The Artful Engineer

The title of this post is a nod to the popular TV show of my youth, of which I remember nothing other than the intro and theme song and a single oft-repeated line: “Book ’em, Danno.” While Hawaii was the fiftieth state to join the Union (from which the TV show got its name), it was Michigan that I finally visited after forty-nine others.

We stayed in Traverse City for a week and loved it. Admittedly, October is going to be the best month to visit a place like Michigan, but I’m willing to overlook that because it was so nice. I am, however, pretty sure that I want to be somewhere else during mosquito season.

The image above was on the side of a clearing that we passed whenever we drove into town. In reality, there were probably about as many trees that hadn’t started to turn colors as ones that had during our stay, but there were certainly plenty of patches that were vibrant like this one. Zooming in tight on this mass of color tells the story I wanted to tell and, more practically, avoided a bright morning sky that would have just been distracting if included.

I found this next image on an early morning at the Grass River Natural Area. One reason that I went there was because it had boardwalks over the marshy areas: I enjoy exploring those kinds of areas and without the boardwalks it’s not easy to do. It was a quiet morning, both in terms of people—I passed one woman out with her camera and no one else—and in terms of breeze. I took advantage of the completely calm air to make this focus-stacked image of a dew-covered plant catching a bit of the morning sun:

Part of why I enjoy this image is the fine detail, which is difficult to appreciate in a blog. Here’s a tighter crop:

This level of detail throughout the image wouldn’t have been possible without focus stacking, and focus stacking wouldn’t have been possible without completely still air. It is a happy coincidence of nature that both dew and still air are things that happen in the early morning.

I enjoy the challenge of trying to make busy images work, in large part because conventional wisdom is that they don’t. There’s a lot going on in this next image. The dominant—or at least most prominent—shape is the lichen-covered branch. The grasses form a relatively uniform patterned background. With just those two elements, the image would be fairly simple, but the red and reddening leaves and bright red berries that are intermixed with the branches add another visual overlay. When I look at this image, my eye is drawn to center of the fallen branch because that is the most obvious graphic shape and it has good contrast with the rest of the image. After that, my eye tends to wander around looking at the redder leaves. Despite being so bright, the red berries don’t really attract my eye, perhaps because they are evenly scattered throughout and are well-camouflaged next to the red leaves. Like the previous image, this one is best viewed large, I think.

Moving on to some less intimate scenes, this next image features a glorious tree in beautiful light. It has great contrast with the row of evergreens behind it, and the colorful trees poking up behind the evergreens are subdued enough to not compete with the main subject but prominent enough to complement it. The foreground colors in the field echo those distant trees, too. Finally, the fence isn’t quite a leading line, but more of an outstretched arm presenting the tree.

Although I would have expected a vineyard here to be changing colors by mid-October, this one clearly wasn’t. This is an unusual image in that the subject is really the background: those distant trees in the narrow slice across the top quarter of the image. To that end, I deliberately kept the lake and its far side bright and hazy to help pull the viewers attention across the vineyard to the changing trees; normally I would try to tame that brightness to keep the attention lower in the frame. There isn’t a lot of detail to be seen in those distant trees, but they garner strength from their contrast with the seemingly endless expanse of bright green vineyard. The wide crop accomplishes two things: first, it emphasizes the expanse of the vineyard; second, it eliminates the sky which was too bright and would pull the viewer’s eye right past those trees.

I have a soft spot for dead trees, and especially bleached ones, so I absolutely had to come back to photograph this tree once I spotted it. In a rookie mistake, however, I had left the ISO cranked up to 1600 from the evening before. Combined with the fact that I had to underexpose the image by two stops because of the bright sky (most of which I have cropped out anyway) I effectively made this image at ISO 6400 and the detail in the subject tree suffers accordingly. It’s fine, but could have been noticeably better. I did return the next morning for a do-over, but the light was different and it was windy, so I couldn’t lower the ISO as much as I wanted to anyway. Unless you are working in a studio, do-overs seldom work out in photography.

In addition to vineyards, there were a lot of nice cornfields around Traverse City, too. Cornfields themselves are a deceptively difficult subject, it seems, but I did give this one a nice supporting role here. There are some definite compositional similarities between this image and the earlier one of the vineyard—in particular both fill most of the image with a foreground that is not the subject—although in this image the subject row of trees is much more prominent with correspondingly more detail.

I hope that you enjoyed these images from my first trip to Michigan as much as I do. Please leave some comments with your thoughts, I’d love to hear them!

Next week I will feature some barns from this same area.