Archive for the 'photography' Category
Get out your 3D glasses! Part of this Garden Bloggers Bloom Day posting comes to you in glorious 3D, inspired by the news that 3D television was the big news at the recent Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, and by past, current and future 3D movies (Avatar, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Alice in Wonderland).
This is one of my clones of Arctotis acaulis, which is just coming into bloom.
To view the 3D effect you’ll need a pair of glasses or a viewer that has a red lens over the left eye and a cyan (green works too) lens over the right. This image, what’s called an anaglyph, is pretty low-tech, more Black Lagoon than Avatar, but it works. I won’t detail all the steps for making it, but there are lots of explanations out on the web for how to do it in Photoshop. [ Here’s one. ] You can also use a good photo editor like Photoshop Elements that will let you adjust the individual color channels of the image.
You don’t need a proper 3D camera to photograph slow-moving subjects like flowers, but you’ll need two separate images, one for the left eye, and another for the right. Just take two images of the same subject, moving slightly left-to-right before you click the second image. If you have a camera with manual controls, you’ll get the best results if you focus and set the exposure manually.
This is the image pair I started with for the anaglyph above. You might even be able to view this raw pair in 3D. Some people are able to practice what’s called “free-viewing,” where the left eye focuses on the left image and the right eye on the right-hand one. You’ll eventually see three images, and the central one will suddenly pop into 3D.
This last pair shows the next-to-last step big step, before you layer the cyan image over the red one to create the final 3D image.
The rest of this post returns to stodgy old 2D. Sorry.
Winter is the big bloom season for many of the native plants, as well as for many plants adapted to Southern California’s mediterranean climate. Here are many of the plants flowering right now.
Here’s the agave I featured prominently in last month’s posting. It’s nearing its half-way point on the spike.
First blooms of the season on Verbena lilacina.
First blooms of the season on Nuttall’s milkvetch, Astragalus nuttallii.
The very first, brave bloom on another Arctotis acaulis clone, ‘Big Magenta.’
First flowering on another plant, likely Crassula multicava. The bed where this plant is will soon be covered with a dense mist of flowers for several months.
Another flowering crassula, Crassula ovata, your basic jade plant.
Black sage, Salvia mellifera, coming into bloom.
Santa Cruz Island buckwheat, Eriogonum arborescens, still blooming—the Energizer Bunny of buckwheats.
…some weird bromeliad. I have a likely name somewhere, but not stored in my brain’s RAM right now…
I was taking some pictures of this desert mallow, Sphaeralcea ambigua, but was more captivated by the interesting damage patterns created by a leaf-mining insect.
And last but not least: What I’m certain will be the last paperwhite narcissus of the season. I keep thinking that, but another clump pushes up through the earth and starts to flower. I’m not complaining.
As usual, my thanks Carol of May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day! Check out what’s in bloom in other gardens around the world [ here ].
If you haven’t had enough of the 3D photos, check out a much earlier 3D garden blog post [ here ].
Now enough of this 2D indoors nonsense. Open the door, and go outside and enjoy your garden in the grand glorious 3D it comes in naturally.
January 15 2010 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: 3-d photography • Garden Bloggers Bloom Day • gbbd • mediterranean plants • native plants | 14 Comments »
Another quick stop over the holidays took the form of a visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Installed at the new main entrance is this battalion of 202 antique streetlights, Urban Light, by artist Chris Burden. Streetlights like these of course were positioned at curbs in straight lines, spaced regularly. Clustering them together like this accentuates that fact, and to me makes the whole installation seem maybe just a little bit militaristic.
Arranged behind the Burden piece are some palm trees, the first plantings of what will be a large installation of palms by Robert Irwin. Irwin is the design force behind the Central Garden at the J. Paul Getty Museum, but here the trees will read less like a separate garden than plantings integrated into the art and architecture.
Their trunks echo the posts of the streetlights, as does the fact that they’re planted in a regular pattern. Also, as with the streetlights, they’re a collection of different kinds. A press release states: “Along with the palms, Irwin’s other medium is Southern California’s light, and the species of palms have been specially chosen to gather and reflect the interplay of light and shadow native to L.A.” [ source ] I love Robert Irwin’s work [ here’s a sample ], and I’ll be checking back on this installation as time goes on.
The whole vertical shaft thing becomes a theme around the Museum’s latest building, the newish Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which has red exterior accents, including plenty of red columns.
The landscaping in this part of the museum is interesting in that it uses palms or flat plantings. Virtually no shrubs. It’s a pretty urban planting that in part seems designed to give the homeless no place to camp.
Most horizontal surfaces, using decomposed granite or this Turfstone product, are designed as walkable extensions of the concrete paving. Where does the landscape end and the urban fabric begin?
Here’s an interesting gardening aside: The Museums are located on the same big city block as the famed La Brea Tar Pits, where the ground oozes black, gummy tar, a substance that has preserved bones of sabertooth tigers and woolly mammoths from the last ice age that got too close to the stuff. Just imagine trying to garden where digging a hole to plant a shrub might put you in contact with the deadly sludge! I have yet to pick up a garden book that even begins to discuss what to do with this kind of soil problem. While the park containing the tar pits has a few gooey shoe-grabbing spots, these plantings seemed free of the muck.
My main reason for visiting LACMA was to take in a photo exhibit that reassembles many of the works that were seen in the seminal 1975 “New Topographics” exhibition of landscape photography. These works in the show signaled a break from the more romantic takes on what landscape photos ought to look like and engaged a land where the human presence reigned supreme.
One of my favorite photographers in the show, Robert Adams, often combines the romantic sublime with a cooler take on what the world really looks like. To the left is “Mobile Homes, Jefferson County, Colorado” from 1973 [ source ], a great example of what his eye sees. You get the sense in his work that the human landscape often fails to live up to the stunning geography where it’s sited.
Seeing his work again prompted me to reread some of his Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values. (From this photo you can see that he takes “traditional values” pretty broadly.) Here’s a quick snippet gardeners and landscape designers might like to think about.
Not surprisingly, many photographers have loved gardens, those places that Leonard Woolf once described as “the last refuge of disillusion.” Gardens are in fact strikingly like landscape pictures, sanctuaries not from but of truth.
—from the essay, “Truth and Landscape” in Beauty in Photography
In parting, let me move from beauty in photography to beauty in art. Here’s a closeup of Urban Light, backlit by the afternoon sun:
(For another example of Burden’s work, check out the installation of 50,000 nickel coins and 50,000 matchsticks that the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art exhibited: The Reason for the Neutron Bomb.)
January 12 2010 | Categories: art • landscape • landscape design • photography • places • quotes | Tags: architecture • architecture and landscaping • art and landscaping • Broad Contemporary Art Museum • Chris Burden • Los Angeles County Museum of Art • palm trees • robert adams • Robert Irwin | 7 Comments »
Photographing a tree can present some challenges. You can walk around it to select the best angle, or pick a time of day with the best lighting conditions, but you still have to deal with the fact that the tree stays rooted in its spot and that the background behind the tree may be an unsightly or incomprehensible mess.
Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #8, archival InkJet print. [ source ]
Last year I ran across the work of Korean photographer Myoung-Ho Lee, whose photos of trees present an elegant—and spectacularly not practical—solution to this problem of background. He just brings a plain background with him and stands it up behind the tree. If you figure that the trees in the photos are at least 25 feet tall, you get a sense of how huge the background sheet has to be.
Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #13, archival InkJet print. [ source ]
Some of the photos have just the tree isolated against the plain background. Others show the tree and background in the larger context of the landscape where the tree is growing.
The results are pretty amazing, and create photos that are rich with suggestion and ideas about photography.
Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #11, archival InkJet print. [ source ]
You might be driven to think about the fact that to photograph something in the wilds is to select it. Although this act of selecting the tree isn’t really digging the thing up from nature, it’s still bringing something from the wilds indoors onto a wall. That might make you think that photography—and much of art—is finding something interesting interesting in the world and bringing it into a gallery.
You also might think that looking at a photograph of something might tell you something about how the thing in the photo looks, but very little about its context or meaning.
And you might even think of Marcel Duchamp displaying a signed urinal in an exhibition, with the basic premise that if an artist calls something art, it’s art.
Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #12, archival InkJet print. [ source ]
None of those thoughts are “right answers,” and you will probably have other thoughts of your own. I think you’ll agree, however, that these are some of the more striking photographs of trees that have ever been taken.
July 07 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • photography | Tags: Myoung-Ho Lee • trees | 12 Comments »
I started this blog because I was feeling that I was entering a bit of an imposed artistic hiatus. Kodak had stopped producing the specialized film I used for most of my photography, and I’d bought the last of the old stock of it that people had to sell on eBay.
I enjoy gardening at least as much as art-making. Also, the idea of a garden plays with the same kinds of ideas that I was interested in when I did my art, stuff like the edges between human culture and nature, and the environmental costs of human habitation. The idea of a garden blog seemed like it could keep me thinking about some ideas that interested me. And it might push the some of the same creative buttons that photography did.
(Left: James SOE NYUN. Calla Lily Dissection II, 1997. Pigment print, ca. 13 x 19 inches.)
Maybe the blog has functioned too well to keep me out of the studio. But I’ve been reprinting at some of the garden-based photography I did in the past and seeing how it might point in new directions.
Recently I was invited to show of my older work at a small gallery in Escondido, in northern San Diego County. The show is Eyesight is Insight / Art + Science, and is curated by Ruth West and Sarach Attwood. The show opened yesterday, and remains up through July 3 at the Escondido Arts Partnership Municipal Gallery. These are a couple of the works in the show, images from my Destructive Testing Series, a small group of works where I use plant materials from the garden in little science experiments.
(Left: James SOE NYUN. Fig Leaf Flammability Test 6b, 2000. Pigment print, ca. 19 x 15 3/4 inches.)
In addition to reprinting some fo the older work, I’ve actually been doing a little bit of work looking at gardening. I’ll share some of it here once I get to something I’m willing to show the world.
In the meantime, I’m happy to share some of this older work. Stop by the show if you’re in the headed for Escondido!
June 12 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • my garden • photography | | 4 Comments »
In a world where color photographs are easy to come by it can be refreshing to stand back and look at images where the color has been simplified down to tones of black, white and gray.
Edwin Hale Lincoln (1848–1938) compiled his massive series, Wildflowers of New England, Photographed from Nature, in the early part of the 20th century. The photos are warm-toned platinum prints where the plants form decorative patterns. You can tell that the photographer was associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, and many of the photos could serve as templates for carved decorations on a piece of furniture.
Left: Edwin Hale Lincoln. Convolvulus Septium, Hedge Bindweed, Morning-Glory, plate 124 from Wildflowers of New England, Photographed from Nature, Volume V, 1904. [ photo from the de Young Museum, which had an exhibition on Lincoln last year ]
Left: Edwin Hale Lincoln. Acorus Calamus, Flag-Root, Sweet Flag, Calamus-Root, 1914. [ image from Alan Klotz Gallery, which will be featuring Lincoln’s work in a show that runs from May 7th to July 2nd ]
Different from Lincoln’s work are the later photographs of Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932). His 1928 Urformen der Kunst, published in the 1929 English edition, Art Forms in Nature, features 120 beautifully grainy photogravures. (Soulcatcher Studio has the entire volume online.) Blossfeldt followed up the book with a second volume in 1932.
Blossfeldt, like Lincoln, came out of an arts and crafts orientation, in his case, that of ornamental metalwork. But Blossfeldt moved in closer to his plants, often showing them in extreme magnification. He didn’t claim to be a scientist, and instead was looking at nature for the ultimate inspiration for human art.
(BTW, If you happen upon reruns of the TV show Will and Grace, take a look at Will’s apartment, and you’ll see several framed Blossfeldts prints on the set.)
Karl Blossfeldt. Sanguisorba, swallowwort, from Urformen der Kunst, 1928. [ image from the Wikimedia Commons ]
Karl Blossfeldt. Monkshood, from Urformen der Kunst, 1928. [ image from the Wikimedia Commons ]
But that’s barely scratching the surface. Check out Edward Weston’s stunning, almost lewd Cabbage Leaf. Or Imogen Cunningham’s Magnolia. Or one of Robert Mapplethorpe’s calla lilies.
Or next time you go out into your garden to photograph a plant, put your camera in black in white mode, and notice the things you start to pay attention to once the color isn’t there as a distraction…
May 10 2009 | Categories: art • photography | Tags: Edwin Hale Lincoln • Karl BLossfeldt | 6 Comments »
Have you ever made a mistake while using a camera and ended up liking the “bad” photo best?
I had borrowed John’s digital point and shoot and had aimed the thing at one of the local native plants, a blooming bush poppy, Dendromecon rigida. The camera took forever to focus, and I thought it’d done its thing. But the flash went off as I was moving to put the camera back in my pocket.
The resulting photo combines a blurred rendition of the plant and mulch with just a little bit of subject matter frozen in place by the flash. It’s nothing you’d use to identify the plant, but I like it as a photo…
April 26 2009 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: bush poppy • Dendromecon rigida • photographic mistakes | 7 Comments »
Gardening Gone Wild is hosting a photo contest for the best image of native plants in a garden setting. Wander down to the links in the comments on their post to see all the excellent ways people use natives in their gardens.
It’s hard for me sit something like this out, so below are my three entries, photos taken in my garden over the last couple of months. (As usual, click to see the larger images.)
I’ve already shared the first two on these pages, so forgive me for reprising them. These are of clumps of blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium bellum) in a totally assorted planting, mixing the natives with veggies (Red Winter red Russian kale, beets, red- and orange-stemmed chard) ornamentals (heliotrope, geum and sages) and an herb (catmint). The planting requires an average amount of watering to keep everybody happy, but it shows how food plants and natives can easily coexist with more gardenesque selections.
(“Gardenesque”—how I love that word. No, I didn’t make it up. I have Noel Kingsbury (with Piet Oudolf) to thank for using it in Designing with Plants. He blogs, too!)
The first is a closeup of the native, the second shows the same bed three weeks later, after the geum started to flower.
The third photo pictures a foundation planting featuring one of the California native rushes, Juncus patens. I have this thing for spikey, architectural plants, and this one fulfills my needs nicely. Most rushes are creatures of wet zones. However, J. patens is one of the most drought-tolerant. These plants are located in the drip line for water off the roof, and they can make it through the summer with minimal added irrigation.
April 22 2009 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: blue-eyed grass • Juncus patens • native plants • Sisyrinchium bellum | 7 Comments »
It’s spring, and the wildflowers wait for no one. I’ve been forsaking gardening and home projects and blogging (gasp!) a bit to check out some of the local open spaces. Here’s a panorama of part of the view from the top of Fortuna Mountian, at 1,243 feet the second highest “peak” in the San Diego city limits. (Click the image to enlarge.)
This peak burned on October 26, 2003 during the county’s big Cedar Fire. Revisiting the area is a great lesson to see how things recover from a major fire, either by resprouting from the roots or reestablishing themselves by seed. There are still plenty of dead branches poking up towards the sky, but there’s also a huge amount of green. And these big, gorgeous rocks didn’t hold on to their scorch marks for long. (Don’t you just love rocks in a landscape, either in the wilds or in a garden?)
Many of the plants and flowers aren’t ones you’ll find even in native plant gardens, but several have passed the “garden-worthy” test. In the second frame from the left above, you’ll see a bloom spike of the stinging lupine, Lupinus hirsutissimus, sort of an awful name for a beautiful plant.
While I haven’t seen plants of this annual species offered for sale, several online sources do list seeds, including S&S Seeds, and Seedhunt.
Also on the summit were two other plants that are used fairly frequently in native gardens: laurel sumac (Malosma laurina) and mission manzanita (Xylococcus bicolor), both of them eventually forming large, interesting shrubs.
I’ll be sharing more bits and pieces of the trips as I get them more organized.
April 03 2009 | Categories: landscape • photography | Tags: Fortuna Mountain • Mission Trails Regional Park • San Diego | 2 Comments »
On my recent Chicago visit I had the chance to stop by Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark 1909-1911 Robie House in the Hyde Park neighborhood. Unfortunately the foundation that runs it was in the middle of a major renovation inside. Even through we were on an architectural tour the only way to view the interior on this day was stand outside and peer inside through the stained glass windows.
Ooh… (Looking inside, off the second story porch into the nearly finished space…)
Uhhh… (The ground floor, still in the throes of renovation…)
Once we got that out of our system we had to concentrate on the exterior of the building and the gardens. I could think of worse things to have to do.
A pair of side gates opens up to an auto court with a small garden on the side. It was winter and the plantings weren’t any too spectacular this time of year, but the hardscape details were worth a close look.
The thin, wide bricks of the house and garden walls all feature this neat little detail: The mortar between the courses is the typical light mortar color, but the horizontal spaces between the bricks uses a red-colored mortar. The effect is that you notice horizontal bands and not the individual bricks. The house swoops sideways towards the horizon, and the walls do the same, celebrating the ever-expanding horizontal prairie that makes up the Midwest.
Several of the corners of the porches feature these stylized urns. Instead of the chubby Roman models, Wright has designed them to swoop sideways just like the house and walls do.
And there are several of these planters that explode with color in the summer. But now…well, not so green. The story goes that Wright designed these planters without drainage—something that comes as no surprise from an architect who was obsessed with form over function and notorious for creating houses with leaky roofs and suspended terraces that sagged under their own weight.
As I reviewed the photos from the Robie House, though, there’s one thing that starts to gnaw on me. Though it doesn’t look huge, it’s still something like 9000 square feet if you count the outdoor terraces. All the outdoor spaces seemed squeezed in there. Was this a space-intensive urban use of a small lot? Or was it a hundred-year-old McMansion? Even if that, it’s pretty cool as McMansions go…
February 28 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape • landscape design • photography • places | Tags: architecture • brick • Chicago • concrete • Frank Lloyd Wright • garden walls • planters • Robie House • walls | 8 Comments »
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