Ok, this was actually our third adventure in April but I didn’t figure that the Japanese Garden trip would be the only one last month, and I liked the Juniper for a Day title so much I didn’t want to ruin it with the “Adventure” label, so here we are bestowing that title on our trip to the coast!  Trip #3 for the month!  Given that our initial thought had been to go there before the weather has us look eastward to the Painted Hills, I guess it’s appropriate we held off on the designation.

“Dawn is always tantalizing: the nature of light that one has wished for may never materialize yet another unlooked for image may emerge in front of one’s eyes.  That is one of the most wonderful things about landscape photography that is rarely discussed: the element of surprise can be as joyful as it can be in photojournalism.”

Boy did I step in a pile with that one!  Do not, I repeat, do not take a picture of your rig and forget to include your interpreting dashboard gecko!  Yes, I know he’s a collard lizard, but when he gets like that I call Jack a gecko and he calls me any one of “fat man”, “bald dude” or “old guy”.  It’s how we know we’re not quite happy with each other.  Well, Mr. Gecko told me he wasn’t going to let me speak to Beast until I take a selfie of him!  And a good one too! So . . . .

It’s been busy days around here at the Terrell household. Between work and a slew of side projects/tasks, we’ve been pressed for time lately. Consequently, I’m way behind on post writing, although I do have a list of ideas sketched out that just need to be written and photographs worked on. So here’s something to help wet the whistle.

I love falling asleep to the smell of juniper.  Especially that intense presence you experience when you’ve been away from it for awhile and your body relaxes as you drift away into a deep sleep.  Last weekend Ann and I decided we needed to get out to photograph and, after a week of ever-changing weather forecasts had us continually recalculating where we could go to escape the rain, we wound up at one of our favorite places, nodding off to the fragrance of juniper - the Painted Hills.  We may have stayed there only for one night, but it gave us an incredible morning of photography!

Today’s answer:  To push yourself.

Since I’ve been back from my overseas adventures, one of the subjects that has captivated me the most has been water.  It certainly captured my creative thinking during our latest excursion to the Portland Japanese Gardens.  One of the issues I’ve discussed before is how critical the shutter speed is for how the water turns out in an image.  It was no different this time around.  Except, when developing the images for the trip blog post, I was faced with the question - which exposure time is better? 

One of the advantages of working in digital is that the sensor captures everything that it can capture.  While I may set up my mirrorless camera to show me a square, black and white image on the rear LCD screen, the camera records a color image across the entire sensor.  When I download that raw data (my RAW file), I have all the data to do with it as I please.  At best, my computer knows how I shot it and sometimes it will show me a square image (sometimes not, though I don’t know why).  But, for the raw files at least, it shows me all of the images in color.  I have to convert them to B&W on my own.  Which means I always see my images in color on my computer regardless of how I “saw” them out in the field.  That leads to today’s images.

Back in my large-format film days, I used to joke that I saw in black and white, and that I only saw in color when I was getting paid.  That was true back then, but not nearly true now.  Still, for as much as I talk about learning to see again in black and white, my recent efforts at the Japanese Gardens reminded me that in addition to seeing, there’s a lot of developing skills in black and white that I need to re-learn as well before my B&W images are as good as they should be.

The trip to Pro Photo Supply wound up being what we’d expected.  And that wasn’t good.  Both camera and lenses (yes plural) wound up on their way to Fuji for inspection/repair.  Fortunately, we’d brought our backup camera, which meant I could still photograph at the Japanese Gardens on Saturday morning.  Unfortunately, we hadn’t brought the L-bracket for the X-T1.  So I had a choice - hand hold the images, or hold the camera in place on top of the tripod head.  Knowing the type of images I’d want to be making, and the slow shutter speeds they would entail, I opted for the imposed constraint of holding the camera in place on top of the tripod!

Given we were up in Portland photographing last weekend, and that we’re planning trips out  for next weekend and the fortnight after that (cross your fingers), this was a weekend to do prints.  While Ann and I discussed how to approach doing a massive printing marathon session to try out all of the sample papers we have, we decided the wiser thing to do was to make a couple of images using some smaller-sized 5” x 7” paper we picked up last weekend to see how smaller prints looked.

Ann and I had some business we had to do up in Portland (buy more photo paper!), and, given that the cherry blossoms were out in our neighborhood, we decided to make it a photo trip as well.  And where better than the Portland Japanese Gardens?  Photographically it turned out to be a weekend of constraints - self-imposed and otherwise.

On the second day of our Yosemite Adventure, right after I messed around in the snow and rocks, I mentioned that after I extricated myself I had to go find Ann.  As I approached her I noticed the two trees that are the last image of the post.  But as I approached those trees (happy that Ann’s camera was pointing in a different direction) I realized that she  was trying to photograph an interesting rock that had a very elegant slot in it.  She eventually gave up on it, not making a single shot, and headed back towards the main trail while I photographed the trees.

Ann won’t toot her own horn, but nothing’s stopping me from doing it (not even Ann’s evil-eye).  So put your fingers in your ear because the blast is coming!

Ann and I are thinking of heading up to Portland next weekend, so when Ann said she had some errands to run and asked if I just wanted to stay home I said, “Sure, if you don’t mind.” I immediately knew what I was going to do - PRINT!  I had been thinking of what I wanted to print next throughout the week, and decided that I really needed to check out some of the matte papers that we have.  This was the perfect opportunity!