[ Lost in the Landscape ]

i won, i won!

After two rounds of judg­ing it’s now offi­cial. My image of a chalk dud­leya (Dud­leya pul­veru­lenta) is the win­ner in a con­test look­ing for an image to use to pro­mote the upcom­ing Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Week, which this year is April 17 to 23. The com­pe­ti­tion was held by the San Diego Chap­ter of the Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Soci­ety, and the win­ning image will be used locally in pub­lic­ity and on t-shirts and who knows what else.

Woohoo! I’m jazzed!

To the right is the win­ning image, Chalk Dud­ley, Bud­ding Out.

Down below I detail the steps I took to turn a snap­shot into this final photo.
con­tinue reading »

March 20 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden • photography | Tags: black and white photography • California Native Plant Week • composition • contests • how-to | 35 Comments »

cellphone camera test

After hav­ing lived with­out a cell­phone for the last two cen­turies I finally took the leap. Not only did I get a cell­phone, I got a smart phone. The iPhones have been all the rage for a while, but I ended up select­ing an HTC MyTouch ser­viced by T-Mobile.

As some­one who’s a bit of a Lud­dite and who’s loudly protested cell­phones and cell­phone cul­ture, I’m almost ashamed to admit own­ing the device. Still, some­thing about the com­bi­na­tion of a device that is part-phone, part-camera, part-wireless router, part-web browser, part-music player, part-camcorder, part-GPS unit, part-nanny, part-godknowswhatelse seemed compelling.

The view look­ing north, up past Scripps Pier

Last week a good friend came to visit for a few days. A tourist trip up to the top of Mount Soledad, the high point of coastal San Diego, seemed like a good idea. Thurs­day was a break between win­ter storms, which meant that the vis­i­bil­ity could be pretty stunning.

Yes indeed. The views were ter­rific. Also, a lot of native plants sur­round­ing the lit­tle pad of green grass and park­ing at the top of the moun­tain were break­ing out into bloom.

Did some­one say “photo-op?”

Scar­let mon­key flower, Mimu­lus auran­ti­a­cus, but judg­ing from the focus the cam­era was more rapt with the view of La Jolla below.

Deer­weed, Lotus sco­par­ius, also frus­trat­ingly out of focus, no mat­ter how hard I tried to get the cam­era to focus on the flower instead of the back­ground foliage.

Since I didn’t have my real cam­era this seemed like a good test for the cam­era fea­ture on the new hand­held device. (Really, can you call it a phone anymore?)

Here’s a short stack of snap­shots I took up there. And yes, I con­sider them snap­shots, only snapshots.

I’m used to cam­eras with lots of con­trols. For con­trols, this model has a mod­er­ate zoom option and the abil­ity to turn the flash on or off or on auto­matic. That’s it for options. So, it does make for a simple-to-use cam­era, but it’s sim­ple to the point of being sim­plis­tic.

Coast sun­flower, Encelia cal­i­for­nica, show­ing both focus and expo­sure issues.

The flow­ers of lemon­ade­berry, Rhus inte­gri­fo­lia. Unlike my other attempts at close­ups, this shot came out clear and crisp–but still blown out in the highlights.

Achiev­ing good focus or get­ting an expo­sure that doesn’t over­ex­pose some­thing in the frame can be a chal­lenge. These are lim­i­ta­tions for lots of point and shoot cam­eras, so I don’t know that it’s any worse than some of them. Lens flare when you shoot into the sun can be a prob­lem, but that hap­pens with even the best of cameras.

The phone design­ers prob­a­bly real­ized that the cam­era would be liable to shake as you took a snap­shot. To com­pen­sate they applied a fairly extreme level of in-camera sharp­en­ing. For some images it’s barely notice­able, in oth­ers it’s so obvi­ous it hurts.

So as not to seem like I’m a total Mr. Neg­a­tive, there were a few things I did like. The wide 9:16 aspect ratio of the image–similar to the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of televisions–is kin­duv cool and cin­e­matic. The 2:3 aspect ratio of old-school 35mm cam­eras is harder to work with and often feels unnatural.

A view with encelia and lemon­ade­berry in the fore­ground, as well as the ever-present coy­otoe­brush, baccharis.

That view again, this time with some chamise, Adenos­toma fas­ci­c­u­la­tum, in the fore­ground. I still have trou­ble decid­ing whether I’m in coastal sage scrub habi­tat or mar­itime chap­ar­ral. The pres­ence of chamise tells you that you’re in chaparral.

A view to the south. You could eas­ily see a cou­ple dozen miles into Mex­ico that day.

Col­ors looked pretty true to life.

And in the end there’s the much bet­ter chance that you’ll have the cell­phone cam­era handy when you’ve left the ded­i­cated cam­era at home. You may never miss another photo op again.

So…has life changed with a cell­phone? I can’t say that it has that much. It was handy to have when I was try­ing to nav­i­gate Philadel­phia a cou­ple weeks ago. It’s handy to keep in touch with peo­ple when you’re away from the land­line. And I guess I feel just a lit­tle bit more hip. Like, now, when peo­ple talk about angry birds, I real­ize chances are that they’re most likely talk­ing about the app and not what hap­pens when you dis­turb a nest.

February 26 2011 | Categories: photography • places | Tags: Angry Birds • cameras • cellphone cameras • cellphones • Mount Soledad • native plants • snapshots • viewpoints | 12 Comments »

bomb-sniffing petunias?

Thanks to She Who Would Not Want To Be Named for send­ing me a link to a really inter­est­ing story in yesterday’s New York Times: Plants have been engi­neered through the dark arts of gene splic­ing to detect TNT at a level of sen­si­tiv­ity one hun­dred times greater than bomb-sniffing dogs.

In the pres­ence of TNT vapors the leaves of the engi­neered Ara­bidop­sis and tobacco plants blushed from green to white as chloro­phyll drained out of the leaves. The process took sev­eral hours, so just imag­ine how slowly an air­port check-in would move. Still, I think I’d rather be scanned by a plant than a radiation-emitting strip-search machine.

The research was pub­lished Wednes­day in PLoS ONE under the catchy title “Pro­gram­ma­ble Lig­and Detec­tion Sys­tem in Plants through a Syn­thetic Sig­nal Trans­duc­tion Path­way.” (Some­body please help sci­en­tists come up with titles that make sense to the rest of us.) The title in the Times is maybe even worse, in an insult­ing way, “Plants that Earn Their Keep.” Do plants have to jus­tify their exis­tence? Why does a plant have to “do some­thing use­ful” in order to earn a place on this earth? Grrrrrr. Arro­gant humans!

Any­way, air­line travel has been at the front of my mind recently as I brace for a trip in a few days to Philadel­phia. Mon­day I was brave enough to add the weather report to my desk­top. Yikes! I’m not sure that I even rec­og­nize the weather icon for last Wednes­day. It’s def­i­nitely one that’s never appeared on any San Diego fore­cast I’ve been around for!

In the gen­eral Philly area both Long­wood Gar­dens and the Mor­ris Arbore­tum have con­ser­va­to­ries. Unfor­tu­nately I’m not likely to have much time to do sight­see­ing, but it’ll be inter­est­ing enough to see what some peo­ple call win­ter. But if there’s any­thing on the “must see” list, let me know.

Let me fin­ish my ram­ble by return­ing briefly to the unpleas­ant topic of air­line ter­ror­ism to say a cou­ple words about these pho­tos that were in the news a year ago that many of you recognize.

[ source ]

These are shots of the alleged “underwear-bomber” Umar Farouk Abdul­mu­tal­lab, prob­a­bly taken dur­ing while he was attend­ing school in Lon­don. I looked quickly at the main subject–really, what can a pho­to­graph tell you about a per­son? Maybe that a seem­ingly normal-looking per­son can attempt to do some awful things? Maybe that this per­son was not so iso­lated as not feel the peer-pressure to buy a hat with a Nike swoosh?

What I focused on next–and some of you gar­den­ers out there have already guessed it–is the amaz­ing back­drop of col­or­ful foliage. What are those plants?, I asked myself. Then my brain wan­dered off into other areas: Did the sus­pect enjoy plants enough to think that this would be a scenic loca­tion for a por­trait (on at least two occa­sions, look­ing at his change in cloth­ing)? Or maybe the pho­tog­ra­pher dragged the resent­ful and unwill­ing sub­ject out into the cold, into these spots with the col­or­ful backgrounds?

[ source ]

I don’t know. The only pos­si­ble answer I can pull out of all this is that the back­drop is the kind of foliage that peo­ple in areas of the world colder than mine get to experience.

Other than that I’m left with ques­tions, only questions…

January 28 2011 | Categories: gardening • photography • places • rambles | Tags: climate • looking at photographs • news • terrorism • terrorists • weather | 6 Comments »

getting real

Grow this plant and your gar­den will look exactly like this! (Yah, right… )

[ Right: Image of Echium wild­pretii by Mat­a­parda. This file is licensed under the Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. ]

I’ve got to be real­is­tic, I keep telling myself. The plant may be cool, but the whole effect prob­a­bly won’t be much like how the plants grow in the wild or how they’re shown on some dra­mat­i­cally illus­trated gar­den website.

It’s like buy­ing clothes out of a cat­a­log that are being mod­eled some­one impec­ca­bly styled and impos­si­bly toned. But because of the reces­sion most of us have had to let our per­sonal styl­ists go, and when you go to try on the clothes the look ends up being a sad disappointment.

For my last post, on my bloom­ing echi­ums, I was hav­ing a hard time com­ing up with an attrac­tive photo that showed the entire plant. The plants are grow­ing in a tight cor­ner of the gar­den that has a wood­pile, a rusty shed and a big dis­or­derly stack of stuff wait­ing to be dis­sem­bled and taken to the metal recy­cling facil­ity at the landfill–not stuff I wanted to pub­lish out there for all the world to see.

From one van­tage point the stu­dio walls act as a fairly neu­tral back­drop, but to take this photo my back was against the neighbor’s wall and I couldn’t get the dis­tance I wanted.

The angles that showed off the plants bet­ter also showed off all the junk. Gag.

Okay, back to get­ting real. My gar­den will never look like the high vol­canic slopes of Tener­ife. It’ll never look like the east­ern slope of the Sierra Nevada, or approx­i­mate the wide vis­tas of our desert two hours to the east of here. Some of my plants may come from those places, but cul­ti­vat­ing them won’t hide the fact that I live in a sub­urb with neigh­bors all around.

I guess I look at the gar­den as a scrap­book or photo album. A plant might have asso­ci­a­tions with some­where I’ve been or would like to visit. Maybe I grew up with another of the plants. Yet another may be intrigu­ingly cool even though I have no idea where it comes from. In arrang­ing the plants, in mak­ing the gar­den, I can come up with some­thing where my mem­o­ries can mix with the shapes, col­ors and tex­tures of the plants and pro­duce some­thing I like and hope­fully will look okay to others.

Bloom­ing now in one of my lit­tle bog gar­dens is a stream orchid, Epi­pactis gigan­tea, a plant with a huge pile of asso­ci­a­tions for me. (You can sort of make it out to the left in this photo.) Those mem­o­ries go some­thing like this: I was tak­ing some of the rough Jeep roads in Saline Val­ley, a gen­er­ally unvis­ited expanse of white sand imme­di­ately north­west of Death Val­ley. I’d camped one night on the west side of the val­ley at the mouth of a lit­tle canyon lead­ing up into the Inyo Moun­tains. All night long I kept hear­ing angered chal­lenges from the wild bur­ros that called this area their home. The next morn­ing I headed towards the canyon, keep­ing a wary eye on the bur­ros that were never far away. Soon I started to hear water. I guess I’d unknow­ingly plopped myself on top of a trail lead­ing to a water source for the burros–That would explain the angry noises all night.

Soon the canyon folded in around me, and I went from the glar­ing white hot­ness of the exposed val­ley floor to a cool, shel­tered out­door room. Water driz­zled down a gran­ite face in front of me. Ferns grew every­where. And scar­let columbines. And dozens of this plant, the stream orchid, in peak bloom. Imag­ine that. Orchids in the desert. It was one of those peak out­door moments that I’ll remem­ber forever.

Well, the lit­tle bog gar­den looks and feels noth­ing like that May morn­ing in Saline Val­ley, but see­ing this lit­tle orchid will remind me of that encounter every time I see it.

June 06 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden • photography | Tags: Echium wildpretii • Epipactis gigantea • Saline valley • Tenirife • travel • why people garden | 13 Comments »

echiums!

This must be the year for my prima donna plants to finally decide to bloom. First it was the first bloom for me of the Agave atten­u­ata over the win­ter. Now it’s this echium’s turn.

This is Echium wild­pretii, which has gone from five feet tall two weeks ago to over seven and a half feet.

It’s also known by var­i­ous com­mon names, includ­ing tower of jew­els, red bugloss, and–in Span­ish–taji­naste. “Taji­naste”: what a gor­geous sound­ing name, way more musi­cal than bugloss or “tower of jew­els,” which sounds a lit­tle square to me, like a plant name from a 1927 seed cat­a­log. Taji­naste is endemic to one Atlantic island, Tenir­ife, off the north­ern African coast.

This echium species is described as a bien­nial. Many plants described that way will put up leaves the first year and then bloom the sec­ond year from seed, after which the plants pro­duce huge amounts of seed and then die.

Although it’s been known to flower in the sec­ond year, this plant’s usual inter­pre­ta­tion of the term takes “bien­nual” lit­er­ally as “two years,” keep­ing you wait­ing that long from sow­ing to flow­er­ing. And there’s one plant in the front yard that looks like it’s going to be tak­ing an addi­tional year. Bien­nial? I think not.

Still, worth the wait, don’t you think?

The plant grows in spi­rals. Here you can see the spi­ral­ing new flowers.

The cen­tral rosette of leaves just a few months before send­ing up the cen­tral bloom stalk.

Dur­ing the two years you wait for it to bloom, you get to look at an attrac­tive mound of lance-shaped coarse gray leaves, usu­ally eigh­teen inches to twice that across dur­ing its sec­ond grow­ing sea­son. When nature with­holds flow­ers you can always look at and pho­to­graph leaves. So here’s some of my lit­tle crop of Echium wild­pretii plant photos.

Echium wild­pretii leaves in soft focus

Some of the leaves develop these neat hook ends.

As you can see it’s an attrac­tive plant even when out of bloom. It has low water require­ments and looks clean until its final, spec­tac­u­lar exit. After a few months it turns from a big dra­matic plant into a big dra­matic dead plant with ten­den­cies to top­ple even before its deep tap root decays.

Its rep­u­ta­tion is that it’ll send seeds every­where at that point, so this might not be the best plant if you live near the edge of a dry nat­ural area. A related echium, pride of Madeira, (E. can­di­cans) has estab­lished itself as a pest in some coastal areas of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. I’ll get to see how bad it really is after these plants finally give out later this sum­mer. I’ll worry about that later, but for now I’ll sit back and enjoy the plant.

June 03 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden • photography • plant profiles | Tags: Echium wildpretii • mediterranean plants • tajinaste • tower of jewels | 9 Comments »

unfurling datura

Only about five min­utes elapsed between the first and sec­ond of these pho­tos of the unfurl­ing buds of sacred datura, Datura wrightii. I had no idea how quickly these things opened in the fad­ing evening light as they get ready for their night­time pol­li­na­tors. Stand too close to these mas­sive open­ing buds and you could almost get hurt!

There are times I’m sorry you can’t con­vey hover the inter­net how some­thing smells. This is one of them. These mas­sive eight to nine inch flow­ers can pump out so much scent every moth in the neigh­bor­hood comes for a visit. I usu­ally think humans and insects don’t have an awful lot in com­mon. But we def­i­nitely share an attrac­tion to this flower’s amaz­ing scent.

That’ll be the next photo project: set­ting up the tri­pod again in the dark, wait­ing for the moths, as I get intox­i­cated on the scent of the flowers…

April 29 2010 | Categories: my garden • photography | Tags: Datura wrightii • sacred datura • toloache | 11 Comments »

an invite to my groupies and stalkers

I’m one of sev­eral artists in town who’ve been nom­i­nated for the San Diego Art Prize, an annual oppor­tu­nity for long-established local artists to part­ner with newer emerg­ing tal­ent and hold a joint exhi­bi­tion that will rocket every­one to fame and fortune–or at least that’s the idea behind it.

Even though I’ve been around town for a few years, I’ll be show­ing as “emerg­ing tal­ent” along with a dozen oth­ers who’ve been nom­i­nated by var­i­ous artists and art pro­fes­sion­als around town. The show is the speed dat­ing exhi­bi­tion, where the estab­lished artist can get to know the nom­i­nated artists and select their choice of the per­son they’d like to exhibit with. It’s also a chance for folks in town to take a look at our work.

I’ll be show­ing part of a photography-based instal­la­tion that looks at the names peo­ple have given to fea­tures in the land­scape, par­tic­u­larly to fea­tures that bear a resem­blance to humans. Some of the names are fan­ci­ful and fun, oth­ers march pretty quickly into ter­ri­tory that’s pretty rude or offen­sive. Land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy that takes on issues of racism? Well, why not? (My recent blog post on cul­tur­ally offen­sive plant names comes from the same place in my brain and deals with some of the same issues.)

James SOE NYUN. CADP1001: The Face in the Rock, Dana Point, Cal­i­for­nia. Pig­ment print on board, 10 x 12 1/2 inches.

Here’s a recent image that’ll be in the show, one of the more fun ones, a for­ma­tion up the coast at Dana Point.

James SOE NYUN. AZCNM0802: China Boy, Chir­ic­ahua National Mon­u­ment, Ari­zona. Pig­ment print on board, 12 1/2 x 10 inches.

And then there’s this one from Arizona’s Chir­ic­ahua Moun­tains, one of the poten­tially more offen­sive ones. Although the name prob­a­bly dates from the 1930s, when peo­ple thought a name like this was okay to use, the name still appears on sig­nage to this day.

I did a post on this body of work a cou­ple year ago [ here ] but this is the first time it will be exhibited.

The scoop:

New Con­tem­po­raries III runs Sat., April 24 – Sat., May 22, 2010
at Project X: Art, 320 S. Cedros Ave. Ste. 500 , Solana Beach, 92075
Exhi­bi­tion hours: Tue — Fri­day 10 — 5, Sat­ur­day 11 – 4 pm
Open­ing Recep­tion: Sat. April 24, 6 – 10 pm
Panel Dis­cus­sion: Sat­ur­day, May 15 at 6 to 8 pm

Drop on by to the open­ing and intro­duce your­self if an Ice­landic vol­cano isn’t get­ting in the way of your air travel!

April 18 2010 | Categories: art • photography | Tags: New Contemporaries III | 7 Comments »

bloom day–in 3d!

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 »

a visit to the l.a. county museum

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 | 8 Comments »

one way to photograph a tree

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 »