, and particularly when the water is reflecting sunlight. You can't actually see the water in the image because I am shooting with such a narrow depth of field. To give you some sense of just how narrow it is, if I were shooting a person's face who is turned slightly sideways, one of their eyes would be in focus and the other would not be. The more I shoot, the more I understand what I like, how to find it and how to achieve it in both camera and post production, which for me is in Lightroom.

The Olentangy Trail

These photographs were taken in late June along the Olentangy Trail. I'm so grateful to have this place just five minutes from my home. The trail runs along the Olentangy, so I am able to use the river to achieve my approach as the sun is setting and the river and the sunlight are to the west of the trail.

As noted above, when I work my images, I often experiment with working the white balance on the cool side vs the warm side. There is an enormous range that I can use in both directions. I also experiment with the amount of contrast I apply. My experimenting includes trying black and white images. As I often shoot with such a narrow depth of field, I almost always take more than one shot of the same subject. If I used a tripod, I wouldn't have to do this, but I rarely shlep the tripod around. It's too heavy and the places I hike are usually crowded and a tripod would be in the way of too many people walking or riding bikes. For some of my close up shots, I have to literally sway in and out of the precise focus to capture a specific area. I work all of the images that achieve my goals. I work the first one as I want it, which usually means as close to as I saw it, and for the remaining images, I experiment. The images below are a good example of what I'm describing.

One of my instructors referred to this color variation when he was describing the process he goes through in selling his prints. He noted that some people pick the colors they want in an image based on the color scheme in the room where it will be hung. I would have never thought about it that way, but it makes sense. As I experiment, I amuse myself by thinking about people appreciating an image based on the color of their couch. Would you not hang the Mona Lisa in your living room because her dress doesn't match your drapes?

Hard Road Park

This is a park very close to my home. If I'm not feeling lazy, I can walk there. It's wonderful to have a place to shoot so close-by. There are fields with lots of plants and wildflowers, there's a wetlands area and there is a woods with a creek running through it. I really love the variety.

I enjoyed shooting on this early July day. What I didn't enjoy were the more than 35 bug bites that I came home with between my waist and the tops of my feet, and everywhere in between. By the following day, I was so miserable that my doctor put me on steroids. I live in an area that has lots of ticks and I know enough that I do not ever want to get Lyme disease. Thus, when I'm out hiking and taking photographs, I stay on trails and paths. As much as I might be drawn to a place off the path, I resist going into tall grasses because I don't want any tick bites. I almost always wear a hat, long pants, and a long sleeve shirt regardless of the temperature. And on this July day, it was really hot. I didn't apply bug spray and they got me. Just glad they weren't ticks.

Inniswoods Metro Park

I've written a lot about Inniswoods. It is one of my favorite places to hike and shoot in central Ohio. There's probably as much variety in habitats and plants as anywhere around here. Besides the fields, woods and wetlands, there are gardens with plants that you just don't find anywhere else. I usually spend hours there hiking, looking and shooting.

My Yard

There are times when the best place to shoot is my yard. I used to have a very large vegetable garden. As I've developed an allergy to all of the hard work involved, I plant fewer vegetables every year and have replaced many of the beds with perennials. Pauline's purple is everywhere.

Olentangy Trail

I made a second trip to the trail at the end of July.

The Fee Farm

Nancy has a family member who lives on a beautiful farm about an hour from Columbus. We went for a visit in early August. It was a very cloudy day and periodically it poured. We were sitting on the porch outside and I took some shots while it was raining. His home is also surrounded by fields that were planted in corn.

Columbus Zoo and Aquarium

Bruce and I made a visit to the zoo in mid August. I'm highly conflicted about zoos and usually disappointed with photographs I take there, unless I'm photographing my grandchildren. I'm not a big fan of shooting through glass or metal barriers. There aren't a lot of places to shoot without some kind of obstruction.

I appreciate the upside of zoos, which include the issue of preservation, particularly of endangered species and the notion that these animals don't have to worry about finding food or dealing with predators. I am unable to get the idea of their incarcerations out of my head. Compared to their natural habitats, they live in such confined spaces without all of the stimulus they would have in the wild. It sucks. These feelings are magnified for me when I'm with the primates. It is the worst for me when I'm with the gorillas, bonobos and orangutans. The differences between them and us is an evolutionary sliver. I always feel as though their confinement is just not okay. We've got to stop destroying their habitats and we really need to leave all of these animals alone. We should probably also take a long look at what we're doing with our prison system.

These were a few of the shots I thought were acceptable.