Playing

This week I spent some time playing around with panoramic images, where I took three images and then stitched them together on the computer. It’s a nice way to avoid having to take a lot of lenses. You can leave the super-wide angle lens at home and still go even wider. The cover image of this post is my favorite (see it in full size below). I also did some more images of reflections in water and some straight-forward images of scenes on my walk.

I walked around Roselle Park east of Grand Rapids on the Grand River, Saturday. It’s still mostly brown and yellow, with bits of green coming back to life here and there. The first of these images is near the entrance to the park, as you walk along the asphalt path from the silo towards the river. The second is from near the end of my walk, on a cross-country skiing trail.

There is a lot of opportunity everywhere for abstract-ish images, when you get in the habit of seeing that way. The first of these is the light playing on the water of the Grand River, with the contrast set to extremely high in Lightroom. The phrase “water music” comes to mind for it. The second is simply a black and white of utility lines–perhaps more “minimalist” than abstract.

When you start looking for images of reflections up-and-down and right-and-left start to not matter. The point, in my view, is simply to see something interesting. Sometimes when I plan an image like this next one, I bend over to look at the scene upside down or on a 90 degree angle of view. I did that with this one.

Here are two of the panoramic images that I mentioned, where I took three pictures, with some overlap between them, and then had Lightroom stitch them together in a panoramic image.

The first–the cover image of this blog post–is the more interesting one. I shot it with a telephoto lens from a long distance. It features the kind of reflections of trees in water that I’ve been doing lately. The second I did close up, with a 50mm lens. It has a bit of “barrel” distortion, though that feel is exaggerated by the curved lines of gunk in the water at the bottom of the image.

Finally, here is one more reflection of trees in water image. These feel like abstract sketches to me. Trees, and yet more and less than trees at the same time.

I like the landscape as it looks this time of year, with brown, yellow, and occasional orange, red, and green hues. Mid-summer is a big boring with everything green and the trees all covered in leaves (and annoying, with mosquitoes and sometimes black flies).

This is a great time to be outdoors. The right temperatures, few bugs, and lots to see, as we transition from winter to summer. Easy to get out and about and stay socially distanced, even with people around. Michigan is now among the worst states in the nation with COVID-19 rates. So enjoy the outdoors, and stay safe out there.