Contrasts 2
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Steam versus Diesel. Taken on the Gloucester and Warwickshire Railway in Toddington loco yard during a photo charter.
“Our lives at times seem a study in contrast… love & hate, birth & death, right & wrong… everything seen in absolutes of black & white.
Too often we are not aware that it is the shades of grey that add depth & meaning to the starkness of those extremes.”
– Ansel Adams
Emotions in Black and White 15
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Runa Photography, Daniel © 2022
© Some rights reserved, don´t use this image without my permission
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Fotografía desde el Teleférico anaranjado donde se ven los rascacielos de la parte central y Sopocachi. Al frente esta el barrio de Armando Escobar Uría.
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Muchas gracias por sus comentarios
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Switzerland, May 2021
My best photos are here: www.lacerta-bilineata.com/ticino-best-photos-of-southern-...
My latest ANIMAL VIDEO (warning, it's a bit shocking): www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T2-Xszz7FI
You find a selection of my 80 BEST PHOTOS (mostly not yet on Flickr) here: www.lacerta-bilineata.com/western-green-lizard-lacerta-bi... (the website exists in ESPAÑOL, FRANÇAIS, ITALIANO, ENGLISH, DEUTSCH)
ABOUT THE PHOTO:
So this photo is a bit of a novelty for me - at least here on Flickr, but it's also a journey back in time in a sense. I've always loved b/w and sepia photography; already as a very young teenager I would go out into the woods with an old Pentax Spotmatic (which I had nicked from my father) whenever it was a foggy day to shoot b/w compositions of sunbeams cutting through the ghostlike trees.
I used films with a sensitivity of at least 1600 (for those of you who remember what that means 😉 ), and the resulting photos had an incredibly fine grain which I loved; I blew them up to the size of posters and hung them on the walls of my teenage man-cave next to Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Slash.
But then I abandoned photography altogether for 20 years, and when I finally picked up a camera again, it was one of the digital kind. Now neither film nor grain played any role in my photographic endeavours - let alone b/w compositions: because the reason I fell in love with shooting pictures once more was the rare and incredibly colorful lizard species that had chosen my garden as its habitat.
It's this species - the Lacerta bilineata aka the western green lizard - that my photo website www.lacerta-bilineata.com/ and also my Flickr gallery are dedicated to, but I've since expanded that theme a bit so that it now comprises the whole Lacerta bilineata habitat, which is to say my garden and its immediate surroundings and all the flora and fauna I find in it.
I like that my gallery and the website have this clear theme, because in order to rise to the challenge of portraying all aspects of a very specific little eco system (which also happens to be my home of sorts), it forces me to constantly explore it from fresh angles, and I keep discovering fascinating new motives as my photographic journey continues.
Which brings me to the horse pasture you see in this photo. This playground for happy horsies lies just outside my garden, and it normally only interests me insofar as my green reptile friends claim parts of it as their territory, and I very much prefer it to be horseless (which it thankfully often is).
Not that the horses bother the reptiles - the lizards don't mind them one bit, and I've even seen them jump from the safety of the fly honeysuckle shrub which the pasture borders on right between the deadly looking hooves of the horses to forage for snails, without any sign of fear or even respect.
No, the reason I have a very conflicted relationship with those horses is that they are mighty cute and that there's usually also foals. The sight of those beautiful, happy animals jumping around and frolicking (it's a huge pasture and you can tell the horses really love it) is irresistible: and that inevitably attracts what in the entire universe is known as the most destructive anti-matter and ultimate undoing of any nature photographer: other humans.
Unlike with the horses, the lizards ARE indeed very much bothered by specimens of loud, unpredictable Homo sapiens sapiens - which makes those (and by extension also the horses) the cryptonite of this here reptile photographer. It's not the horses' fault, I know that, but that doesn't change a thing. I'm just telling you how it is (and some of you might have read about the traumatic events I had to endure to get a particular photo - if not, read at your own risk here: www.flickr.com/photos/191055893@N07/51405389883/in/datepo... - which clearly demonstrated that even when it's entirely horseless, that pasture is still a threat for artistic endeavours).
But back to the photo. So one morning during my vacation back in May I got up quite early. It had rained all night, and now the fog was creeping up from the valley below to our village just as the sky cleared up and the morning sun started to shine through the trees.
And just as I did when I was a teenager I grabbed my camera and ran out to photograph this beautiful mood of ghostlike trees and sunbeams cutting through the mist. There had already been such a day a week earlier (which is when I took this photo: www.flickr.com/photos/191055893@N07/51543603732/in/datepo... ), but this time, the horses were also there.
Because of our slightly strained relationship I only took this one photo of them (I now wish I had taken more: talk about missed opportunities), and otherwise concentrated on the landscape. It was only later when I went through all the photos on my computer that I realized that I actually really liked those horses, even despite the whole composition being such a cliché. And I realized another thing: when I drained the photo of all the color, I liked it even better - because there was almost a bit of grain in it, like in the photos from my youth.
Since then I have experimented quite a bit with b/w and sepia compositions (some of which I will upload here eventually I guess), but this photo here is the first one that helped me rediscover my old passion. I hope you like it even though it builds quite a stark contrast with the rest of my tiny - and very colorful - gallery. But in the spirit of showing you the whole Lacerta bilineata habitat (and also in the spirit of expanding my gallery a bit beyond lizards and insects), I think it's not such a bad fit.
As always, many greetings to all of you, have a wonderful day and don't hesitate to let me know what you think 😊
A couple of weeks ago I drove down to Patagonia Arizona and the Paton Center for hummingbirds. They have feeders set up all over the grounds that a large variety birds use, not just hummingbirds. I love the contrast of this photo, with the beautiful red of the bird on a dead flower and the dark background. This is a male Northern Cardinal at the Paton Center for hummingbirds in Patagonia Arizona.
It was the contrasts which caught my eye when I was setting up this scene... Along with the B&W harmonics it made for a nice composition.
What I did not see at the time was the 'Paisley' design the ducks created in their formation.
In one shot they were all in an almost perfect circle, but the overall composition wasn't appealing.
I also shot this scene with my Nikon, but somehow it all looked flat. - and now I don't even own a cellphone..
I saw this scene unfolding - the yellow wall was ahead of where I was originally and I saw this lady walking in that direction - I moved quickly and positioned myself for the shot. I barely had time to get into position and only was able to grab one quick shot
La Ceja, Colombia; 2.300 meters above sea level.
The Scrub Tanager is a common open country bird of the Colombian and Ecuadorian Andes. Due to its preference for scrub and bushy areas, it is most easily found in dry intermontane ‘rainshadow’ valleys but is expanding into more humid areas in the wake of human disturbance.
The Scrub Tanager is identified by its silvery greenish plumage, rust-colored cap and black mask. In further contrast to this typically gregarious genus, the Scrub Tanager most often is encountered as solitary pairs.
neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/portal/species/overview?p_p...
Taken on the same day as my last post when an overnight snowfall had changed the landscape for a brief time. Within a few hours of this being taken virtually all the snow had gone.
During a drug bust operation, this police helicopter flew below and around the contrasting black, gold and yellow clouds near sunset.