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.

To the left is the original image that I prettied up for the contest, basically a snapshot for this blog that I took for the February Garden Bloggers Bloom Day meme. It was a few minutes before sunset when I took the photo, within the “golden hour” that you hear photographers talk about sometimes. During that time of day colors can look more saturated, and the color balance of the afternoon (or morning) sunlight shifts to the colors towards the warm golds and oranges and reds. I’d like to say it was intentional, but that was the only time I had to go out and take pictures. Sometimes things just work out.

The first modification I made was to crop the image. The original photo had the 2:3 (2 wide, 3 high) aspect ratio that my Canon Rebel camera takes. The contest, however, asked for an image that would be 8 1/2 by 11 inches, which is more like an aspect ratio of about 2:2.259. That meant I had to prune the image in the vertical dimension.

There was dark space on the left side that in the end I thought was a little distracting, so I cut that out. And the lower left emerging bloom stalk was a bit out of focus, so I placed it on the edge of the photo, moving attention away from it. Okay, so I found all sorts of reasons to crop it horizontally.

But finding a way to crop it vertically was tough. I placed the central rosette higher in the photo so that it wasn’t a plain boring formally balanced composition. Still, the photo wanted to be just a little bit taller than the rules allowed for, so this modification seemed more like an amputation. I wasn’t 100% happy with the result, but I thought it wasn’t too egregious.

The final touches were to use Levels in Photoshop to lower the white point and raise the black point–effectively upping the contrast–and to change the center point to brighten the image. Last, I applied some gentle sharpening and used the Burn tool to gently darken the edges and some spots of the image that seemed too bright, to draw attention to the parts that were most interesting. These final changes are subtle, but distinct if your carefully compare the top image and this third image.

But the contest also wanted an image that worked well in black and white as well as color. Here’s what you get if you drain all the color out of the photo. It’s okay graphically, but I thought it was pretty flat looking.

And here’s the final grayscale image after I played with the contrast, modified the black and white points, sharpened everything, and darkened the edges of the photo using the Photoshop Burn tool. As much as I like the delicate blues and greens of the color photo, in a lot of ways I like this version even better.

There you have it, from snapshot to winning masterpiece (yah right…) Anyway, I’m happy, and I can hardly wait to see people walking around town with this image on their t-shirts.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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…

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!

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.

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.)

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.