Uncategorized – Brennah's Backyard

New Mexico Landscapes

Last November I went on a trip to New Mexico to visit some family and it was as beautiful there as I was assured it would be. While I was there I did quite a bit of hiking around in different areas. There were two general areas, that were each their own separate ecosystems, that I visited. One of these was the mountains, and the other was the canyon, which was in a lower (though low is relative) desert area. Both were the sort of landscapes that would make going there (as a photographer) and not doing some landscape photography seem… kind of wrong. I hadn’t really done a ton of landscape photography before, but I’m pretty happy with some of the landscape type photos I took on the trip.

Mountains

The mountains were mostly covered with evergreen forest, interspersed with rocky outcrops and cliffs as well as rivers flowing down to the land below. Because of the season we went, there were some interesting ice formations around the rivers.

A ponderosa pine trunk in the foreground standing out against snowy evergreens. This was taken on the day we left; there had been a snowfall the night before, so everything was covered in snow, but higher in the mountains there was snow the whole time we were there.

This was a particularly rocky area we went through on the way out.

Another mountain scene with some sort of birches.

Rock formations like this one were pretty common in the mountains.

Canyon

The canyon we visited was the Rio Grande Gorge. I found a trail that went from the rim of the canyon down to the river, which we did on our last day there. The canyon area had lots of little shrubby looking trees (I think they were mostly just slow growing and sometimes stunted from the conditions they were growing in). I know some of the trees there were junipers, ponderosa pines, and pinion pines. It wasn’t really forested, though, and there were quite a few smaller bushy and herbaceous plants that I wasn’t familiar with (although I’m pretty certain a significant amount of it was sagebrush).

The Rio Grande Gorge from the bridge across the gorge.

A large boulder from one of the cliffs in the Rio Grande.

This was the trail we took into the gorge. You can see the switchbacks in the trail in this photo.

Another picture of the gorge from the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge.

The gorge from within, about halfway down the cliff.

Of course, I took more than just landscape photos on the trip; I actually noticed I was switching lenses and settings quite a bit more regularly than I usually do since I was trying to photograph such a wide variety of subjects. In coming posts I’ll share more of the other kinds of pictures I was taking.

Autumn Leaves

I was really enjoying photographing the Autumn leaves last fall, and I wound up with quite a lot of leaf photos. Here are a few of them.

Most of the time the leaves on the blackberry brambles turn to a deep red or purplish color in autumn, but they don’t usually do this. This one plant I found at the edge of the woods has some sort of almost variegated look to it’s leaves.

An elm leaf I found in the driveway and held up to the light to photograph. Elm leaves have cool patterns in the serrated edges of the leaf and the leaf veins that I like to photograph. I’m not sure where this leaf came from though, because there aren’t any elms near the driveway.

This sassafras leaf was still on the tree when I photographed it. I wasn’t sure at first if I wanted to try to get one of the large dark spots in the picture, but then under the macro lens it was kind of reminding me of a sunspot so I decided I liked it.

A Wren and a Moth

I saw this little house wren at a nearby park last summer. Looking through my telephoto lens I was able to see the impressively large moth the bird was carrying. As I watched, the wren flew down from the tree and landed next to one of the metal posts that was marking out the parking area, and went inside (they were at least partially hollow). I could see the movement of chicks inside the post as the wren fed the moth to one of them.

Announcement

Lately I have been working on setting up another way for everyone to connect with me and my art. I have started a Patreon page where you can become a patron of my work! If you want to help support what I’m doing, please check it out. There are a number of different tiers and benefits for joining. Hope to see you over there!

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=79336712

Whimsical Grass

a grass seed head with a twisty stem

This summer I was finding my newer telephoto lens to be quite nice for taking pictures of things like grass flower/seed heads due to a slight difference in the way the depth of focus works for that lens. This seed head particularly stood out to me since the slightly twisted stem gives it a whimsical look.

Catbirds

Grey Catbirds are common birds around here that were a bit of a challenge to photograph because they spend much of their time hanging out in dense, brushy areas. Since learning this it seems appropriate that my first good photo of one was this:

a grey catbird framed by out of focus leaves — This is a crop of the first picture of a catbird I took that I liked.

a grey catbird in a small gap among out of focus leaves — This is the full photo. Almost the entire picture is out of focus foreground plants… I had to line the bird up with a small gap in the leaves to get the picture.

Though I may not see the catbirds themselves too frequently, I know they’re common because I hear them all the time and almost everywhere. (They’re very talkative birds.) If I follow the sound I can often spot where it is coming from but not necessarily get a clear look at the bird.

Grey catbird singing — Catbirds can make a wide range of different sounds as well. They have some sounds that are specific to them and will also mimic other birds (like this one was doing, stringing a bunch of different birdsongs together in rapid succession).

a grey catbird calling from a branch — This is a more recent picture of a catbird calling. It is probably my favorite now.

Details of a Grape Leaf

Here is a photo I took of a young grape leaf. I think what had originally attracted me to photographing this particular leaf was the sun shining through it, highlighting the leaf veins. But in the end, I actually preferred this shot from the front, instead of the ones with the light coming through the leaf. There are lots of interesting little details in this photo, like the tiny hairs on the midrib (and some of the more major leaf veins) and the veins that form an almost perfect pentagon… which is why I decided to include this close up cropped version as well.

Telephoto Lens (Part 2)

My new telephoto lens is probably now my most high tech piece of camera equipment, and I’ve been pretty impressed with its capabilities. As I’ve been teaching myself to use it, I’ve been getting an idea of what kinds of things it can do.

goldfinch (in nonbreeding plumage) on sunchoke seedhead — Goldfinch foraging on sunchoke seeds. This photo was a surprise because I took it through a window screen! I can see some loss of quality in the photo as a result, but it isn’t nearly as bad as I would have expected, and I would have startled the birds away if I’d gone outside (they were pretty close to the door) so I was happy to get anything at all in that situation.

I mentioned in my last post that I can use my telephoto lens like a pair of binoculars, but the lens actually has an edge over binoculars because it has some built in stabilization that cancels out the tiny movements you make when holding something, which get very magnified when looking at a zoomed in image of something far away. This means the image I see looking through the viewfinder is much steadier than what I see looking through binoculars. (And then being able to take a photo of whatever I’m looking at is also nice, of course!)

house finch perched on a cedar branch — For birds with subtle markings or features or birds hanging out in hard to see places, like this house finch in a cedar tree, looking through the telephoto lens helps to be able to identify the birds, and is helping me get a better idea of what birds we have around here.

When it comes to taking the actual picture, the stabilization helps some in preventing the photo from being blurry from slight movements (when you aren’t using a tripod, which isn’t very practical in a lot of situations), but the usual way to do this is with a very fast shutter speed. The person at the camera shop where I got the lens told me I’d be able to use a bit slower shutter speed than I would otherwise, but I would still need it faster than I was used to to get a sharp photo. Despite this advice, it was probably inevitable that I would try pushing the limits with lower speeds eventually (because faster speeds limit the light available and you end up with a darker picture or you have to find a way to make up for it elsewhere), and surprisingly, I was finding I could hold the camera steady enough to use pretty low speeds without getting a blurry photo, which is great… until a subject starts moving around quickly.

a slightly blurry photo of a woodpecker eating a dogwood berry — This was where I got a little too confident with slow shutter speeds… I can’t say for sure this picture would have turned out well if I’d used a faster speed, but this woodpecker was foraging pretty energetically on the dogwood berries and definitely moving around too fast for the speed I was on.

The moon, at least, is a good safe subject to use a slow shutter speed on, which is helpful with a dark scene like this.

Lately it seems like I’m very much starting to get the hang of getting good bird photos (I’ll probably save those for their own posts, though), but even the less than perfect shots have been helping me to identify quite a lot of birds I wasn’t able to see clearly enough before; I mostly just managed to identify the bigger/brighter/more distinctive looking species.

a swamp sparrow on a branch over water — This photo of a swamp sparrow almost turned out perfectly – except that there was something out of focus creating a bit of a haze over the bird. Otherwise, it is perfectly in focus, the sparrow is in a nice position and the background is good… but at least this photo provides a nice view of most of the bird’s markings so I could identify it as a swamp sparrow! Sparrows can be a bit tricky with their subtle markings and usually mostly brown colors… but like a lot of my subjects, they benefit from a closer look.

Getting a Telephoto Lens (Part 1)

Relatively recently, I got a new type of lens for my camera. Previously, I had a macro lens and a pretty standard non-specialized type of lens. The new one is a telephoto lens, which is a type of lens that allows you to zoom in on distant subjects.

Rabbit lounging in the grass — A very relaxed rabbit.

A telephoto lens has very different uses and possibilities compared with a macro lens, but there is one thing about it that feels familiar; both lenses allow me to photograph things I can’t quite make out. I may be able to see them, but not clearly enough to tell what I’m looking at. Through the lens, I can see them with much more detail. (Sometimes I will just look through the lens like binoculars to see what that dark shape in the trees is.) So, what the macro lens does for tiny objects (or creatures), the telephoto lens does for distant objects (or creatures).

A male goldfinch perched on a spruce branch. This was taken shortly after I got the new lens.

So this new lens doesn’t make any of my previous lenses obsolete, it just opens up a whole bunch of new possibilities that weren’t there before. One of the main things I’d had in mind for it when I got it was to use it to photograph birds; a telephoto lens is pretty much a requirement for bird photography. The lens also works well for butterflies and presumably any other large, skittish insects, like dragonflies.

A monarch butterfly on New England aster flowers — A monarch butterfly foraging on New England aster flowers. It is possible to get a photo like this without a telephoto lens, but it would be a lot harder and more dependent on luck. (Most of my previous butterfly photos happened when a butterfly approached while I was photographing other pollinators.)

Another use for it I’ve found that’s less apparent is to be able to get a different angle on certain subjects, even though I can get close to them and I want a ‘close up’ of them…

Sunchoke flowers against dark background — This is a relatively close up picture of these sunchokes, but I took it from a ways away so that I could line the bright yellow flowers up with the dark backdrop of a clump of trees to the south, making for some sharp contrast. I had seen this contrast in previous years, but I wasn’t able to photograph it with the lenses I had at that point. Once I got the telephoto lens, I knew exactly what to do with it.

Spring in the Hoophouse

It is getting very close to spring, both by the calendar and otherwise. But in the hoophouse, it is already spring. To be specific, I’d say it is around the beginning of April in there. The hoophouse is unheated, so it goes through seasonal temperature cycles just like the rest of the landscape, but it goes through somewhat different temperature cycles. It tends to warm up quicker during the day, especially if it is sunny (on sunny days the temperature difference can be extreme, but there are louvres that open automatically at a set temperature to moderate extremes). At night, though, it can get almost as cold as outside (but at least it is sheltered from wind and snow).

purple deadnettle (lamium purpureum) — Purple dead-nettle in between spinach leaves

The fact that it isn’t just consistently a little bit warmer inside the hoophouse seems like it would make estimating the equivalent season difficult, if not impossible. But I realized, a couple years ago now, that I don’t have to figure it out; the weeds growing in the hoophouse had already done that. Because of my ‘photojournaling’ observations, I had pictures of when different plants flowered, or went to seed or fruited (or even just when they started coming up). So all I had to do was look at what the plants were doing, and see when they had been in the same stage outside in previous years.

At first, I wondered if the results would be consistent. Would all the individual observations, taken together, all point to the same time frame? Or would different plants handle the seemingly non-equivalent conditions in different ways? But it turned out they did all point to the same time frame. So, I figured, if the plants in the hoophouse were doing what they would do in March (for example), I could plant crops that would be planted outside in March in this area, and they should do well. That has seemed to work pretty well, and gave a method to follow for figuring out when to plant what in the spring even when we were new at growing in a hoophouse.

These flies definitely seem to think it’s spring