Trees of the American Southwest

[bakubo]

stevecim, I like that first shot the best!

Tony, same to you. I like your first shot best!

Here are some more trees, but these are from the American Southeast. The first two are Caddo Lake, Texas on the border with Louisiana:




This one is a cypress swamp along the Natchez Trace National Parkway in Mississippi:



All are scanned film. My recollection is that the camera was a Minolta Alpha 9xi with the Minolta 28-135mm f4-4.5 and Minolta 70-210mm f4.

[Tony Meredith]

Henry,

those trees at Cadda Lake are very eerie looking, very well done, awsome photos.

Tony

[David Kilpatrick]

When we were in Natchez, we visited a plantation with an excellent cypress swamp and lots of 'knees' sticking up from the water. The swamp cypress used for the woodwork and doors in the antebellum houses looked great, and I asked luthier friends whether it is suitable for making guitars. The answer came back that it's so HARD due to the silica content from the water that no-one tries to use it for anything at all, it blunts saws and tools so fast that making a single door for those houses probably cost the workman a set of tools (except back then, a whetstone would have restored the sharpness, unlike today's Japanese tools used for guitar maker which are so fine it's impossible to sharpen them, but which last for years in normal use).

David

[aster]

Bakubo,

The Caddo Lake is spectacular; colours, textures and reflections and all !

You certainly have been to some interesting places..

Yildiz

[David Kilpatrick]

I found one of the pictures from 2002 - a lot has changed in 7 years, we visited Lousiana and New Orleans, and the cameras were a Dimage F100, Dimage 7, and a Konica Hexar with fixed 35mm f2 lens (still have that camera, it's a true classic). The Hexar was used with new Konica Centuria Super 100 film for this sunset shot:



Scanned from a print. Looks very contrasty to me, but it reproduced well in the magazine. The latest issue printed is very soft, lacking magenta, have complained to the printers about the flat quality of printing. But seeing this scan mskes me wonder whether I should not be artificially boosting the contrast of all the images, clipping the black, forgetting about subtle midtones.

David

[Greg Beetham]

That's a pretty good exposure for film David, although it looks like it was on the verge of struggling a bit, (is that a little touch of reciprocity over in the distance), do you think any reasonably low noise detail on the backs of the trees could actually be got from the neg? I think it looks fine the way it is with them silhouetted.
Greg

[David Kilpatrick]

Centuria 100 Super was a fantastic film and I am sure almost anything could be got from the neg, if I still knew where it was

David

[bakubo]

I have been to Caddo Lake twice and these photos were the first time in 1999. Actually, I probably have about 30+ photos from that spot and 9 are on my website. I just more or less randomly selected these 2 to show here. The conditions that December morning were just perfect with no breeze at all so the water was like a mirror. I was fascinated with the reflections on the water and the gray, leafless trees. A few years later I stopped by Caddo Lake again but it was a different time of year and also the water wasn't absolutely still. As in much of photography timing and luck are so darn important! I like to visit the national parks and often near them there is some photographer with a photo gallery displaying awesome big prints or in the visitors center there will be books, postcards, posters for sale with gorgeous photos. The people who take those photos usually live in the area and can see when conditions are good and get out there. Most of the times I have been at the national parks, even if for a few days, the conditions never turn out (light, clouds in the sky, color of the sky, etc.) to be as amazing as what you see in their photos. If you stay there for a year then you will certainly get several fantastic opportunities but the chances of getting that opportunity when you are only there a short time are small.

I recommend the drive along the Natchez Trace National Parkway. In the spring of 2000 we made a 5 week road trip from Austin, Texas to Key West, Florida hugging the Gulf Coast the whole way along the coastal highway and then after Key West hugged the Atlantic coast all the way up to North Carolina and then back through North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas and back to Austin, Texas. On that trip we drove on 2 national parkways: Blue Ridge Parkway and Natchez Trace Parkway. Both were excellent! Here is a photo of a section of the old Natchez Trace:



The Old Natchez Trace was a 500-mile footpath that ran through Choctaw and Chickasaw lands connecting Natchez, Mississippi, to Nashville, Tennessee.

As for the film used, at Caddo Lake I was shooting Fuji Velvia 50 and Fujichrome Sensia 100 (slide film). The cypress swamp in Mississippi was on, I think, Fuji Superia 100 (print film). Oh, and I remember as a child we were taught to remember how to spell Mississippi with this little ditty: M - I - crooked letter - crooked letter - I - crooked letter - crooked letter - I - humpback - humpback - I.

[David Kilpatrick]

We did the Natchez Trace main highway (parallel to the trail route) for maybe 25-30 miles upstream, but diverted off the main highway to the old Trace road for the drive back. In the middle of the woodlands, we found a beautiful but rather sad burned-out plantation mansion. It was sad because it had been built with a massive portico of doric columns, but really these were just plastered over girders (probably not antebellum, which is why no-one had restored it). The house resembled a factory steel frame, but with these fake classical touches surviving in places. At another spot we found scout camps and a large gang of kids all preparing to walk the Trace, and an SUV turned up with one of their leaders full of takeaway fast food - burgers, cans of Pepsi, etc. Not scouting as I knew it! They littered the whole area with the cans and packaging and made no attempt to clear up.

This was in contrast to the street musicians and hobos we spent a couple of hours with in NO, who cleaned up the square at midnight and made sure they left the benches and sidewalks clear of every scrap of litter, not a cigarette butt dropped.

David

[Javelin]

Thats funny, Our plant is in Mississauga Ontario and we hear this little chant often when speaking to Americans on the phone and they are muttering it to themselves while trying to spell Mississauga... it always ends badly for them. In nothern NY some cities have the -auga- or -agua- in the name so sometimes the chant is ended with an undignified sound.

Oh, and I remember as a child we were taught to remember how to spell Mississippi with this little ditty: M - I - crooked letter - crooked letter - I - crooked letter - crooked letter - I - humpback - humpback - I.

[artington]

Trees of South-East England. All scanned from 6x6MF taken with Rolleiflex 3.5F TLR, Sorry I know these are supposed to be with Minolta kit - hope no-one minds

[aster]

Very nice artington,

The first one is especially nice for me with the sky as a background.

Yildiz

ps. I think there are a couple of scanner dust on the first one, visible only on the blue of the sky.

[Dr. Harout]

Wow, am I getting relaxed with this thread.

[stevecim]

These six shots are from rain forests in far north Queensland, Taken 1999
, Minolta 600si body agfa 400iso film and either a 70-210 or 30-80 kit lenses

The first three shots are above canopy shots of trees taken over by Cathedral Fig Tree - Ficus virens







In the end the fig kills the host tree
The next three are from ground level

[stevecim]

You can see what the fig tree does to the host tree, it will strangle it, then the tree dies, in a rain forest when a tree dies it dosen't allways hit the ground sometimes it will get held up by a tree next to it. The next 2 shots show what the fig will do when this happens.



Thats my wife standing at the bottom, all 5 foot of her