Why sketch when you can take a camera?
Went hiking last weekend with some friends in the lovely Brice Creek area of Oregon. Shady canyon dominated by towering trees, really lovely scenery. We all stopped on the trail to admire a gorgeous specimen of Indian pipe (aka ghost plant) growing precariously along the slope. The ghostly-white flowering stalks were really stunning. Dang, let's take a picture of that!
Well, deeply shaded canyons with massive stands of hemlock and Douglas fir trees overhead are dark. Though the human eye adjusts and it seems perfectly easy to see, our cameras where having a hard time of it.
Hmm...
Well, that's a little better but still not great...
Curse you, auto-focus!
The four of us spent rather a lot of time fussing over this plant, and pooled our tripods and spare hands and tried all sorts of ingenious approaches to getting a photo. What we finally came up with was tripod, flash, and a big rock held behind the plant to block out the background.
All this creative problem-solving effort was great fun, and the end photo is...bizarre, but clear enough for reference I suppose. Midway through the camera kerfuffle, though, I realized that I was, of course, carrying my sketchbook.
I try not to think of cameras and sketchbooks as rivals in the image-producing game, but it sure took less time to get an approximation of what the adorable little ghost plant looked like by way of the sketchbook than with the camera in this circumstance!
Well, deeply shaded canyons with massive stands of hemlock and Douglas fir trees overhead are dark. Though the human eye adjusts and it seems perfectly easy to see, our cameras where having a hard time of it.
Hmm...
Well, that's a little better but still not great...
Curse you, auto-focus!
The four of us spent rather a lot of time fussing over this plant, and pooled our tripods and spare hands and tried all sorts of ingenious approaches to getting a photo. What we finally came up with was tripod, flash, and a big rock held behind the plant to block out the background.
All this creative problem-solving effort was great fun, and the end photo is...bizarre, but clear enough for reference I suppose. Midway through the camera kerfuffle, though, I realized that I was, of course, carrying my sketchbook.
I try not to think of cameras and sketchbooks as rivals in the image-producing game, but it sure took less time to get an approximation of what the adorable little ghost plant looked like by way of the sketchbook than with the camera in this circumstance!