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Friday Slide Show: The Garden in the Fog
2 August 2024
There's nothing quite like diffused light for a boy who grew up in the fog. It's the way we see the world. No blinding highlight, no shadow too obscure. You can take it all in.
But in taking it all in, you can't avoid anything. And in the garden, this is inescapable. Where there are blooms, there are withered leaves. Where apples mature, wrinkled lemons fall off the tree. On the flowering rose, petals start to fall.
The cycle of life, it's charmingly referred to by those who've been around the block a few times. For the young it appears more like a tragic drama in three acts: birth, life, death.
And you only get one ticket on that ride.
But we cheat death in a few ways. One is by having children. The other is by remembering our ancestors.
Gardens have no memory. They serve in other ways. Meaningful exercise rather than mere reps. The creation of an environment for not just plants but insects, animals and birds to flourish. And stationary props for the photographer.
So we wandered out into the garden on a foggy day, the light just right, to see how the apples were maturing, if the lemons were ready for picking, what flowers were in bloom and a few other things.
If we went out with the idea we'd be shooting impeccable floral arrangements, we soon learned otherwise. But we didn't avoid the less impeccable. We considered it was a challenge to find and photograph its "good side."
We shot these with our Nikon D300 and the repaired 18-200mm Nikkor at f8 (but regretted we didn't open it up a bit more because a few images were blurred by camera movement). You can't get too close with that lens, but we knew we could crop tightly and still have good resolution for our 800-pixel slide shows.
We edited the images in Lightroom on the iMac. It's slow to bring up the images and the sliders are not quite as responsive as they are on the M2, but we do like letting our eyes fall into that big screen. Which, we have to confess, we forgot we had calibrated at the old house.
We also synced our edits of the first image we edited (the second in the show) to the rest of the images after changing the color treatment to Adobe Standard from the more saturated Adobe Color. Even Adobe Landscape was saturated (to say nothing of Adobe Vivid).
But if you're shooting in the fog's diffused sunlight, you don't want saturation. You want no blinding highlights, no shadow too obscure.
You want to take it all in. The growth, the decay. Life.
