Ye Olde Celtic Strawberry

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Time Drawn: Fall 2011

This was an experimental piece in many ways.

For one thing, I was trying out painting on black paper. Did you know how difficult it is to get black watercolor-grade paper? I had to use construction paper, which isn’t thick enough in the first place, and the black dye bled some from the water I was using.

That’s why the background is that interesting mottled purple color. The dye isn’t true black, it’s actually a really dark purple, and the paper wrinkled from the moisture, causing the dye to pool in the low spots. It’s an interesting effect, but not at all what I was aiming for.

I also learned just how much paint is required to have the colors be visible. That’s why artist tend to paint on white paper. Even the slightest hint of color shows up. I repainted the base color at least five or six times to get it this intense.

Now, this actually is part of what makes this piece glow some. The black background forms a dark base, and the layers of color show through slightly with the semi-transparent watercolors I was using. It’s a tricky thing to manage, these layers of color, even if they’re necessary to paint skin and other things realistically. So I’m glad I managed it.

I was also trying a Celtic knotwork design. It’s one of my own invention, of course. I mean, how many other Celtic strawberries have you seen?! The leaves came out beautifully, though I’m not sure how well the spirals in the knots represent seeds, like I was hoping. Still, with the strong yellow highlighting I put on the lines, the knotwork does stand out.

As for why it’s a strawberry… Honestly, I don’t fully remember. I know I was going for something fairly simple for this, with all the experiments I was running. So hey, strawberry!

  

A Truly Blazing Sunset

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Location Taken: Valparaiso, Indiana
Time Taken: October 2007

Most sunsets are pretty standard, a bit of flashy light, a change in color, a few interesting clouds.

And then, every so often, the sky is on fire.

Well, not literally, unless you and everyone around you is having a really bad day. But the light coming from the sun is blazing so bright and flame-like that there’s no other way to easily describe it.

Now, the sunlight itself isn’t doing it. At the exact same time as you’re standing there looking at the flaming sky, someone just a thousand miles to the west is under standard blue skies, lit by light escaping at the same time as the stuff that’s illuminating your sky.

It really comes down to two things: angle and particles. Angle is why sunset and sunrise is different from full night or full day. The light is low on the horizon and shadows become more prevalent. A lot more things just don’t capture enough light to be more than silhouettes, like the trees in this image.

Particles are important because they’re what catches the light in the sky itself. The photons actually bounce off of particles or might even be absorbed and re-emitted, both of which changes their wavelength and thus their color. That’s why the sky appears blue, by the way, air particles absorb wavelength colors other than blue better than blue, so more of the photons that hit your eye are in the blue wavelengths than not.

Now, angle and particles come together in really interesting ways. For one thing, when the sun is low in the sky, it’s actually coming through more of the atmosphere than if it was coming straight down from above. It’s just a matter of the geometry of a sphere, really. This means there are more particles between the light and you, and more opportunities for the color to change.

Also, the particles in the air are not the same in all parts of the sky. There’s a lot of non-air particles that hang out low in the sky, like dust and pollutants kicked up during the day. And since the light is now coming from a very low angle, it passes through a much larger percentage of these low-hanging particles than it does at noon. Again, simple geometry.

This is also why sunrise and sunset look different. On the surface, they shouldn’t be too different, the light is coming in at similar angles through the same atmosphere at both times. But actually, it’s not the same atmosphere. Daylight hours have a lot more activity than nighttime hours, if only because it’s easier to see and a lot of things like seeing. Dust gets kicked up, people drive around and release pollutants, plants grow and absorb carbon dioxide, heck, even the light itself adds energy to the air that makes it move more and change its composition. Oh, and the light of the sun powers the complex system of weather, which really changes things.

It’s the days with really high particle counts that have the most brilliant sunsets. So perhaps this sunset was right after a dust storm was kicked up far away, or a lot of people decided that was a great day to drive around Chicago, or a volcano released a bit more ash into the air than usual.

Oh, about that last one, have you ever seen Munch’s The Scream? It’s a pretty famous piece of art, so there’s a good chance you have. For a long time, art historians assumed the brilliant orange sunset in that photo was an exaggeration done for mood setting. It’s a fairly reasonable assumption, since that’s the sort of thing the more stylized artists of the time did. This lasted until they started looking seriously at the sunsets painted in even the basic landscape paintings of the day, and found the same brilliant skies in all of them. A quick consulting with historical meteorologists (and did you think THAT was a job) and they found that there had been a large amount of particles in the air that colored it blood red. It was caused by the massive eruption of Krakatoa in distant Indonesia in 1883. Now mind you, the painting was done in 1893, ten years after the eruption, and the ash and gases stuck in the sky had cleared long before that, which is why it took them so long to realize it. But Munch painted events from his past a lot, and the blood red sky caused by large amounts of volcanic particles had stuck in his head for a decade.

So if you really want to get a brilliant sunset, just go convince a volcano to erupt. If it’s big enough, the particles will stick around for months, too!

  

A Rain of Leaves, but None are Falling

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Location Taken: Bridgeport, Nebraska
Time Taken: November 2012

Camping during the winter months is both unusual and challenging. For one thing, the majority of the camping places have closed for the season. Most people don’t find camping in below-freezing temperatures that appealing. For another, well, there’s those below-freezing temperatures to deal with.

Which just makes the normal camping hazards like rain all that more worrisome. If it rains while you’re sleeping, and then drops below freezing, well, you’ve got a layer of ice on your tent.

Which made waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of rain slightly worrying.

Until I realized it wasn’t actually rain. I was just hearing the dried leaves in the tree we were under rustling in the wind. It just happened to sound exactly like falling rain.

Which was actually really awesome, because I love the sound of rain. I sleep really well when I hear it, and I slept extremely well that night.

Even though we were the only ones camping in this public recreation area in western Nebraska. Even if it did drop below freezing that night and my nose got more than a little chilled. Even if it was the night after a day of feeling icky (I inhaled too much sulfur while at Yellowstone, and I didn’t take to high altitudes that well, and had a bad reaction to both). It was still the best sleep I had in months.

Makes me kinda want a cottonwood tree of my own to have outside my window, to rustle-rain and make me sleep well all the time.

  

Archive these under P for Pansies

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Location Taken: Right outside the National Archives, Washington DC
Time Taken: November 2008

Sometimes I wonder what people think of me as I go about my photo-taking.

I mean, this is a lovely photo of some lovely pansies. They’ve got fantastic color to them, don’t they? Especially for when I took this photo, in early November. It was a warm fall that year, so the flowers were doing just fine.

And this wasn’t just any garden. It was the fancy landscaping right outside the National Archives, one of the museums in Washington DC. For all I know, these flowers look this good because they dig out and replace any that aren’t up to snuff.

Still, in order to get this photo, I needed to get close to my subject. Which means kneeling or sitting on the ground in this case. So there I am, sitting on the ground right next to a major museum, bent over even more, taking photos of the landscaping. Now, the camera along makes it socially acceptable (perhaps because photographers are crazy and get aggressive if you try to stop them from taking the photo they want). But still, if you saw someone sitting on the sidewalk staring at a flower, you’d probably think they were a little bonkers.

And I am a little bonkers, I’ll not deny it. But I’m not the dangerous bonkers, just the type who actually pays attention to the world around me and then does weird things with it. Like take photos of pansies in November.