Ann Torrence Photography

Lost Dutchman State Park

2012-05-14T16:18:31Z

Lost Dutchman State Park, Arizona

From when I was traveling Highway 89 every winter. This winter I built a house instead. Got to get back on the road again.

B&WT: Rat Dastard

2012-05-14T16:15:33Z

Rat Dastard

Second installment of Black & White Tuesday. Feel free to join in and put a link to your B&W creation in the comments.

Easier Wall of Water filling

2012-05-14T17:14:03Z

Invert a bucket over your plant before placing the empty Wall of Water

For some folks, it’s a favorite picture on the wall, or unpacking a treasure that makes a place feel like home. This weekend, I planted tomatoes and finally felt settled in. It reminded me of a useful trick I use to keep a Wall of Water tepee from spilling, flopping, crushing and otherwise annoying the $%&# out of you while you are trying to fill it with water. Most of you are probably past frost season, so just file this away for next year. Here in Torrey, the word is not to plant frost-tender plants until the first Saturday in June. When I was at the farm supply store, I even overheard two women saying they would wait until the Saturday after the first full moon in June. (BTW, our farm supply store has some really cool stuff.)

We like our tomatoes A LOT here at the bunkhouse, and if you start them in June, you won’t get much production before the frost gets them in September. The wall of water contraption extends the season by protection the plants in a cylinder of solar-heated water. The frost has to freeze the water before it can get to the plants inside. When I used them in Salt Lake City, I regularly planted out a month before the last frost date.

Remove the bucket after filling the Wall of Water tubes

The only problem with this Wall of Water object is that you are usually setting them up and filling the tubes with water in cold and windy (early spring) weather). And until they are full, they are not very stable. More than one has tipped while being filled, dumping its contents on me, in my shoes, all over my plants. Not fun, especially if the plants get squashed.

I don’t remember when I figured this out, but if you take an empty container (a 5 gallon bucket works well), remove the handle, and set it over the plant, you can drop the Wall of Water around it. The bucket supports the tubes as they fill. No more spillage from floppy, partially filled units, and the bucket protects the plant if you accidentally squirt a hard stream of water as you shift the hose position around.

We didn’t have deer pressure in SLC, so I hadn’t really thought of it before, but maybe they will help protect the toms too. This very morning eight of the marauding beasts ambled through the orchard. They went around the caution tape enclosure where the tomatoes are, and then I chased them off.

Tomato start cuddled in a warm and secure Wall of Water nest

In an instant, I could see my future. Deer fence. Dog. Water cannon (are paint guns legal this close to town?). It was all in the queue anyway with the apple orchard, but the tomatoes will accelerate the program. Will do just about anything for a sweet summer tomato.

Gorilla in the house

2012-05-08T19:28:01Z

Gorilla grafitti, Salt Lake City

Black and White Tuesday: Bassett Hound

2012-05-08T20:38:49Z

Basset Hound at St. Patrick's Day parade, Salt Lake City

Came back from the Moab Photo Symposium with an inclination to make some B&W conversions. Thanks Hucko, another project.

Finding my rusty muse

2012-05-03T01:13:46Z

Another man's junk is my treasure

Bruce Hucko is one of my favorite photogs, as a human being, an artist and a model of someone showing up and doing the work. Bruce defined a project for himself, to regularly photograph along a few hundred feet (637 paces) of Moab’s Mill Creek, near where he lives. The genius in this is that he chose a stretch that was accessible without drama, an entire weekend or a $50 tank of gasoline. The challenge is plain: by the way he defined the project, Bruce inherently eliminated most of the excuses (gear fetishness is another) that we as photographers allow, even cultivate, as creative blocks.

Maybe it’s a fault, but I am by nature a project-oriented photographer. You would think the Highway 89 project would have cured me of it. And I am really susceptible to envisioning complex and costly projects. I have three or four projects in various states of progress right now. All depend on things outside my control: other people’s schedules, the kindness of strangers I haven’t met yet, even the weather.

Ever since I heard Bruce talk about his project at the Moab Photo Symposium, I have been looking for my own metaphoric stretch of riverbank, something or someplace so accessible that even accounting for laziness, I will return to it often. I may have found it. It’s a rusty pile of junk. I adore rust and junk. And like my missing car keys, it was right under my nose.

Now this pile of junk has been sitting on the other side of the fence for as long as we have owned our parcel. Photog friends who visit all ask me longingly if the most prominent feature, a junked GMC truch, is mine. But I, a bred-in-the-bone respecter of private property boundaries, had not explored my neighbor’s scrap heap until I took over irrigation duties this year.

It turns out that the ditch we use has an easement across the adjacent parcel. And the tree that fell down took out a dang convenient bit of our shared fence. Now I have a reason to visit the junk pile at least every 5 1/2 days when it is our turn for water.

Honestly, there is no excuse not to go every day. It’s only 12 apple trees away from my front porch, and on the way to the post office and the general store, with a bakery turning out doughnuts every morning! I can bribe my inner artist with a maple bar most any day. Minor White said, “One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.” What a great way to start, asking myself what else I can see today.

Why I didn’t see it sooner, I do not know. Rusty relics fits a theme that runs through all of my work–what do we as individuals and as communities decide to keep, reinvent, or discard? Until the junkman cometh, I have a muse. Who knows where it will lead. Probably to more junk, that will be just fine.

No, the real crime is waiting for inspiration and not shooting. To paraphrase some advice from other quarters, if you are thinking about shooting some photos, then shoot some photos and think about them later.

Where can you find your 637 paces of riverbank?

Be Careful

2012-04-30T16:34:09Z

Be careful, Ogden, Utah

Problem to feature: hugelkultur beds

2012-04-30T16:52:06Z

Free timber for the hugelkultur bed

“Turning problems into features” is an attitude we try to cultivate here at the ranch. When our builder trenched across the pasture to lay the water line, naturally the grasses got all tumbled with the subsoil. Now the grasses and roots are breaking down, and one day as I walked across the field, the trench sank underneath my footsteps. Not a serious problem, but somewhat dangerous if you aren’t paying attention.

In the meantime, I had scheduled a crisis by buying 30 asparagus roots before digging the holes to plant them in. And we don’t really want to do much digging here. Besides the fact that digging is always hard work, we have a noxious weed problem. The pasture, like too much of the intermountain west, is infested with bindweed, which sprouts new vines, like a maniacal plant version of the Hydra monster, from every bit of cut roots. And turning the soil promotes its seeds to sprout, seeds which might have lain dormant for 50 years! Digging today means non-stop bindweed cultivation tomorrow and for years to come.

The asparagus roots have been lingering in a plastic bucket for about 10 days, apparently waiting for the holes to dig themselves, while I tried to decided where to put them. R came home from his university workweek ready to do something about the trench. We don’t need people falling into it (there’s a lot of foot traffic on our property because of various irrigation easements, but that’s a different story). But we have only one source of free fill dirt, the topsoil from under our house, which our builder kindly saved for us. We weren’t too thrilled to be wasting topsoil to fill a trench.

Stomping the sawdust and leaves into the larger branches of the hugelkultur bed

And so a feature is born: we built our first hugelkultur bed this weekend. I had read last year about this traditional German technique of making raised beds from the timber left over from tree-cutting. The concept is to replicate soil conditions on the forest floor. The decaying wood and leaves, munched on by natural bacteria, fungi, and worms, create a spongy, carbon sequestering, water-thrifty planting bed. The best part is that you can plant in it right away, but the bed can last decades without retilling.

We started filling the trench with deadfall from our own cottonwood windbreak. The trench swallowed everything in easy reach. Then we remembered that over the winter, a poplar had fallen across our canal just on the other side of our property line. The wood was rotten and useless for firewood. They just limbed it to get it off the canal and our fence and left a big mess of branches, bark, and sawdust. Problem to feature, right? Here were loads of debris that was in our neighbor’s way to her ditch. We cleaned out a path as we hauled off loads of free hugelkultur fill. Even so, we only collected enough to complete about 20′ of bed yesterday.

Watering and final mulching the hugelkultur bed

Building one of these things is mostly improvisation–use what you have. One thing we have is hay. I can’t tell you how many locals have casually asked me what I was doing with my hay, since we don’t have livestock, ready to make an offer to take it off my hands. Some folks around here probably think I’m a fool for “wasting” it, but it makes wonderful mulch that I don’t have to import. And I have other plans for a big project that will use up a lot of hay later this summer. Yesterday we spread just a couple of bales on top of the wood debris, then trundled over wheelbarrow load after load of topsoil to cover the heap. After planting the asparagus, we plastered down a bit more hay as a final mulch. We have about 30′ more of woody material in the trench, ready to top with hay and soil. We need to finish that over the next month, before the next self-induced planting emergency is scheduled.

Hugelkultur bed planted and mulched

Some hugelkultur beds are 6′ high and supposedly can hold enough water from spring rains to last all growing season. We didn’t have the materials or inclination to go that large. Knowing that this bed will collapse some as the wood decomposes, we aimed for a bed that will end up around a foot above grade. Nothing too high in case we have to cut through it to move irrigation water around, but high enough to hold a good amount of moisture for a happy bed of asparagus. Problems solved, trench now a berm, expensive plants out of the holding bucket, hugelkultur experiment underway, and platters of asparagus in three years.

Almost every winter, somewhere in Torrey a tree falls across the canal. If this project works, the next time a tree comes down, I will be loading up my trailer with someone else’s problem and stockpiling it to make another hugelkultur bed. I have never had too much asparagus.

Plan to crop

2012-04-23T21:46:59Z

4x6, 5x7 and 8x10 crop ratios overlaid on the same image.

As much as I try to minimize it, I can’t teach the Nuts & Bolts of Digital Photography class without a little math cropping up. Some adult learners just don’t want to revisit the painful experiences of school-age math tests. But if you refresh your mind on the concept of ratios, it’s easy to avoid a common pitfall where an image is too constrained to crop to fit a standard frame. Or an unhappy surprise when your photo lab’s computer crops your enlargement to fit the paper ratio. Yep, it’s a just computer and the ‘puter doesn’t know that it just chopped off Aunt Martha head.

First, know your sensor size ratio. It’s not that you have 12 kabillion gigapixels, it’s the ratio of the length and width of the rectangle array that counts. Most DSLR pixel arrays are organized in a rectangle that is proportioned like an old 35mm slide: two-thirds as many pixels on the short side as the long, or a 2×3 rectangle*. Multiple each side’s ratio by two and a 2×3 rectangle makes a uncropped 4×6 print, straight out of the camera. But if you multiple by four, you get an 8×12 print. These days we are starting to see some picture frames and print services that make 8×12″ prints, but an 8×10″ frame is a lot easier to find.

The colored boxes in the image of Ray’s Boathouse represent the cropped sizes of the image if I keep the full width of the image the same and cropped to a 4×6 (yellow), 5×7 (lime green) or 8×10 (aqua) size.

Limited options for cropping in this image

Hard-won experience when laying out my Highway 89 book taught me to consider the future uses of an image. Today I would compose this picture of an antler seller in Jackson so that I had more cropping options. As it was, the only proportion that eliminated distractions, but kept the essentials of MY story (from skull to arch) is the one shown here. It’s even narrower than a 4×6, and you can see from the aqua lines what a disaster result with an 8×10 crop. The result was that the no-compromises crop dictated the entire spread layout and forced design decisions that weren’t 100% consistent with my other pages. You might not notice it unless I pointed it out, but it was an unnecessary constraint. Keep the options open.

So back to ratios. An 8×10 crop is equal to a 4×5 or 2×2.5 proportion or ratio. To go from a 4×6 to a 4×5, you need to throw away 1/6th of the image on the long side. But what if you filled the image from edge to edge along the longer edge with essential visual information (like a skull and an arch)? Then you don’t have 1/6th of the image length to crop away. That limits your options.

Find an element in the viewfinder about 1/6th away from either short edge to use as a potential crop indicator.

Now there’s a lot to be thinking about in the heat of battle, and your first concern is to get the shot. But if you are previsualizing (thinking about future uses–I want this photo of my kid in my rogue’s gallery in at least a 5×7 frame), you can make it easier on yourself if you find a mental guide in your viewfinder that’s about 1/6th of the way to the left or right of a short frame edge. Maybe you can use one of the focus points as a measuring stick, or one of the data elements at the bottom of the viewfinder. In this example of a generic viewfinder, you could use the indicator of the number of remaining frames a reference point. If you keep all the essential image the the left of the imaginary line, you know you can crop to an 8×10 size later. That’s not to say that the other 1/6th of the frame can be ignored. You might want to use the image at other proportions, like 5×7, or uncropped at all. Your goal for this area is interesting but croppable, if you want an image that works at several sizes.

“Fill the frame” is still good advice-always in the shorter dimension. But think about what you want to do with the picture before you accidentally commit yourself to the 2×3 rectangle. Try to shoot some variations in composition that allow for a squatter crop size, and it just might save the design day.

* Some point and shoot cameras use a 3×4 proportion sensor. If you aren’t sure, you can look it up in your manual, or calculate it yourself. Divide the width of the sensor pixel count by the length: 3000 pixels wide divided by 4000 pixels long is 3×4 or .75. The same calculation for a 2×3 ratio sensor would have a result of about .66.

Graffiti guardian

2012-04-23T16:44:32Z

Graffiti art, Salt Lake City