Glass Bottles

in Monochrome

in Monochrome

I’ve spent the better part of the week going through my photo library. My computer has been groaning about the Aperture Library load ever since we’ve been home from NYC, and the best way for me to get space quickly, without paying for it, is to cull my photographs.

Why is this such a hard job?

Well, partly, it is darn time consuming. No one needs 4 views of anything, but to narrow the choices, it takes time to look at each photo and compare. Then to tag with keywords, to check the meta-data. All time I could spend . . . taking MORE photos!

But the weather has given me a great opportunity to stay inside, huddled in a corner with my Mac. I know it’s summer, and this year it seemed I had to wait months and months for summer to arrive. And I know it’s Wisconsin, all that temperate weather and those cool breezes, but the last days have been darn hot by upper Midwest standards. 95˚F and 65% humidity is enough to slow anyone down to a slow crawl.

I looked at the entire weather map of the US a couple of days ago, and there were two areas of the country with bright yellow weather warnings for heat advisories-the middle of Arizona in the Sonoran desert and the upper Midwest-Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois. Our heat doesn’t get compared to desert weather too often!

As for the above photo, I found it buried in my archives, where I found way too many photos that I once considered posting, and then ran out of time and space. Considering I shoot 4 to 5 days a week, a few hours in the morning, and then back again for the evening light, it is way too easy to collect a huge number of photos. At least when I shot film, my wallet always stopped me from taking too many photos. It seems that no controls like that exist any longer, though I know my camera does have a limit. Just like the Ever-Ready Rabbit, I just keep shooting, and shooting, and shooting.

If nothing else, it keeps me out of trouble. (Usually.)

Harbor Reflection

Gills Rock, Wisconsin

Gills Rock, Wisconsin

There is a reason why photographers get up at five in the morning for photo shoots. It’s all in the lighting. Love this early morning light.

Dancing Skirts

Oriental Poppy

Oriental Poppy

More poppies, but taken at a different time of the day. These poppies were photographed in the early morning light, and they took on a shimmering, papery translucency.

Poppies on the Summer Solstice

The Brightest of Red Flowers

The Brightest of Reds

We found poppies growing in dozens of gardens on the Door County peninsula, many in gardens that have been tended for generations. Huge flower petals and a black center make these tall flowers a delight in a mixed perennial garden. The petals are so thin that they wave undulate in the air, almost in dancing waves. I had a great time photographing these particular flowers, waiting for gentle winds to hide or expose the black centers for my photographs. When I scanned the many photographs quickly on my computer, it was like looking through a flip book, and it reproduced the movements of the poppies. A movie of dancing poppies!

Poppies have a long history of cultivation as an ornamental and medicinal plant, from as early as 5,000 BC in Mesopotamia. They have been found in Egyptian tombs. They are mentioned in Greek mythology, the poppy being associated with Demeter, the goddess of agriculture. Folklore has it that if poppies in fields grow bountifully, then the food crops will be bountiful as well. This is why the Oriental poppy is sometimes referred to as the corn poppy, “korn” being the Greek word for grain.

View from Gills Rock

 Lake Michigan Triptych

Lake Michigan Triptych

We spent the weekend in Door County, the northeast peninsula of Wisconsin that juts into Lake Michigan, and which is often referred to as “The Cape Cod of the Midwest.” I actually set my alarm so that we could get up when the sun came up. Too bad I chose the Summer Solstice,the longest day of the year, for an early morning shoot. Even though I slept great–I usually do when I’m camping unlike my insomniac nights at home–the alarm went off way before either of us were ready to get up. Nonetheless Sherpa and I lugged ourselves out of our sleeping bags and into the fresh air. Armed with camera equipment, we headed north to the shores of Lake Michigan.

I was rewarded with a few moody shots, including these that I photographed from the northern tip of Door County, gazing into the purple mist of the lake. (This particular area is called Death’s Doorway. Washington Island, not too far in the distance, is hidden from view by the morning mist. Evidently more than a few sailors have lost their lives trying to pass this way.)

When I decided to try to put these three photos together as a triptych, I called on the computer skills of my younger daughter. She’s not majoring in Computer Science for nothing! I have no idea how she managed to get these together. Though I might have played around with the proportions of the black framing if I’d had a clue, I’m greatly appreciative she put them together for me. The software I found on a Google search for stitching a triptych was for Windows, nothing my Mac nor I want to fuss with at the moment. Maybe someone out there knows how to make a triptych without using Photoshop. I don’t think it’s something that Aperture can do, though I may be wrong about that.

We packed a lot of shooting into the weekend, so there will be many more Door County photographs to come.