What Gum is that?

The gruff widower Holland has two possessions he cherishes above all others: his sprawling property of eucalyptus trees and his ravishingly beautiful daughter, Ellen.

When Ellen turns nineteen Holland makes an announcement: she may marry only the man who can correctly name the species of each of the hundreds of gum trees on his property.

Ellen is uninterested in the many suitors who arrive from around the world, until one afternoon she chances on a strange, handsome young man resting under a Coolibah tree….

 

… The plot of Eucalyptus a novel by Murray Bail

I thought I needed to brush up on my identification of the local eucalypts (gum trees to us aussies) as a preliminary to the Jell’s Park Photowalk, and it a lot harder than you might think.

 

 

This vertarama (a vertical panorama) is built from 5 photos using Autostitch, from straight ahead to almost vertical over head, which leads to the curved expansion at the top. I think this is a Yarra River Gum, which only grows in central/southern Victoria, and is recognized  as "in a highly precarious position and one of the most threatened of the eucalypt species". Pryor (1981). I should have included a person to show the size of this tree (probably over 30m). The pines behind it  would normally be considered tall. The CSIRO is building a guide called EUCLID , that supposedly is Identifying eucalypts made easy, I could not find it online but they are nearing 900 species now. And it isn’t so simple, the classification depends on type or bark, leaf shape, flowering, seed shape and density, branching habit and season of observation, just to mention some of parameters. The only true way to identify the Yarra River Gum, according to Dr Tree from Otway Greening, “If you're really keen to identify a yarra gum, grab some leaves and boil them in water for two minutes. If it is a yarra, a volatile oil called benzaldehyde will be given off by the process. And according to Simmons (1986) it smells of a cross between bitter almonds and fish oil!” Needless to say I haven’t done that.

Artinspired :: from Photo into Mark Making

I am very inspired by the works of Fred Williams, at the obvious level they are very abstract, yet at the same time they capture both the colours and textures of the Australian Bush. more particularly the bush around here. That's not surprising as Fred used to regularly spend one a day a week in the bush painting and sketching what he saw. Today I am beginning with a “non-bending marco” taken of the truck of a gum tree in jells park. A couple of limbs have “dropped’ and left large gashes where the gum is leaking out. Parts of the bare truck can be seen as well as the corky rough bark normally around the base of the tree. Its a pretty ordinary subject to photograph.

Fred’s work often has two levels a rich colour ground, and then an almost calligraphic decoration of texture, squiggles and lines that are a kind of shorthand to describe the terrain, the trees and other aspects of the landscape. So I have decided to create two separate dreamcope images. One that captures the colours in a rough fashion. I tried a few filets including a couple of my own and ended up using two stacked filters, one after the other. First a watercolour then a sketch filter. There are not conventional parametric filters that adjust a given slider like exposure of saturation. The deep dream process takes the image and builds a neural network like matrix and iterate through looking for parts of the image that have the same characteristics as the filer. In this case I was looking to enhance the colours, and colour harmony (ie not just pumping up vibrance of saturations) Then I created a separate layer that focuses on the lines and textures, for this I used the money filter, which I have used before and it definitely searches out the strong design elements, shapes and textures.

 

The final step is to combine them, and I must admit I liked the way you could still see the three layers, fully exposed in different parts of the image on my previous art inspired piece, the autumn leaves on the ground. In this case I used OnOne 10 layers again but used soft light blend mode for all layers, to let each layer bleed through but I also used simple gradational filter to start with the original photo at the top that fades into the strong line work and with the background coming through and dominating the bottom.

Reality transforms to abstract.

More Secret Lives of Trees

After a very overcast day, the sun came out for a very shot period before sunset. This blue gum look like a perfect glamour shot for my secret life of trees project.

Happy River Gum

River Gum on the edge of Dandenong Creek enjoying the regular rainfull this year.