Photos from She Who Walks Among Graves..

[shadowkat]

These are the photos from the day I got lost - which was Wed, after the five hour negotiation from hell. I was sore for two days after this. The walk helped with the stress - up until the point that I got lost. Also there was more street traffic that day than on Friday for some reason, and less masks.

I'm kind of hoping the fact that the upstate region is starting to re-open - will grab some of the frustrated New Yorkers. The problem with going to the parks - or why they are more crowded than ever before - is there are no gyms, aerobic classes, boxing, tennis, basketball, soccer games, football, baseball, swimming pools, vacations, etc - so all people have is the parks.
There's no where else they can go - but the parks and the side-streets for exercise. Apparently they've opened up more streets now to pedestrians, and closed them to traffic. Also are creating more designated bike lanes. This should make walking about easier. I may start taking much longer walks. Who knows maybe I can walk to the doctor's office in June? The appointment is at 4:20 - if I start at 9 am, I might get there by then.

Anyhow, here's the pictures.

1.

Flowers:





2.




3. Sunlight with the Graves..











4.

Grave of the animal right's activist Henry Bergh who founded the ASPCA.




5.

Trees and sunlight




Walking through the woods in the cemetery



Monument and Trees





6. More trees, flowers, graves and sunlight on Lookout Hill or Mauseulum Hillside.











Reposting the heron, photographer for apto_omn

Comments

[atpo_onm]

I'm less picky - or I tend to go with my gut, what works, what doesn't is a gut level thing regarding art. I'm an intuitive thinker or feeling when it comes to art.

And that's absolutely fine. I'm one of those types who is very leery of telling someone that whatever artistic craft they practice, that somehow what they're doing isn't right or proper. The way people see the world is so vastly different that it strikes me as ridiculous that there should only be one valid methodology of artistic expression.

I liked your photo of the heron as it was, but it's also not possible for me to instinctively not analyze it in the way my brain would if I had taken it. In fact, I also usually try to intuit what the photographer saw when he/she took the shot.

It is possible, for example, that by crowding the photographer in to the right frame and by partially cutting him off you were making a statement as to his intrusiveness in photographing the bird (from the bird's perspective), a perfectly valid artistic choice, IMO.

But what caught my eye was, as I mentioned, the sweep of the stone border around the lake, which passed by the photographer and ended up at the bird. There is also a reflection of a tree in the lake that tends to point toward the bird. Is the bird's current environment making a statement as to man's intrusion upon it?

As to my method, it's very technically fussy in some things and less so in others. The camera itself may be surprisingly basic-- it's an approximately 12-15 year old Nikon Coolpix L6. That's right-- a little digital point-n-shoot, pretty much all automatic. It replaced a much-beloved Honeywell Pentax 35mm SLR, with only a light meter built in, no automatic anything, purchased in 1972. I have a bunch of lenses, filters and other accessories for the Pentax, all of which have now been setting unused for quite a while now, essentially since digital got good enough to compete with film.

For an amateur, the huge benefit with digital is not really the medium itself so much as the ability to process/improve your images with software and then print them out yourself instead of sending them off to a photo store to do so-- the ability to have full control throughout the process.

The photo software I use is quite old at this point, from 2005-- it's called Paint Shop Pro 10, originally a graphics program that evolved into primarily photo work. The current versions are here:

https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/

... but I'm not fond of the versions after the one I own, so I keep on with the oldie, which I run on a Windows XP desktop machine. Printers are currently an Epson 8-1/2 x 11 inch basic office type machine and a "Pro-sumer" level Canon wide format that can do up to 13 x 19 inch prints.

I tend to be very careful framing the shot in the viewscreen, since that makes the subsequent efforts in software far easier. Sometimes, as you've mentioned, the subject may not stay still, or the light may change, whathaveyou, then grab as you can and hope is all you can do.

In the film days-- that meant not being able to save some shots. Software-- oh my, even with the low-cost one I'm using, the stuff you can do is amazing.

What you can do these days with a product that's supposedly mainly a telephone is remarkable, but whether you're an instinctive or technical photographer has far less to do with the camera than the person using it, advice given to me by a college student photographer friend waaaay back in '72, and still very true today.