In the Moment:
Michael Frye's Landscape Photography Blog

Spring Wildflower Resources

Wildflowers in Carrizo Plain National Monument, April 2006
Wildflowers in Carrizo Plain National Monument, April 2006

 

This could be a great wildflower year in some parts of California, so although I’m on vacation this week I thought I’d pass along some resources, places you can go to find out where the flowers are blooming.

First there’s this map from NOAA depicting rainfall in the western U.S. since September. Note that Death Valley and other areas of the Mojave Desert have received over 150 percent of normal rainfall, so we can expect good flower displays in those areas. Other traditional wildflower hotspots like Anza-Borrego, Antelope Valley, and the Carrizo Plain have also received above-average precipitation.

Carol Leigh has created two great resources for flower photographers: Carol Leigh’s California Wildflower Hotsheet, and the CalPhoto group on Yahoo. Both feature reader reports of wildflowers from around the state. I’ve been a Calphoto member for a long time and it’s a great place to find information about photographing many California subjects, not just wildflowers.

DesertUSA is another valuable site, with wildflower reports for Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas as well as California. Also check out the Theodore Payne Foundation’s Wildflower Hotline.

These links just scratch the surface of what’s available, so if you know of other good sources please feel free to post them in the comments.

Of course I’ll keep you up to date on what’s happening around the Yosemite area in this blog. Right now it’s hard to say what kind of wildflower year it will be in the Merced River Canyon west of Yosemite. We’ve had above-average precipitation, but we need a stretch of warm, clear weather to get the bloom rolling.

As a reminder, I won’t be posting a critique this week, so I’ll post the next critique on March 16th or 17th. See you then!

 

Weekly Photo Critique: "Odgen Lake II" by Joe Hablas

"Ogden Lake II" by Joe Hablas
“Ogden Lake II” by Joe Hablas

This week’s photograph, by Lou Hablas, is from O’Leno State Park in Florida. Did you know they had fall color like that in Florida? I sure didn’t.

Lou said that he made this photograph on an overcast and sometimes rainy day while on a hike with his family. That weather provided perfect conditions for this subject. I mentioned last week how soft light enhances colors and color contrasts, but it has another benefit: simplification. Forests have random, chaotic configurations of branches, trunks, and leaves. Sunlight filtering through the trees creates splotchy patterns of light and dark, further adding to the visual confusion. Soft, even light helps simplify such scenes.

But forests are still difficult to photograph, even on an overcast day, because it’s hard to create visual order out of so much chaos. I think Joe did a pretty good job of finding a coherent design; we grasp the main ideas easily, and it doesn’t seem too confusing. The main focal point is the red maple on the right side, and its Y shape echoes the lines of the trunks on the left edge of the frame, giving this image structure and repetition.

(more…)

The One That Got Away

Yosemite Association’s web cam, Saturday, 5:48 p.m. 

As I was worked in my office in Mariposa Saturday afternoon I kept an eye on the weather outside, as well as the satellite and radar images on the web, just in case the storm might clear before sunset. It looked like there was a chance, but only a small chance. I had a lot of work to do. I decided to stay home rather than make the two-hour round trip to Yosemite Valley.

Just before sunset I noticed a sliver of clear sky to the west, then sun hitting some trees on a nearby ridge. I looked at the Yosemite Association’s web cam and saw the image you see above. Ouch! Oh well, I guess you can’t always be in the right place at the right time. The moral of the story is that I should always take the chance, even if the odds are low, because it’s precisely those situations when truly spectacular light can occur. I hope some of you were there and captured some great images!

To console myself, my wife Claudia and I drove down to Merced yesterday afternoon to check out the orchards. We found numerous trees in bloom, mostly almonds I think, including this grove where the recent rain had knocked off many petals, making it look like snow had fallen. What appears to be dry ground between the rows of trees is actually long pools of water two to six inches deep covered in blossoms.