Maine Glow

While we were visiting Megan's parents in Maine this past holiday season, I did what I always do there- I take plenty of photographs.  Since I've been going there five years now, I have to make a conscious effort to find new images.  It's SO easy to just take the same pictures year after year.

One late afternoon, just as the sun was dropping, I decided to walk through the woods surrounding their home..  The dominant trees of this particular area are balsam fir, white pine, hemlock, red oak and yellow birch.  Even though the light was really great, I couldn't find a subject that was interesting enough to my eye.  I then turned around, and noticed the small but specatular patches of light where the setting sun came through the forest.  I used my telephoto lens to single out these areas of reflected and refracted light, shooting straight into the sun.  Making sure I didn't look through the camera at the sun, I snapped several images that I was really happy with.  I've never quite made this type of photograph before here, but I am really pleased with these.  Yes, there are  plenty of lens flare, normally considered a "problem", but to me, the technical flaws are what makes these images interesting.

No matter what you're doing, be it looking for rare plants, searching for wildlife, or photographing the natural world, take time to look at things a different way- you never know what you might find.

-Tom

Ohio Buckeye

The leaves of the Ohio Buckeye are often the first to unfurl in our woodlands.

The Scarred American Beech

Why do we deface our mature American Beech Trees? And why do we think that we have to leave our names everywhere? (I'm apparently guilty as my name is on the tree too, via my watermark!) Almost eleven years ago to the day, I was sitting on a portable stool with my fellow Hiram College students in Carnarvon Gorge National Park in Australia. A ranger who was introducing us to the ecology and geology of hte park gave us a strong, almost accusatory warning that we Americans can't write on trees and cliff faces in Australia like we do in the USA. I've thought about this ever since, and I just don't get it. What compels us to do this? It's obviously ingrained into our culture, I'm not exactly sure how it started, and I don't see any sign of it stopping.

Tom

Adams Lake Prairie State Nature Preserve

Last Friday before the moss workshop, I had the fortune to visit several State Nature Preserves in Adams County. The first stop of the day was Adams Lake Prairie State Nature Preserve, where I found the blackjack oak seen in the oak quiz post. There are some top notch botanists who identified this oak right away- some without ever seeing it in the field.

Little Bluestem and Red Cedar

Adam Lake Prairie is a tiny prairie patch on a hillside in Adams County. Of all my botanical travels to Ohio's hotspots of diversity, I have visited Adams County the least. It is known for its xeric limestone prairies. If you've been following along at Steve Willson's Blue Jay Barrens blog, you are familiar with this type of ecosystem. Some of these barrens also can occur on shale, and that is the case of Adams Lake Prairie. Although small, if you ever find yourself in Adams County, Ohio, not too far from the town of West Union, this little botanical wonder inside Adams Lake State Park is definitely worth a visit.

The shriveled leaves of Prairie Dock.

You nailed blackjack oak, but how about this one?

The hills created by the Allegheny Mound Ant are a common sight in this part of Ohio.

And finally, here's a violet for your perusal. I talked quite a bit about the stemless blue violets over over last weekend with Daniel Boone (yes, a real person for those of you that have never met Dan!), one of the midwest's most enthusiastic and prolific botanists. This past field season, he went on a quest to find all of Ohio's violet species, and in the process, helped us understand more about one of our endangered species, the bog violet, Viola nephrophylla.

The leaf above isn't bog violet, but I'm sure Dan would know it right away. Unfortunately, I'm itching for Tom Cooperrider's book right now, but it's a few miles away on the bookshelf at the office. Can someone pinch hit for me?

Tom


View Ohio State Nature Preserves in a larger map

HDR Photography How To- "On Golden Pond"

Click for larger image.

First of all, I'd like to thank Tom aka Fishing Guy, from Kent Ohio, and Heather of the Hills, for inspiring me borrow the original "On Golden Pond" film from the library. I was explaining that I'd never seen a loon at Little Pond, Maine, and Tom was surprised, since the movie "On Golden Pond" portrays them as a regular sight and sound for the Thayers. Not so for Little Pond- I just don't think it is big enough to support loons.

Getting back to the movie- Megan and I watched it, and although it is a bit dated, a bit slow, and a bit cheesy- it was really worth our time. The movie does a superb job of illustrating what the lake life is like in Maine- idyllic.

Now, onto how I created the picture above. Obviously, this type of view is something that an ordinary camera cannot capture with a single image. However, using a photographic technique called high dynamic range photography, or HDR, we photographers can take multiple exposures of the same scene and merge them in a software called Photomatix. The resulting merged image can then be tone mapped, also using Photomatix, to allow the bright areas and the shadow areas of the image to be exposed as the eye would see them in nature.

Let's see how this works- here are the three images that went into making my On Golden Pond- Little Pond photograph-.




The three shots are not exactly impressive are they? One reason for this is that they're minimally processed RAW files, straight out of the camera. Photomatix, with a great deal of input from the user by adjusting many features with sliders and buttons, can really make magic.



Tom

P.S. I'll give 10 points, yes, 10 points, to the commenter that can correctly identify the scientific name of the deciduous tree prominently featured in the right hand portion of this image.

Around the Office with the Point and Shoot

It has been one of those weeks. I'm still sick, unfortunately. Megan is pumping me with meds, but I've definitely got a virus that has been really hard to shake. Its tough because I'm pretty much worthless around the house- she has to do more work with Weston. I'm typically full of energy, but this week, not so much.

My coworker says he thinks I have tuberculosis. You've got to know him, some of you do, but I just think that is hilarious. He is completley kidding. Well, as you can imagine, I've been taking it easy, but that didn't stop me from capturing a late sky watch image Friday evening which I posted at TA Photography.

As for here, I took fifteen minutes yesterday with my point and shoot camera, a nice little Panasonic number (more specifically, the LZ-8) I picked up from Big Lots for 100 bucks. It pays to always have a camera ready. And even if its a point and shoot- don't forget about composition. Make everything in the frame count, always, before you hit that shutter every time. Does that little branch really need to be in the frame? Can I use a different focal length? Can I get closer? Analyze your scene critically before you hit the button, and if you do that you'll always get better images. It doesn't matter if your camera is a Canon 5d Mark II or a Kodak disposable film thing you picked up because you forgot your camera battery.

Mosquito on Crab Apple

Red Maple Samaras

Eat your heart out Redbuds...I drool over this plant. These things are all over calcareous Ohio, not so much in the acidic N.E. part of the state where I grew up.

Ant on a sandbar willow flower.

The recently cut stump of an ash tree, spared from death by the EAB, but not spared from death.

Umm, Ok, wait a minute here...how did my head pop in that picture? Wasn't I just ranting about good composition? :)


And there you have it....Ok, I'll admit, sometimes it is fun to just point the camera at see what you get. For the last image of the Virginia bluebells, that is just what I did. I actually had the camera laying on the ground, pointing straight up, and I think this is a fairly neat perspective. It shows how we've integrated native plants around our office buildings. And that is great for a guy who's been sick all week and just needed a quick native plant rush.

Tom

Saying Goodbye to Autumn

Megan and I finished up the major raking today of our yard. Most of the Bur Oak leaves are piled on our devil's strip (aka tree lawn) waiting to be sucked up by the giant Worthington leaf machine. It is hard to believe that Thanksgiving is near, and Megan and I will be traveling to little pond Maine once again. It was only five weeks ago that we were there to witness the blaze of glory that is the north woods in fall. I took these series of images on the afternoon that we left. The light was muted by a thick layer of clouds, allowing the colors in the leaves, no longer shrouded by chlorophyll, to shine.

The yellow leaves of the fall-flowering witch-hazel against the appropriately named red maple.

Witch-hazel above, red oak below.

A pair of red maple leaves.

The leaf of a fallen red maple, with fronds of bracken and white pine needles.

Red maple, with American beech below.

American beech.

Huckleberry

And finally, a view across the pond, showing the yellow tamaracks (a deciduous member of the pine family) that grow in the bog that rings Little Pond.

Tom

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Our Quercus

Megan and I have lived at our new home here in Worthington for over three months, but we are still getting to know our Quercus macrocarpa (that would be bur oak to the non- botanists out there). This huge tree, we have found, is the pride of the street. When we first met our neighbors, they did not hesitate to ask us if we liked the tree. There was quite a rumor going around that the new owners were thinking of cutting this beauty down, so we had to quickly squelch that one. Once they learned our last name was "Arbour", i think they understood that we would love the tree just as much as the whole neighborhood did.

Here is a shot of our grand tree using the Canon efs 10-22 super wide angle zoom which I rented one month ago. The oak leaves were just beginning to fall. Most of the leaves have yellowed and fallen by now, but in this shot, only a few leaves are on the grass.

Tom

I wasn't gone for long

A few quick shots, courtesy of my mom, an occasional commenter here. Here we are pulling the truck into our old front yard, my dad is directing me back. He did a fantastic job.

All magically loaded up, now the truck is at our new house. Here you can see our super duper friends that today, doubled as our moving crew. They were absolutely awesome and we owe them big time. We got our whole three bedroom house moved in under four hours.

And this is one of my mom's shots of our fabulous bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa). It is huge. Our house is two stories, a good 18 feet tall probably. She did a fantastic job of capturing the massiveness of this specimen tree. It mesmerizes me as we sit on the deck and look up at it. It is quite awesome.

And here is my brother and I last weekend scraping away wallpaper glue from our family room wall. This is the project that I've been blogging about so much. That same wall now has a layer of primer on it and several layers of joint compound. It is quite amazing for me to look back at this shot and think just how much work I've done.

We're in the house. My new blogging locale is in my basement, which several of our movers and even my aunt labeled "The Man Cave". I miss my little back bedroom that looked out on the backyard, but I think I'll be able to figure something out. Like getting the laptop to actually connect to our wireless router, and then I can blog from the backyard. That would be cool.

For those of you that don't know the Columbus area, we've moved about three miles north of our house in the beechwold neighborhood to the city of Worthington, which predates the city of Columbus, although now this little burb is mostly surrounded by Columbus. We're in the suburbs, sort of. Our house was built in 1966, really when suburbs were just starting to ramp up. I'm not a five minute walk from the river anymore, but I am a five minute bike ride. We'll be getting out and exploring more of the Olentangy as time allows. It should be great fun. And there sure is plenty of work around the house. Boxes to unpack, things to organize, and of course, I can't forget about that little family room project I started!

Tom

P.S. I uploaded these pictures at full resolution. Clicking them will reveal the entire image with more detail.

Kelleys Island

Thanks to Derek Jensen for releasing this fabulous oblique aerial photo of Kelleys Island to the public domain. You can can get a great feel for how large and still how wild this island is. Let me qualify that: wild for OHIO! We do have 10 million people in this state, so finding any high quality natural areas is quite a challenge. You can see in this photo the quarries. The island is a hunk of limestone with thin soil on top. Much of the limestone has been quarried away. The abandoned quarries make fantastic habitat for many of Ohio's state listed plants. There are also red cedar woods across the island which also make for interesting habitat.

To get to Kelleys, you can take a boat or fly. We take the ferry. Cedar Point roller coasters in back left.

The ferry landing.

To the east quarry to botanize.

Carex viridula, an Ohio potentially threatened species.

Very interesting dragons in the wheel position. Any thoughts?

A tiny american toadlet with vestiges of his tadpolian tail.

Our super invasive non-native Phragmites australis subspecies australis.

A quarry sedge swale not yet invaded by Phragmites.

It supported larval ambystomatid salamanders, perhaps the Kelleys Island salamander.

The clear horseshoe shape lake of the quarry supported a lush growth of pond weed. (Potamogeton)

To the woods, a natural calcareous cliff, perhaps an old shoreline.

A not so natural fence, contructed long ago.

The blue ash, Fraxinus quadrangulata, is not uncommon on the island.

Neither is the honey locust, Gleditsia triacanthos.

And last but not least, the woods was teeming with this damsefly, perhaps an emerald spreadwing. Thank goodness for them. Nature's Bug Spray. Dragons and Damsels.

Tom