A few days ago I said I was finished posting photos from my trip to the Denver Botanic Gardens. At the time I thought that was true, but I was mistaken. Here’s one last photo of water reflections. I like it better than most of the others I posted. I intensified the colors, but not dramatically.
Here are two details from “Albedo” (2010), by Osman Akan. “Albedo” is a two-story-tall sculpture installed in an open area of the parking garage at the Denver Botanic Gardens. It’s made of dichroic glass panels affixed to long, vertical, curving steel tubes. As the identification sign explains, “Albedo is the measure of how strongly an object reflects light. It is an important concept in climatology, astronomy and computer graphics—a relevant combination of disciplines for the Gardens and for Akan, whose art specializes in the physics of light.”
At 3 p.m. on April 2, the sculpture was casting teal shadows on the wall behind it. I didn’t get a good photo of that, so I need to go back. It would be interesting to document how the color and intensity of the square panels change throughout the day, how they vary from sunny to cloudy days, and how they alter over the seasons. I also want to take photographs of this sculpture from which I can isolate even smaller details. I find the colors and the overlapping forms almost hypnotic in their effect.
Taken at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Images cropped and colors over-saturated.
Taken at the Denver Botanic Gardens. This is a very small section of the original, slightly color-intensified.
Back to abstracts. This was taken at the Denver Botanic Gardens.
Aspen trunks present so many interesting abstract patterns. These photos were taken of a single tree in Georgetown, Colorado. They’re not quite what I was hoping to capture, but I’ll keep working on it.
I finally redesigned my photography website and it’s now live. Readers of this blog will find some photos that I’ve posted here, but also lots of older ones. These images were taken with a wide range of cameras. Some of the oldest were digitized from negatives; others were taken with a digital SLR, with a variety of point-and-shoots, with my new 4/3 Olympus, and with my iPhone. I hope you enjoy the website! Feedback is heartily invited.
Paphiopedilum Black Thorpe
Flowers are pure sex out in the open, and that’s especially true of orchids, which are exquisitely adapted for pollination. The sheer sexuality of orchids has been commented upon so often that it is a cliché—but it’s a beautiful one. This is the first time I’ve taken a photograph that amounts to flower pornography. I’ll show the entire flower, along with a number of other orchid species, in my next post. Olympus OM-D EM10 II, 30 mm macro.
Taken at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s 2017 orchid show. Olympus OM-D EM10 II with 30 mm macro lens (60 equivalent). I recently acquired this 4:3 mirror-less camera (which somehow stands up under the burden of that absurd series of letters and numbers), and so far I absolutely love it. It’s lightweight and small, which is a boon for my tendinitis-weakened wrists, but it seems to perform as well as my Pentax K-50. Best of all, you can shoot just by touching the LCD screen where you want the sharpest focus to be. No, Olympus didn’t pay me to praise this camera. What a shame! Next up: Orchids! Lots of ’em.
iPhone photograph. This was taken on the campus of the University of Kansas, Lawrence.
VAPOR AND FLOW 