On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
JanieM
Just when I was grappling with a mild crisis of confidence after my Mendocino trip, summer arrived in Maine. The least visually interesting of the seasons IMHO, it’s the time of year when another winter has come and gone, the weather is balmy, and the grass and foliage have settled into a steady green after spring’s delicate variations.
Today it’s green, tomorrow it’s green, next week it’s green….
I’m not complaining, mind you; summer in Maine is too brief and precious to complain about. But I did have a bit of a struggle with picture-taking until Steve from Mendocino suggested that I expand my skillset by experimenting with aperture and depth of field.
Out of that exercise came . . . weeds.
*****
I learned a lot from these experiments and came out of a somewhat slow summer (photographically) with all kinds of ideas about what to take pictures of next.
Thanks are due as always to my editor, who made these pictures magical.
An older picture with a more recent edit. In the old days, before the field next to my house was cleared, goldenrod defined the late summer. This shot was taken in 2010 with my old point and shoot Coolpix. I included it for love of the memories it brings, and also as a baseline for how much my field has changed over the years
A dense patch of black-eyed Susans appeared at the town beach this year, seemingly out of nowhere. It was so lush and intense that it probably could have been seen from space. I used it on many evenings and from many angles for my DOF experiments. In this case, I wanted the mass of yellow to be the background for the finely defined seed pods of the thistles, with the lake all fuzzy in the distance.
Cattails are about as mundane and weedy as it gets. And yet this patch has provided me with variations of color and texture all summer. Another DOF experiment, with the cattails crisply defined and the pine trees soft-edged in the background.
Yet another DOF experiment. Steve’s editing made it lovely beyond anything I envisioned when I took it.
Crisp foreground, extra blurry background, with the bands of color and texture playing off each another.
I made some of my first DOF experiments on this patch of clover. Part of the lesson was to get better at choosing the aperture and then telling my camera where I wanted the focus point to be. This was the only workable picture I got that first night, so I told myself I’d come back the next night and try again. But the next day the mowing guy came, and there was no more clover to photograph. (At least for a few days. It’s a weed, after all.)
Practically every weed on the property is represented in this picture, though I think I missed Queen Anne’s Lace. Once again I like the image for its bands of color and texture, with the unusual touch of having the weeds in the very near foreground out of focus, because they decided to photobomb the picture at the last minute. I think it turned out okay anyhow.
Okay, not really weeds. But they wanted to be included in this set so I said okay. This was an earlier phase of my education, when I was simply practicing close-ups.
The patch of black-eyed Susans at the beach again, now mostly gone to seed. This came out of another session of practicing setting the focus point. It ended up feeling like every stalk and seed pod had an opinion of its own to express.
Another one with a little bit of everything, with DOF and aperture practice thrown in. The focus is varied in a scattered way that I think gives the picture a fairy tale quality.
swiftfox
I see native grasses and wildflowers.
p.a.
Nice stuff! How ’bout some camera/lens info.
Rusty
The Tall Grass is so simple yet also so beautiful. Thank you for sharing all of them.
Baud
I wish my weeds looked so good.
Geo Wilcox
These look like what my fields look like. We had horses on them and regularly bush hogged them. After we sold the horses, we let that field go and now it is a mix of small trees, golden rod, iron weed, and asters every summer and fall. I love it. Everyone else wastes gas mowing everything but I don’t. Plus the pictures I get are marvelous. I find late summer the best time to photograph bees and butterflies as well.
J R in WV
Nice work, my current camera is a little tough to do this work with depth of field, but I still like it a lot to draw Your attention to My preferred area of focus.
The use of an out-of-focus background is called bokeh, iirc from a Japanese word for blurry. It’s great for drawing attention to the foreground where a friend is, or a specific tree or flower wants extra attention.
Good job!
You should get a free photo editor and start learning to clean up and/or distort images. Tuning contrast is easy and can be quite useful to improve your images, for example, and on a computer you always have both your original and your most recent version if you make an edit that goes horrible on you!
Ken
@swiftfox: I’ve become much more mellow since adopting the philosophy “It’s only a weed if you don’t want it there”.
Wag
Playing with depth of field was so much easier with 35mm film. I have a much more difficult time setting my focus depth with my digital camera.
Great photos. I especially like the Black Eyed Susans that have gone to seed
TxTiger
I just love these photographs – they bring me back to my summer camp days in upstate New York, but without the accompanying allergy-induced runny nose and watery eyes! The depth of field experiments are particularly striking. Thanks for sharing them!
barbequebob
looks like great habitat for all kinds of butterflies and many other species of wildlife that depend on open habitats for nesting, basking, feeding, etc. Any woodcock using the field on spring nights for courtship flights?
Betsy
I really like Miscellaneous #1.
And the field off Blackeyed Susans gone to seed. Perfect.
These remind me of color-field paintings of the “Washington DC school”, if that’s what it’s called.
knally
Years ago (June/July 2007) I did a road trip around America and Canada. Started by driving from Portland Maine to Little Deer Isle. I was delighted by all the lupins by the roadside, only for my hosts to tell me they were an invasive nuisance! So it’s nice to see some native “weeds”.
Benw
I like weeds! So many flowering plants need to be cared for and weeds are like “oooh a crack in the pavement!”
JanieM
@p.a.: I’ll collect some camera/lens info once I’ve had some breakfast/caffeine.
@Geo Wilcox: When we moved here, the former owner’s Percheron, Bud, still lived here for a year or so. I fed him inside the barn, but he mostly liked to be out in the field grazing. His favorite thing was the purple flowers of thistle plants — it was a kick to see this huge black horse delicately pulling them off the plants with his lips. While Bud was here, the whole field was walkable. After Bud was gone, it was totally overgrown within the first year. The owner decided to keep most of it open, so here we are.
@barbequebob: I used to see woodcock now and then — haven’t for a long time, but then I don’t spend as much time outside as I used to, or at least at the right time of day. There are lots of bird calls and songs that I wish Albatrossity was here to identify. :-) (If I weren’t so lazy I’d learn some. I only know a few.)
@knally: Lupines are lovely! When my kids were little, one of our favorite children’s books was Miss Rumphius, by Barbara Cooney, about a woman who goes around scattering lupine seeds. I didn’t know at the time that they were an invasive, and there have never been any on this property. But a few years later we had big warnings about purple loosestrife, another invasive that was spreading through the roadside ditches all around here. Purple loosestrife is definitely around, but it really didn’t take over the way it seemed like it might.
JanieM
@Benw: Yes! And that was part of the point of my title for this post, which was meant to be wry and lighthearted. Also, I wanted it to be clear that none of these pics were from my garden, because I don’t have a garden. All this beauty just volunteered!
pieceofpeace
@Geo Wilcox: Well post them here so we can enjoy your good sights/sites?
cope
Very nice pictures, thanks. Besides playing with depth of field, you can also work with contrasting foregrounds/backgrounds some more as you have done in pics 5 and 7 as well as finding subjects suitable for silhouette shots.
As for birdsongs, there is a great free app called Merlin that records birdcalls as you hear them and then identifies them. I recorded three at once the other day and it IDed all three (I assume correctly). Here’s a link:
https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org
Keep ’em coming.
pieceofpeace
Thoroughly enjoyed these pics. The wild and free landscapes are favorites of mine. As is being in the weeds, those persistent and usually ignored growths can be found almost everywhere, rather like a reminder of sorts.
I’ve never quite adapted from film to digital, but might give it another go. The editing for your pictures is appreciated as well for the more dramatic effects.
So well done, and I hope you share again.
Steve from Mendocino
@pieceofpeace: took me more than 10 years to make the transition, then a friend suggested that I just shoot manually with my digital rig. something I’m very comfortable doing. from there I just added on one little camera capability after another.
munira
These are wonderful. I love photos of beautiful things that people often don’t notice.
Steve from Mendocino
@pieceofpeace: It took me more than 10 years to make friends with my digital camera (which, of course, was obsolete when I finally did). A friend finally told me to just set everything to manual — something I understand well. After that I gradually added in one capability at a time and bought myself a decent modern rig. Try ignoring all the buttons and use your digital camera like a film camera. Shoot in RAW and take the photos through Lightroom and Photoshop. The ability to recover detail from opaque shadows and blown highlights is astounding!
JanieM
@p.a.:
(ETA: Sorry about the numbering. The comment box does its own thing and I don’t have time to wrestle with it right now. ETA2: so the first ETA erased the #s, which were all 1 anyhow.)
ISO 100 for the Nikons, 125 for the Sony and the Canon.
Goldenrod
Nikon Coolpix S51 (my old point and shoot) — 1/400s at f/3.4, -3.10EV
Thistles and Friends
Sony DSC-RX100M7 — 1/25s at f/4.5, 7/10 EV
Cattails
Sony — 1/250s at f/4.0
Tall Grass
Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark II — 1/250s at f/2.8
More Tall Grass
Nikon D850 85mm f/1.8 — 1/500s at f/2.5
Clover
Nikon 85mm — 1/320s at f/2.5
Miscellaneous #1
Canon — 1/60s at f/5.6
(not really weeds)
Canon — 1/60s at f/7.1
Black-Eyed Susans
Canon — 1/15s at f/8.0
Miscellaneous #2
Nikon w/ 85mm — 1/125s at f/2.2
JanieM
@cope: Thanks for the merlin link! I will have a look. I have been very stubborn about using my phone as anything but a phone (okay, and an alarm clock, and occasionally in a pinch a camera) — but maybe it’s time to give in.
JanieM
@pieceofpeace:
I was the opposite in that I didn’t get really interested in photography until digital cameras were available. Maybe it helped that by that time my kids were grown and off to college, so I had more time; but also, I love being able to load the pics onto the computer right away and see what I’ve got.
The Canon Powershot was what replaced my Coolpix, and for the entire first year I had the Canon I used it in almost the way I had used the Coolpix, as a point and shoot.
With some guidance from Steve, and lots of stories of his experience of full manual shooting (with film!), I set the Canon up at ISO 125 (the lowest it will go) and shutter speed 1/60s, and let the camera choose the aperture. My next step was learning to use the exposure bias dial. It was only this summer that I changed the setting so that I was choosing the aperture and letting the camera choose the shutter speed. And of course, I had a lot more to learn from that.
I also got very used to just zooming by instinct, so using detachable lenses on the Nikon D850 is still a very big learning experience for me — lots more things to think about in terms of distance from subject, etc.
pieceofpeace
@Steve from Mendocino: Thank you, Steve, I’m going to give that a try.
pieceofpeace
@JanieM: Useful information, and appreciated. Thank you.
Tehanu
Lovely photos. Thanks.