My Kinda Culture

My kind of culture is nothing profound, but it can make my day. Wednesday afternoon I sat down in a high quality French Bakery with a well made iced espresso (good coffee pulled right, a little milk, no sweetener, and not too much ice so I can sip slowly without my drink turning to brown water). OK, I’m fussy! I was saying, I sat down with a perfect iced espresso and an incredibly flaky croissant a la framboise (I’ve worked in bakeries, so I’m fussy here, too, and let me tell you, Le Panier does it right…the pastry is buttery and the jam is seedy and thick!) What was I saying? Right. I sat down with a perfect iced espresso, a perfect croissant, in a lively-but-not-too-crazy-noisy French bakery in Seattle, and read the front section of the New York Times. (Yes I’m fussy about that, too. The Seattle paper? Hugely disappointing. So I’m happy as a pig in s**t when someone leaves the Times at a cafe). Culture my style.

Taken with my Android phone and edited with Perfect Effects.

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Many more looks at what culture means across this small, precious globe of ours can be found here. Most all of them are more profound than mine.

What I’m Looking At

A State Park with fantastic rock formations, a birch grove unfurling chartreuse leaves, a sod farm, skunk cabbage – even parking lots are looking good to me these days. The day before yesterday I walked down to Pike Place Market after a meeting in Seattle and took loads of photos of the flowers they sell there – that’s for next time.

It’s quieter colors for now:

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I played around with the processing on a few of these photos. The parking lot – I rarely do this, but I used an in-camera preset – “toy camera” – I like the effect.

The sixth photo down, of a truck in the sod field viewed through an irrigation line wheel, was taken while I held my sunglasses in front of the camera lens. They give a warm glow and good cloud definition without the cost of a filter!

Those old irrigation lines with their rusty wheels are still in use, and the farm manager I spoke to doesn’t like them. The vintage-look photo was done with a sepia preset in Lightroom. Then I added some subtle textures and a border with Perfect Effects (a free program you can find online).

The Black & white windswept tree has a warming filter applied in Photoshop Elements, and the skunk cabbage has a preset called Antique Light, applied in Lightroom, with more fiddling around after that.

Some people say that if you get the picture right in the camera, you don’t need all these effects. There’s a lot of truth to that. Still, I enjoy experimenting with effects. I usually keep them fairly subtle, and I think I learn more about what I’m looking at as I apply them.

And that’s what it’s about – thinking about what I’m looking at, refining the way I see it, and sharing it with you.

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The weathered sandstone formations are at Larrabee State Park outside of Bellingham, Washington. The birch grove is at Mercer Slough, Bellevue, WA; the parking lot is in Woodinville. The sod farm is not far from the Microsoft campus in Redmond. The windblown tree is on a knoll that reaches into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, at Rosario Beach on Fidalgo Island, WA. The skunk cabbage is in a swampy area at Bellevue Botanic Garden, Bellevue, WA.

WHAT’S UP?

I love to look up – always have – there are intriguing images to be found when you train your eyes to look at the world from different angles.

Sometimes to look up, I look down…

And sometimes I might get down on the ground to look up…

Up may be close at hand or far away into the treetops.

Whether at a cedar tree in a Seattle city park or an architectural gem on the High Line in New York, pointing the lens up rewards me.

Another muscular beauty on the High Line reveals its angles and reflects the clouds differently depending on where you stand.

The meditative expression and intricacies in the carving of this grand Buddha revealed themselves when I gazed up at Dia Tang Temple, a Seattle area Vietnamese Buddhists temple.

Looking up at a botanic garden delights my eyes with the soft pastel colors and underwater shapes of an akebia vine.

In a shady grove of cedars, fern fronds catch sunbeams and cast their shadows on one another. (The tilting LCD on my camera is indispensable when it comes to getting shots like this one.)

Looking at the reflection on the water, I imagine a frog’s-eye view of the grasses that edge the pool.

At the Experience Music Project in Seattle, the jostling angles of Frank Gehry’s design form endlessly interesting compositions with Seattle’s iconic Space Needle, which looms overhead.

Maybe I shouldn’t have looked up (actually, for me, this is tantamount to an invitation!)

But if I didn’t look up, chances are I would have missed the way budding tree branches mix with their own reflections against a highrise.

When I looked skyward at a downtown building in New York, I focused my lens at a point midway up, ignoring the building’s foundation and its top, and something new happened.

But then New York is newness personified, and gawking at the skyline gives everyone a thrill. Take that New York habit of looking high up with you wherever you go, point your camera or phone at what you see, and press that shutter.

There are many more ideas and views relating to what’s UP here, at the WordPress Daily Post Photo Challenge.

CHANGING TIDES

Tides nourish the land, and their dependable changes remind me that if life is difficult now, it will get easier…

This week’s Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenge is “Change.” The serene view above is minutes from a busy New York City highway. Maybe the beautiful colors were caused by pollution, but that thought was far from my mind as I sat on the beach that evening, lost in the sound of gently lapping waves and the changing hues of sunset.

A receding tide offers foraging opportunities for Willets on Captiva Island in Florida.

The ebb tide lends itself to soft focus, also on Captiva.

Just after high tide, the noise is deafening as waves crash hard onto the rocky Washington shores of Rialto Beach. Bit by bit, centuries of changing tides have carved a dramatic seascape here.

Happily, the only buildings in the area are well out sight – it’s just rock, water, and sky as far as you can see.

Deception Pass divides two northern Washington islands. Water from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, separating Washington from Canada, is sucked in to Skagit Bay through this narrow passage, creating whirlpools and eddies.

The bridge whose shadow you see was built in the 1930’s – it’s WAY up over the pass, but if you’re not subject to vertigo you can walk across it.

On the bridge, you can look east towards Swinomish Indian lands,

watch the incoming tide as it ripples and flows,

and gaze straight down into paisley water swirling a tidal song of change.

Just to the north, on a rock in Rosario Bay, a gull perches precariously as an incoming tide approaches gently, leaving soft herringbone patterns on the Pacific blue waters.

In the intertidal zone the tide pools are slowly filling back up, wafting kelp in open circles.

Sea anemones (Anthopleura elegantissima), packed tightly into the tide pools, have closed up shop as the tide is out, but a few are starting to reach their tentacles out into the shallow, nutrient rich water.

At Salt Creek Recreation Area on the Olympic Peninsula the tide is halfway out, exposing a dizzying variety of colorful seaweed on the rocks.

Mussel shells tangle with seaweed on the rocks at my feet. It’s getting late, but gulls, cormorants and ducks will feast here til dusk. Tidelands along the Strait of Juan de Fuca support a complex ecosystem of plants, invertebrates, numerous species of fish and shellfish, porpoises, whales, sea otters, birds…I’m sure there are other living things I left out. People, for example!

In Seattle the ocean is a hundred miles away but the waters are still subject to tidal changes.

Looking west towards that distant ocean, the Olympic Mountains draw a ragged edge on a golden sunset as a lone pleasure boat heads north on an ebb tide.

More Weekly Photo Challenges on the topic of Change – a BIG one! – can be found here.

Not Just a Walk in the Park

The city of Kirkland, a suburb sitting straight across Lake Washington from Seattle, isn’t the place you’d expect to find deep woods with giant trees and a lush abundance of native plants. But an effort has been here made to preserve the land – at least some of it – and though logging took its toll long ago, the forest in O.O. Denny Park retains the green magic of a pre-suburban time. I like to wander along the narrow, muddy trail here, wide-eyed with wonder…

There are giant Red cedars and Douglas firs and the forest floor is packed with Sword ferns. A rushing stream carves a deep V into the ravine, where salmonberries, Devil’s Club and trillium vie with moss and lichens for the narrow light streams filtering through the canopy. It thrills me that it’s all just blocks away from busy suburban streets.

The park is named for the first white boy born in Seattle – Orion O. Denny. This was the Denny’s country place; later it was a camp. There is nice lake beach access, making it attractive to families in the summer, but I prefer the woods, the trilling wrens, the towering trees and wildflowers.

One Douglas fir, “Sylvia”, is 600 years old. It measured 255′ tall before a storm broke off the top twenty years ago, and at about 27′ in circumference, it still impresses. (The little square at its feet is a plaque).

The other day I saw the strangest thing in Denny Park –

I was a yard or so off the trail, facing into the woods. At my feet I saw a small red purse, zipped up and carefully wrapped in plastic, and stuffed into the cavity of a decaying branch on the ground. I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t bent down to inspect a wildflower. It seemed like it had been there a while, but I couldn’t be sure.

I was curious, but something made me leave it where it was…fear? propriety? Maybe both.

O.O. Denny Park – a magical place…

COLOR!

A color challenge/photo challenge…so many colors…so many approaches…let’s just see what happens…

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Color is

a Sol Lewitt piece at the 59th St. Columbus Circle subway station in New York, and

it’s an urban industrial sunset on Staten Island.

Color marches up a sculpture by John Fleming and soars

against bluest heaven.

Color is graffiti in Seattle, too – and the intricate thread-work

on an ancient Silk Road Ikat coat, tacked to a museum wall.

Color grows organically on a rusty old truck

behind a nursery in the Skagit Valley (where soon miles of tulips and daffodils

will set the evening aglow).

It plays games

in a midtown New York City store window.

Color is isolated

by a rubber glove dropped in a Seattle alley;

and color

dances

when sunbeams illuminate a torn leaf

in my red cabinet.

Color sweetens the deal in pink and

purple stripes: red osier dogwood twigs blended, in camera.

It reflects late day sunlight –

silver and gold: a banner night. It

swirls

in choppy waves across Chihuly glass

in Tacoma.

Mid-day summer-sun sets color down

flat

on tabletops set out on Seattle sidewalks.

Color ricochets through glasses in an old ship’s galley,

mushes together as it lays exposed

to the elements,

stuck

on a car door,

abandoned in a field,

somewhere.

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Photographs taken with a Samsung camera phone & a Sony NEX digital camera, in NYC, Seattle, and other locations in the Pacific northwest.

Find more colorful Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenges here.

Looking at Palms

All of the images above were taken a few years ago, at the Edison and Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers, Florida.

Here’s another take on palms, in front of the Wilmington, North Carolina courthouse:

And another view of palms, in the Palm House at the Conservatory, New York Botanical Garden, New York City:

And my most recent take on palms…

Fronds of the Windmill Palm, Trachycarpus fortunei, photographed at Everett Arboretum in Everett, Washington.

bluebrightly

Wanderings & observations

Monthly Archives: April 2013