Sibling Assignment #147: So Much to Learn -- So Green, So Inexperienced

InlandEmpireGirl challenged me and Silver Valley Girl to do the following:

This week's  assignment in our series on photography is entitled "Pick Colors":  Create a set of 15 photographs where the main subject is a color. In other words, disregard what the actual subject is (an umbrella, church, street sign), but compose the photograph so that there are only two or three colors. Post the photos and write about the experience.

IEG's collection of green and red pictures are splendid.  Go here and look at them.  

About five days out of the week, Snug and I go to Fairmount Blvd here in Eugene and follow it along the west side of Hendricks Park.  We start at point B and walk about three quarters of the way to point A:

I've been taking my Nikon on these walks and trying to learn my way around the Tamron f/2.5 28mm lens Russell picked up for me at Goodwill. 

The lens has been a lot of fun and has called my abilities up really short.  It's a manual lens.  I can't rely on all the electronic genius of my Nikon for focus or aperture or shutter speed and I have to make these decisions and adjustments myself, a totally new experience for me.  (I realize that I can shoot with the M setting when I use the other lenses, but I've just been too cautious.  This Tamron lens forced my hand, I'm happy to say.)

I walk Snug in this particular spot for two reasons:  it gives both of us a light workout as we have to walk uphill. Granted, the grade is gentle, but it's still good exercise for both of us;  secondly, I don't really enjoy being out in the sun and this walk is heavily shaded and very cool, very comfortable.

As a guy behind a camera with a manual lens and almost no experience, taking pictures of the color green along Fairmount Blvd. challenged me, primarily because of the variety of lighting.  I love the way sunlight shoots and slants through the trees, illuminating a burst of leaves here, a fern there, and it's often the color green that the sun brings alive in great variety.

Taking pictures of all these (excuse the pun) shades of green challenged me, especially in terms of exposure.  Many of my pictures are over exposed:  too much light came in because the aperture was too wide or the shutter speed too slow or I'd failed to properly adjust the ISO. 

Having Snug pulling at me all the time increased the challenge, so evening before last I came back to our spot alone and took more pictures, able to take more time to fiddle with the lens and to try to compose my shots.  My success was decidedly mixed. 

So that's been my experience taking pictures of green at Hendricks Park.

I'll try to illustrate my most enjoyable travails with these pictures (more than the fifteen assigned) with a few comments before the pictures:

To begin, normally my exposure error lean toward the underexposed.  I like darker tones.  I find darker pictures, as well as darker music and stories and plays, richer.  These first pictures feature darker shades of green.  In the first one, I wanted to convey the scare amount of light coming through to these leaves, but I think I might have underexposed the picture.  In the second one, I'm more pleased with the exposure and actually like the way the variety of light makes it so that this single plant's leaves have different shades of green.  I suppose in a more uniform light, the illusion would be created that the leaves are all the same color of green, or, at least, a lot more similar.  

Here are a couple of more picture where I wanted to focus on paler shades of green, but where each of the pictures is overexposed, the green turns ghostly.  I am especially disappointed in the second picture.  My eye say sunlight gashing through a shaded area, bathing these leaves in brilliance.  My eye could see each leaf.  But my failure to properly expose the picture results in a pool of green color and the suggestion of leaves, but without definition and with the light overpowering the image. 

Here, I think I came closer to getting a good picture.  It helps that my camera is closer to the subject.  The green is rich and I really enjoy the detail of the little crescents having been chewed out of the one leaf.  That said, it's clear that I'm still struggling with how to work with the varieties of light.  You can see this where the light washes out the green, making parts of the picture, for my taste, too shiny.

The first of these two pictures was taken in complete shade.  My first two tries at this photograph were way too dark.  I slowed down the shutter speed and opened up the aperture a bit and as a result, the fern is visible.  It's interesting to me how the shaded light in conjunction with my lens give this decidedly green fern an almost turquoise look.  Messing around with these pictures disabuses me of the idea that there is pure color or absolute color.  As the light changes, the color changes.

 In this picture, the little bit of sunlight that come into play adds to the variety of colors in these ferns.

These dead, crumpled leaves are yet another shade of green and you can see I used two different settings to take this shots.

Here's another picture that disappointed me.  I took a bunch of shots of the sun shining brilliantly upon this shock of leaves.  To my eye, it was a luminous sight, but I couldn't seem to bring that about.  I took all of the pictures without Snug and made my way through blackberry thorns and thick ivy to get a good angle.  But I failed.  This picture, to me, is undefined and ill-composed.  It captures little of what I felt as I took it.  It's a good example of a beautiful scene that availed itself to me and that I currently lack the skill to capture.

After trying to make the above picture work, I turned my attention to the moss on this single tree.  I like the bottom picture better.  I like how I lessened the exposure and, to me, it's a deeper, more interesting picture. (Again, I marvel at how different the green looks in these two pictures taken within maybe ten seconds of each other.  The natural light hadn't changed much.  My settings did, though.)

In these pictures, I wanted to see how my Tamron lens worked in close photographs and I liked this fern with its white tip as well as the second, studied from a different perspective.

In this picture, you can see the "browning" effect the setting sun has upon these leaves.  

Here are two attempts at seeing the same leaf in two ways with the setting sun casting light upon it.

I'll end this study of green with three photographs of the same leaf, a leaf that attracted my attention because it's not only green but also has autumn colorings.   I really can't say which picture I think works the best, only that it's another example of how I'm trying to learn what settings I prefer in relation to the light mother nature gives me.