Brooklyn’s Trees, a new Flickr photo group

Welcome, Festival of the Trees visitors! Go see the photos in Brooklyn’s Trees. If you like what you see, come back here and read about it, and check out my other posts on Urban Foresty and Trees in general.


Brooklyn’s Trees is a Flickr photo pool I started to “share and celebrate Brooklyn’s trees through photography.” The response has been great, and the submissions are beautiful and diverse.



I’ve adapted a definition of “trees” from Festival of the Trees:

“Trees” are defined as any woody plant species that regularly exceed three meters in height; exceptions might include banana “trees” which are not woody plants. We are interested in trees in the concrete rather than in the abstract, so the “cloud trees” at the intersection of Ocean and Flatbush Avenues, for example, are out.

Any photographs of or about trees in Brooklyn are welcomed, including those on our streets, in our parks, gardens, and other public spaces, and on private property. Young trees, dead trees, shadows or reflections of trees are all in the spirit of this group. Photos should be “safe” as defined by Flickr.

First Macro Shots

Alstroemeria
Alstroemeria flowers
My new macro lens arrived today. I would say that I was like a kid on Christmas, except that I am notorious among friends and family for carefully unwrapping any gift I receive so as to not tear the paper so I can save it.

The very, very first shot I took was of my router. Not that interesting. I deleted it. The Alstroemeria is the second macro shot I took. One of our next-door neighbors was coming home, and she had a bouquet in her arms. The other shots are from my backyard.

Itea “Little Henry”
Itea "“Little Henry”"

Ilex verticillata, Winterberry (female)
Ilex verticillata (female)

Nepeta calamintha, Catmint “Walker’s Low”
Nepeta calamintha "“Walker's Low”"

Note the bonus ant in the above photo!

Hydrangea flower
Hydrangea flower

This lens will take some getting used to before I can select and frame my subjects effectively. It’s a long lens, 105mm (digital, logner equivalent 35mm), so the depth-of-field is compressed. The advantage is that the combination of long focal length and closest focusing distance of 1 foot can provide 1:1 reproduction ratios: life-size images captured in the camera, which are much larger than life when enlarged. For example, here’s a 1:1 photo of text from the second paragraph of this post:

DSC_2121

Besides shallow depth-of-field, the other disadvantage of a long focal length is increased sensitivity to camera shake. This macro lens also has built-in image stabilization, which counteracts shake by a factor of 2 or more.

I’m really interested in trying out this new lens for insect photography. The lens can focus out to infinity, so I can increase the depth-of-field by shooting from a greater distance. Here’s an example of that in the last shot I took today: leaves from the mystery Ligularia I bought at the Chelsea Garden Center two Saturdays ago.

Ligularia leaves
Ligularia leaves

These leaves are exceptionally ruffled. Although much of each leaf is still not in focus, the overall image accurately conveys the texture and depth of the leaves. This is my favorite of the dozen or so shots I took today with my new toy. I’m looking forward to having more play time with it.

Where are all the people?

Bonsai paparazzo
DSC_3321

Julie, who authors the daily journal, Human Flower Project, recently commented:

It interests (and surprises) me that there are so FEW photos of people in the garden. Any idea why?

She went on to write her own post on this topic:

One might say that since gardens—and photographs, too—are men’s, women’s and children’s creations, they embody a kind of humanism. It just takes a penetrating eye to see the human mind at work in a glorious perennial border or a well-framed foxglove. That’s surely so. But gardens are both by and FOR people, so why are do so few of the Brooklyn Garden’s visitors show us what people are doing there, how they interact with this glorious environment? The same holds true in most gardening magazines and websites. Among the many that feature fine photos of home, public and commercial gardens, one rarely sees a hand pruning or a vagrant snoozing. Why is this?

I hadn’t responded yet to Julie’s comment when I read her post today. So this is my response.


I know I’ve contributed just a handful of photos to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitors pool with people in them. I’ve included a few of them in this post. Most of my photos don’t have people in them. I have some ideas why that might be.

Often the people I end up photographing are other photographers. Why? Because they’re in the way of my shot! Making lemons from lemonade (or something), they become the subject, or at least part of the composition.

Reflections
Reflections

More often, people are are incidental to the shot, or unavoidable, so I include them anyway.

Entrance to the Native Flora Garden, April 2007
Entrance to the Native Flora Garden

Most rarely for my photographs, people are the subject.

Alessandro Chiari, BBG’s Chief Propagator, And Titan Arum “Baby”, August 2006
DSC_1088

Mark Fisher and Titan Arum “Baby”
Mark Fisher and Titan Arum "Baby"

Forsythia handouts, April 2007
Forsythia Handouts

I’m not generally a sociable person. I’m bad with names, faces, and people. I’ve never been comfortable photographing people. There are so many great faces and characters in New York City, I wouldn’t know where to begin photographing them. Not to mention I avoid confrontation. A telephoto lens helps.

Lily Pool Terrace, November 2005
Lily Pool Terrace


Anyone is welcome to join the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitors group and contribute photos of the gardens. I also actively search for photos of the garden and invite their contribution, especially from folks who are not already members of the group and don’t know about it yet. There’s no formula for what I look for. But one of the criteria is “unusualness”: an unusual perspective of a well-photographed site, or an ephemeral moment.

I think part of the reason why there are so few photos with people in them is that they are not usually the subject of the photo. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is located in a dense urban area and gets a lot of visitors. We don’t normally go to a garden to see other people. For example, the Cherry Blossom Festival at BBG is packed with thousands of people. So a photo of cherry trees in full bloom, without a soul in sight, is unusual!

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitors Photo Pool

With Spring ramping up, and Hanami upon us, this seems as good a time as any to let folks know about the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitors (BBGV) group and photo pool on Flickr. Here’s the original description from Paul-M, who started the group:

Pictures taken at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. This is not affiliated with the garden. I’m just a lover of the place. There is a 12 picture per day maximum.
– About Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitors

I’m a co-administrator. The group is open to anyone for viewing, and open to any Flickr user for contributing. Contributors retain all rights.

Here is a Flickr HTML badge sampling photos from BBGV. I also have a Flash badge for the group in the sidebar.

I encourage everyone visiting the Brooklyn Botanic Garden this Spring to share their photos!

On Garden Photography

[Updated 2006.09.05 10:39 EDT: Reduced image sizes to fit displays with 1024×768 resolution.]
[Updated 2006.08.22 16:10 EDT: Added examples for each “consideration.”]

Susan Harris just posted Tenets of Garden Photography over on Garden Rant, in which she asks some provocative (to me) questions:

… let’s see how they [tips on improving vacation pictures] translate to our world.

The first advice is to not cut off people’s feet, which makes me wonder: is there a plant part that, if cut off, spoils the photo? And the admonition to avoid telephone poles coming out of your subject applies equally well to plant subjects as to human. But really, there’s lots more useful stuff here, like the fact that we usually see the subject, not the whole frame, and we should always “check the borders.” And my favorite – a discussion of qualities of light that goes beyond the avoid-harsh-sun advice we see everywhere to describe “sweet light” and suggest that flash be only during the day, never at night. I just love that counterintuitive stuff!!

Specific to travel, photographers are reminded to catch these elements: people, scenics, details, food, movement, action, and nightlife. So what do you suppose the must-shoot elements would be in gardening photography? Maybe entrances, whole borders, close-ups, small plant combinations, animals, and such hardscape as seating, stone, wood, and statuary. What else?

I started leaving a comment there, but after my comment started getting longer than her blog entry, I thought I should write my own in response!

I’ve been “a photographer” since before the age of five, almost more decades than you can count on the fingers of one hand. The way I’ve photographed, and how I share my photography, has changed a lot over my lifetime. It continues to evolve, not only in response to the huge technological changes, but also to changes in me and my life and interests.

I don’t remember the last time I used a “real” (film) camera. The time lag for feedback between what I thought I shot and what I got made me try to make every shot count. Without access to a darkroom, or the skills to take advantage of it, I learned to compose my shots “in camera”: to carefully frame each shot in the viewfinder to get exactly the picture I wanted to eventually see.

Starting about 1980, I shot slide film exclusively. I “edited” each roll I got back, going through every slide, and selecting the ones which were not only technically perfect (focus, exposure, and so on) but which also captured what I was striving for when I took the picture. At most, I would get two or three “good” shots out of the roll; maybe 1-5% of all the photos I took. These are the only ones which anyone else would ever see. From this population I selected maybe 10% as “candidates” for printing. Again, maybe only 10% of these ever made it to paper. So most folks only saw a tiny percentage, less than 1/1000, of all the shots I took. And yes, I shot thousands of images each year.

Digital photography, blogging, and social networking sites such as flickr are allowing me to share my photography in ways it would have been far too expensive or cumbersome to do in the past. I can experiment more wildly, since I can get immediate feedback on the success of the shot, and the cost of making mistakes is only the time it took me to setup and take the shot. (And delete the mistakes!)

But I’ve kept my old habits. I still compose in camera, and take the time to setup each shot, even though I could easily crop the image on my computer. I don’t dump every photo I take into public view; I still edit the collections. I still go through each image, deleting the ones which are out of focus, or shaky, or under- or over-exposed. Some of these could be corrected digitally, but, unless I have only one image of something, it’s not worth it. There are other, better, shots in which I got what I wanted.

And some things are unchanged by the technology. The qualities of light, dimensions of composition, and the sensuality of beauty and nature are, in deep ways, eternal. It’s my challenge to capture those eternal qualities in a frozen image.

I’ve got two basic reasons for my garden photography: beauty and documentation. While they’re not mutually exclusive, my goal for any shot is primarily one or the other. Good examples of both, and examples of all of the following considerations, can be found in my recent series of photos of “Baby” at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, as well as the other photographs in this blog.

Some of the things I consider in my photography are:

Balance

Balance

This doesn’t mean that the top and bottom, or left and right sides, are mirror images of each other. Balanced asymmetry is much more interesting. Think of a larger and smaller person on a seesaw, and how they move along the beam to balance each others weights. A classic photographic example is the horizon line; it looks best above or below the center-line of the image, depending on where the interest lies. In garden photography, to achieve this I either let the primary subject fall to one side or the other, or let the line of the subject follow a diagonal across the frame.

Scale

Scale

Related to balance, but especially important for documentation photography, is providing a sense of scale in the image. This usually involves including some familiar artifact, such as a chair, path, building, or other “hardscape” element in the image. People are also good for providing scale!

Scale

On the beauty side, some of my best photography plays with and disguises or distorts the sense of scale. Macro-photography is one of my favorites for this. Seeing things close-up, the views we usually never stop to see, allows us to see things in a new way, to see details we would never notice. There is so much beauty in the world which we miss because it is too big or small (or we are too small or big) to see it all at once.

Color

Color

Of utmost importance for me, which is why I shot slide film. Related to this, the best color is achieved by slightly under-exposing the image, by 1/3 or 1/2 stop. This leaves the colors more “saturated” and less washed out, making the image more vivid and natural looking. Subtleties of color and variation in color are themselves often subjects of my photography.

Light

Light (Redwoods, Muir Woods)

My favorite photographs are able to capture the quality of light which was present when I took the photo. This is a big challenge, but awareness of light – its color, its direction, its qualities – is important to consider when taking the shot. Overcast days are the best for garden photography. With reduced contrast between light and dark, not only can colors be more saturated, but texture and structure don’t get lost in the shadows or washed out in sun.

Think of light streaming through the leaves and trunks of trees, or the crepuscular rays of sunlight between clouds. Light becomes visible in these ways when it’s scattered by moisture or particles in the air. In other words, the light is making the space visible, giving a three-dimensional quality to the image, and providing the viewer with a palpable sense of the place in which the photo was taken.

Time

Time

Everything is changing all the time. In the garden, some of these changes are obvious, but mostly they are visible only over time. Capturing the different stages of growth of plants and their parts is, again, a way of helping us see the things we would otherwise overlook.

The fronds of a fern just emerging from the ground are incredibly detailed, but we rarely see or observe them then. A bud before it opens, or the dried husks of plants in winter, these are things which are also part of the garden, and also beautiful. They are reminders of how fleeting it all is. How temporary and ephemeral is each moment in the garden, as are we.

Balance, Time