I really needed to go for a walk this morning, so I headed over to a small nature area a mile away from my house for a walk. Everything is dead and stark, and not very photogenic. However, I found these snow-covered river rocks and I was captivated by their shape and the way the light defined it. Today’s photo, actually taken today. I think I am going to start a 365 project on Wednesday–that’s where you take and post a photo every day. Is there interest in that?
My life has turned into one long series of arguments with the cat over eating, interrupted with occasional bouts of work. Prior to the week before last, any discussion with my cat about eating would be about him eating too much. Now, he’s sick with unspecified liver problems, problems that would cost a minimum of $500 to diagnose further,possibly more. With the vet’s agreement, we’ve decided to take a more conservative route with him and see what we can do with just getting him stuffed with food–part of the problem, he said, was that he wasn’t eating.
Now, he doesn’t throw up anymore, that’s a good sign. But getting him to eat constantly is like arguing with a toddler. You can’t explain to him why he needs to eat. You can keep trying to trick him, but he catches on and I’m running out of methods. We even have this high calorie paste that we’re supposed to be able to get him to lick off his paws or whatnot, but we put some of that on and he just got pissed and let it stay there until it dried up and flaked off. Despite this, he seems to be acting fairly normal–certainly not acting as sick as he did when we took him into the vet first. I just don’t know what to do with him. He feels bony. When the vet calls today, I guess I will make more arrangements to have him in and weighed and given fluids.
Anyway, here’s another canyon photo. Last one, I think, until I go back some time. Which at the rate this cat is costing me money, will be 2015.
I took Thanksgiving morning and went up to Vedauwoo, one of my favorite landscapes in the area to photograph in the winter. I made a few nice photographs, and this is one of them.
A shot of Sarah enjoying the Denver Aquarium on the long weekend. It was nice to get out and look at wildlife that couldn’t run away from me!
These barn swallows have been taunting me every day on my walk. Today, I finally brought the camera along and they didn’t disappoint me. I think I need to try near dusk as well, to get the direction of light I need, but shooting them in pseudo-silhouette is fun too. This has kind of a lomo feel to it for me.
Since I started getting serious about photography, I have followed a relatively predictable pattern. As soon as there has been snow on the ground, I have quit shooting for the year. I hate snow, I hate the cold, and I have never found winter to be an inspiring time for any of the kinds of photography that I like. I don’t have a studio, so almost all of my shooting is outdoors. If that sounds like a bunch of excuses, well, it’s true. More than anything else, I think I found winter a very uninspiring time. I always thought that in winter, I would sit indoors keeping my toes warm and instead work on my writing. The summer is for walks through the nature areas with my macro lens, documenting the odd lives of insects.
That’s what I thought, until this past winter, when I became determined to break the cycle and keep using my camera past October. The result has been a considerable step up in the quality of my landscape photography in particular, but in general, I feel that the effort has improved me in several ways.
The first effect that this had was forcing me to find beauty in landscapes and objects that I do not ordinarily find beautiful. The color green is perhaps my favorite, followed by red. I’ve never much cared for the cold blues, but I felt that it was limiting me to be so restrictive in the color palette that I liked.
Out here, you don’t get much choice. If you don’t like cold blues and grays, you won’t find much to photograph in the winter.
I still have my preferences for vibrant greens, but I’ve learned how to see the beauty in ice and snow better in the past winter than all the years before added up. To get good at this, I had to really stop trusting my auto-exposure meter in the camera and learn to take shots and adjust my exposure as much as a stop up or down. Snow turns out an ugly grey on auto most of the time because of the nature of camera sensors and their preference for 18% gray (some say 12%. Either way, it makes shooting white subjects harder). This means you need to force the sensor to bump it up in a predominantly snowy scene. You can sometimes fix this in Lightroom, but I’m trying more and more to get it just right in the camera, or as close as I can.
After playing around with the technical aspects of shooting in the winter, I realized that I had some really fantastic mountain vistas I could be capturing, so I started to take landscape photography more seriously than ever before. Which leads me to the next point.
At a certain point, cold is cold. And with my newfound interest in landscape photography, I realized, the best light really is during the “golden hour.” There’s an hour after sunrise and an hour before sunset where you get a nice, warm, low-angle and diffuse light. The quality is unmatched by nearly any other light as far as landscapes go. I’ve known this for a long time, but I had always had a really hard time motivating myself to be up early enough to be in position for the sunrise, especially in the winter.
So cold is cold, and if I’m going to be out in it, being out in it a little earlier doesn’t really hurt much. Because I was working on an east coast schedule, I found it very easy to rise around 5:30 or 6 AM to be out in the mountains in time for the great light.
If you go for a drive in a national park in the middle of the day, you’re going to see some wildlife, but it’s going to be pretty inactive. Grazers will be hunkered down chewing cud and won’t make for great shots. You’ll be incredibly lucky to see a predator. And of course, the light stinks, so photographing anything results in harsh shadows and a generally unpleasing look, unless it’s really cloudy and you’ve got a sky that has turned into a giant softbox, but even then, if you want any sky at all in your shot, it’s going to look pretty bland if everything’s just white from the horizon up.
Shooting landscapes in Rocky Mountain National Park at dawn, I realized, like a dummy, that the elk herds were most approachable and most interesting around the golden hour as well. I began to follow a pattern of shooting the sunrise for landscape work, and then moving down to lower elevations to set up and photograph elk.
Again, shooting wildlife with a telephoto in low-light conditions? Not easy. Technically, I had an incredibly hard time getting a decent exposure in focus. I had to learn how to wield ISO better. I hate shooting at anything other than 100 ISO, honestly, but my telephoto isn’t fast enough to make good use of the light. Even with in-body stabilization, I had to learn better methods of bracing my camera from the car, and I was forced to finally spend a little money on a good, decent carbon-fiber tripod. The legs can be locked into 4 different positions, it’s light weight, and it allows for a more sophisticated ball-head mount.
Shooting in less than ideal conditions really does a lot to make you think about how to get better. I spent a couple of trips and came back with nothing remotely good. Under exposed, blurry from camera shake, or worse. I could have been discouraged, but I loved being out there so much (annoying tourists not withstanding), that I kept at it, and slowly my work began to improve.
In the end, I feel like I’ve taken my technical skills up a notch. I’ve learned to utilize natural light better than before, and I don’t trust my camera to give me the best exposure automatically in every situation. I’ve learned better methods for stabilizing my camera by hand, and when to increase the ISO to get more light. I learned a little bit about animal behavior and how to take advantage of it, but I still have a lot to learn about wildlife photography (and a lot of time I need to invest into it).
Would I have learned some of these things if I had put up the camera in the fall and waited for spring? Maybe. But I wouldn’t have learned them as quickly and in the same combination. Some I might not have learned at all, and my goal is to be a well-rounded photographer.
Pushing myself outside my comfort zone for a winter paid off in spades. I hope that some of the photographs I’ve included in this post have helped drive home that point. All of these were taken in this past winter.
Do you have a story to share regarding how pushing yourself outside your comfort zone helped you improve at something? Share your story with us in the comments.
That seems like an unusual idea, doesn’t it? That wielding a camera to capture single moments in time really has anything valuable to add to the process of writing stories? But it has, I think. Each time I pick up the camera, I think about writing, and each time I write, I think about the camera. The two passions have odd synergies between them. There are commonalities among all creative endeavors, perhaps. Here are a few principles that I feel have worked their way into my work , or become stronger, because of my pursuit of photography.
Pushing past the automatic settings in writing means discarding early ideas, and digging deeper for more essential truths. Writing not on autopilot, but with careful consideration, tweaking until the mental image is just right, with the subject in focus, and distracting elements not.
Do you find that your interests teaches you unexpected things about one another? What intersections between different arts and activities have you discovered, and what have these discoveries illuminated for you?
Some day, I’ll write about how writing and fishing have many things in common. For one, both require tremendous amounts of patience to get what you what.
This prairie dog is a lone wolf.
I feel like a right idiot today. I botched last week’s episode of Escape Pod, production-wise, according to most feedback. I overreacted to a friend’s offhand comment on Facebook and caused a ridiculous amount of drama for no good reason other than I have thin skin.
My natural reaction when faced with so much failure is to give up, but I am not going to give up today. I’m going to apologize and do better next time. Hopefully EP listeners and offended friends will forgive me.
All things considered, I’d rather be back in Antelope Canyon with my camera right now. That would be hard to screw up.
My stepfather Mike drives me out into the country to show off some discoveries he made while walking through the woods looking for cast-off deer antlers. He and an older man by the name of Chester often go looking for such things.
We drive nearly up to the Missouri border and park in an area under control for the Corps of Engineers. Hills surround a low field that has yet to be plowed under. Corn stalks still stand here and there like soldiers on the battlefield at the end of the war, while others blow across the ground in the breeze. Purple clover carpets the soil beneath the stalks, good nitrogen for when the farmer eventually does plow and plant for another season.
The sky is strung with low-hanging gray cotton clouds, thoroughly obscuring the sun. It’s a welcome change from the sunny bright weather of Colorado, actually. Overcast days are rare where I live now. A sharp, cold wind blows, making me pull my coat around me tighter. We walk down a muddy road. Water is everywhere, but it hasn’t been raining much, so it seems to come out of nowhere, and I wonder aloud about it. Mike nods and leads me up the side of a hill. Water trickles slowly down the slope through the grass which has become matted down in places with the wet. We follow the water up into a treeline, stepping among fallen logs until we come to a stone ridge at the top of the hill. We move around along the ridge until we spot the source; an old spring.
A half-circle of limestone pieces, fit together with no mortar, precision work that I become very familiar with through the rest of our exploration, has been set into the hillside three feet deep. the water half-fills the hole. Someone, perhaps as much as a hundred years ago, found this tiny upwelling of fresh water, dug it out and reinforced the walls with stone from the hillside. No one lives around here for miles, but that wasn’t always the case. (More below the photo)
I take photos, trimming away brush and debris, cleaning up the scene as best I can. The water is green with thick algae, and lichens and moss coat everything. The grass and weeds have yet to grow back, although sky-blue wildflowers have sprung up here and there beneath the trees.
Mike gives me a grin as if to say “you haven’t seen anything yet” and we set off back down the hill and along the muddy road, around a pond fed by yet another spring. We walk below the earthen dam that holds back the water, and alongside a field, following muddy tracks of a doe white-tailed deer that passed not more than a couple of hours before us. We find an old horse-drawn plow, rust-red in tall grass, the plowshare still biting into the soil. The gears and levers still function. I pull them and marvel at how a 50+ year old plow can be still relatively intact. All that it misses is the seat and chains to harness to the work horse.
From the plow, we follow the base of the large hill until Mike points out a disused wagon trail whichs cuts back and angles against the slope, climbing to the summit a hundred feet or so above the pond and field. The trail is steep on either side as if heavy wagon loads were carted up and down here until . When we reach the top, it’s not hard to imagine what loads were brought up.
Among the thicket of young trees, maybe 30, 40 years old in places, some older, Mike has found a complex of 3 foot high limestone walls that fences in more than a football-field’s worth of space. The walls show the same details and craftsmanship of the walls of the hidden spring. The stones are not cut of quarried. They are field stones that have been gathered and carefully fit together, tens of thousands of them.
First we examine a cut into the hillside, a cellar almost, walled off with limestone as well, with some pale stones showing signs of having been exposed to intense heat. Here, Mike thinks, was the smokehouse where the pork was hung and cured. This was a hog farm once. The walls seemingly haphazard were added to over time as the steadily wealthier owner added pens. I dig around in the rubble around the smokehouse and find bits and pieces of old bottles and some porcelin. Mike leans down to me and exclaims “Will you look at that!” I look up and he’s found an old horsehoe, rusted bent nails and all.
“It’s a lucky horseshoe,” I say.
“Well, it is now,” Mike says.
Mike points out a small alcove of walls with a narrow entryway, not more than four feet by six feet, and explains that this is where they would have kept the boar away from the sows, letting him out only a few times a year to sire young. It seems like a frustrating life for an animal, to hear and smell beautiful women just on the other side of a wall, but only able to get to them so very rarely. We move on.
Peeking out from just behind the bare trees, I can see a solitary brick chimney standing twenty feet into the air. We explore the concrete foundation which has heavy iron bolts set in to fasten the walls joists which have long since rotted away. I kick away at the fallen leaves and find old roof shingles, corrugated aluminum siding, and rotting wooden floorboards. It’s impossible to look at all of this and not start ot picture the people who lived here, to imagine their animals. I begin to wonder if they had a barn. They clearly had a wagon drawn by horses. I wander the grounds and sure enough, I find the buried foundations of another building, small, but not far from the opening in the walls where the wagon trail led into the ruins. This, I believe was the barn, where the horses were kept, and the walled area around it their yard.
How old is this place? When did they leave? How much money must they have had to have raised hundreds of hogs here? The questions the stones illicit are endless. We wander, tracing the outlines of the farm, and I try to picture it, try to travel back in time with my mind’s eye. I imagine that the farm was first built in the late 1800s, perhaps by a civil war soldier home from the war, weary from the killing. Weary of people, he buys a parcel of land far away from the embryonic towns of Northeast kansas. It’s not ideal, but some instinct left over from the war instructs him to build his home and farm atop a large rise where he can see for miles around, see the river cutting through the hills and carving steep banks below. there’s not much hardwood for building, so he begins to fence in his property with piece of yellowstone that litter the ground. Perhaps he hires a couple of hands to help errect his home, and he takes a young wife from one of the nearby railroad towns, maybe even Osawatomie. He purchases his first hogs and begins to raise animals. He plows a field below the hill and plants corn and wheat. It’s hard work, but not as hard as killing men, there’s that much.
His wife gives birth to three sons and a daughter, and it’s not long before they are put to work expanding the fences, building more pens for the hogs. They strip the hill bare of stones to make their fences, but they don’t simply pile the rocks together loosely. The hogs could push over poorly built walls–no, they fit the pieces together carefully. Sometimes they take a sledge to a piece to break it into smaller pieces, but mostly they use the pieces exactly as they are when they find them, simply fitting them together with thought and patience.
The years go by in hard, fulfilling work. The farm prospers. His daughter and two sons move away to the nearby towns, marry, and raise families. He is made a widower when his wife succumbs to a fever in the summer, some tickborne disease. The second son, the one for whom farming had always seemed to be his fate, takes over on the farm after his father dies from pneumonia after a hard winter. The son buries his father in a grave on the hillside and sets a limestone into the ground to mark the spot. He is illiterate–his old man had never placed much stock in education and did just fine without it–and so no words are etched into the marker. The grave overlooks the acres that the old man has bought up with the growth of his farm and the lucrative sale of hogs and pork.
The son spends some of his inheritance and builds a new house, this time with a concrete foundation. It’s small, enough room for a couple of people to live comfortably. He marries a woman, but they never have children. The depression comes, and things get harder. Few can afford to buy his pork and hogs. Eventually, they sell the land to a nearby rancher and move to the city to try their fortunes there.
And my crystal ball goes hazy. I wonder if there are descendants somewhere who were raised on stories of life on the old hog farm, but who have never seen what I have seen, never visited their ancestor’s lands. My family were farmers, not so many generations ago, but I don’t know the lands they worked. Arkansas somewhere, I am told.
With the ruins explored, Mike and I walk back to the truck in the drizzling rain. I feel today as if I have somehow reached back into time and touched the life of some faceless stranger. History is a funny thing, and I feel closer to it here than I do anywhere else. I don’t know why.
My story “Groob’s Stupid Grubs,” a story of a goblin’s hopes for his idiot children, is available in Black Gate 15.
I recently finished the first draft of a YA novel called Takedown Notice set in the net-mage universe of my stories “Captain Blood’s B00ty” and “One Click Banishment.” What happens when the Magical Association of Atlantis finally gets the upper hand against the net mages in the spell program copyfight?