Traveling to Seattle, a friend and I went to the John Bastyr School for one of their health and herbal festivals. A nature walk through the forest next to the campus intrigued me. It was incredibly informative, discussing how to use plants in the wilderness for medical treatments and health.
The Pacific Northwest forest was dappled with sunlight and the treacherous Devils Club hung over our heads at one point in trail. I worked around the group trying to get a good angle on the plant to capture the details with the strong backlighting.
The Devil’s Club is one that I’ve run into since a child digging around the forests of the Pacific Northwest, and trust me, this is one you do not want to stumble into. Called the Devil’s Club or Walking Stick, it can grow up to 16 feet (5 meters) tall in rainforests and damp environments to which Western Washington is well equipped. Spines are found not only on the stems but the leaves, making it a painful experience to touch in any way, even brush against.
According to our guide, Native Americans used Devil’s Club for medicine to treat diabetes, tumors, chapped lips, and tumors. It can also be used as an analgesic, though it isn’t as strong as traditional aspirin. It can be used in herbal teas and he said that they ate it as food. He didn’t clarify which part they ate, from the red fruits that form in clusters off stems that look like clubs, or from the leaves or root.
For me, this is a plant I’ve endured most of my life, having spent too many hours pulling its little thorn-like spines from by arms and legs and out of my dogs. Still, it is a magnificent examples of the unusual in the world. A plant I think of when I imagine what plant life was like during the dinosaur times.
Every element must help to relate the story. An elk in the woods snorting steam out of its nostrils, bellowing out its lust to the world during rut. Because we know it’s rutting season, we know it is the fall. We know it’s cold because of the billowing cloud of mist from the hot breath hitting the cold air. We know it’s early morning because the light is low in the sky, back lighting the steam, and it’s cold. We have a sense of space and time and understanding about the photograph. Yet it is timeless. It doesn’t matter if it was photographed in 1880 or 1980 or 2080. The image surpasses time. It is its own story.
The wider the lens, the wider the perspective. The longer the lens, the narrower the perspective. This appears to be a pretty basic statement. The more the lens sees, the more goes onto the film. The less the lens sees, the less goes onto the film.
In contrast, the longer the lens, the narrower the view. Switch to a longer lens and suddenly the garbage cans, signs, poles, sky, and parked cars don’t matter. You’ve narrowed the view to your subject, leaving out all the extraneous detail. In other words, you’ve zoomed in on the subject and now what was just a part of the overall scene is the focal point of the photograph.
There are reasons other than magnification to choose a particular lens. One of the most important of these reasons is the change of perspective afforded by using lenses of different focal lengths.
The same effect happens when we photograph flowers closeup with a wide angle lens. The parts of the flower that are closer to the lens appear proportionally bigger in the resulting photograph than the other parts of the flower, or than the other flowers in the picture. A wide angle lens will cause objects closer to the lens to appear proportionally larger in the photograph than the other objects in the picture. This is useful for separating an object from surrounding objects, making the objects appear farther apart. Wide angle lenses seem to expand space.
If we move to a very long telephoto lens, like a 500mm or 600mm lens, we would have to move backward 25 or 30 feet (10 meters) to photograph our friend. The magnification power of this lens is high. A person standing a few feet behind him would appear to be nearly at his side, because the difference of a few feet compared to 30 is small. The large telephoto lens has a perspective that seems to compress space, magnifying distant objects equally.
Photography turns a three dimensional world into a flat one dimensional image. Depending upon the lens perspective, the combination of optics and focal lengths you are using, the aperture, and the distance to your subject and to the background, things in the distance can suddenly become very close when flattened into a photograph. This is usually the cause of the tree growing out of the head, when the tree is meters away in the background but the photograph is compressed so the branches look like they are growing right out of the skull.
We’ve moved either further or closer to our subject and changed the focal length of the lens to change our background, since different focal lengths change the background perspective behind the subject. Across the valley, more than a mile away, rose a mountain with the last of the winter’s patches of snow on its steep sides. A 200mm lens, the shortest lens used in this series of photos, sees a lot of the background. You can see the snow on the far mountain, though it’s not clear if the white blobs are snow, clouds, or cartoon thoughts coming from the marmot.
Brent changed to a 300mm lens and moved farther back from the marmot to keep him about the same size in the frame. The 300mm lens sees a bit narrower perspective than the 200mm, so the white snow is just a blurry bit in the corner. Moving even further back, Brent changed to a 500mm lens with its very narrow perspective and the white snow packs are gone and the marmot is isolated against a green background.
In this example, we set up a dried teasal in the backyard.
There is “something” about a door. Growing up in Washington State, it was a summer and winter ritual of ours to stop along the way, crossing over the mountains to Eastern Washington to visit friends and family, at The Alps. The Alps was owned by a German immigrant family and they offered a rest stop for fun, candy, and toys. Originally a small part of their home, it has now grown into quite the complex, but in those early days, it was a magical place for children.
There were chairs to rest upon and chairs swinging under trees. A small playground and sandbox was for the smaller children. And there, in the middle of it all near the river, stood a framed door. Just a door. Nothing special, just a simple wooden door. It was weathered and slightly bowed from years of exposure to the harsh Cascade Mountain weather, paint peeling slightly, and a handle waiting to be turned.
During our travels, our fascination with doors has continued. Now, Brent is obsessed. We prowl around ancient cities and the derelict remains of new ones, looking for 
Doors come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. In the United States, doors come in glass and wood and combinations of the two, and they are inevitably the same size and grouped as one or two doors side by side. 
Not all buildings are made of wood. Some are made from adobe style baked mud and sand and others from cements and different stone. The doors within their walls can be as sturdy or weak as their supporting construction. They can be painted to blend in or stand out against its surroundings.
Doors can often give you a glimpse at the work or culture that lie beyond, such as huge barricades outside of embassies and government buildings, or the rounded or dome-like arches over doors covered with thousands of tiny tile mosaics in Arab or Muslim communities. 
Doors into homes were kept small with long hallways with more doors between the street and the living space. It’s hard for a warrior covered in armor and weapons to get through these narrow openings. Some doors and gateways even hosted openings above where residents would pour hot water or boiling oil down upon the heads of the attackers trying to break down the doors.
Some doors are famous, especially those found on churches. In 
Doors are also art forms. We have found doors of abandoned buildings used for graphiti and others of wealthier buildings with doors hand tooled and carved, covered with copper, silver, and artwork that speaks of a time when people cared about how their buildings and doors looked. Handcraftsmanship for door building still exists, though it is hard to find. The speedy and cheap methods of manufacturing doors and windows have taken much of the “style” out of doors. So finding an artistic door makes the find even more of a treasure, worthy of photographing and preserving.
Doors tend to avoid the sun. They like to sit under awnings and within doorways, usually where the shadows play. If you want the graphic elements of the shadows across the door, then this can work for you. If you don’t, you may have to return during a time and weather that will allow softer 
As with nature, early morning and late afternoon is the best time for many doors as the light level is warm and low enough in the horizon to duck under porches, eves, and awnings for front lighting. When found as side lighting, it can enhance the texture of the door and its knockers and knobs.
When you encounter a photographic door, remember your first impression. What was it about the door or doorway that first 
If the texture of the door is what fascinates you, the peeling paint, the carvings, metal grating, some closeup aspect, move in close and consider using a 
Door knobs can be very interesting subjects. 
When you have photographed the item that caught your attention on or around the door, move back and study the rest of the door. 
These two photographs were taken in Rhodos, Greece. The texture of the cement, spackle and paint with the unrailed stairs leading to the door offered a wonderful “door landscape” effect. Using a medium length lens, Brent was able to isolate part of the wall leading along with the stairs to the door in a 
There is a timeless quality to doors. Among all these pictures of doors, do you know the season or year of the photograph? Do you know the age or time period of the door? While you might recognize an architectural reference, attributing the door’s construction to a specific historical time period, it could be a reproduction or the original door. With such timeless subjects, photographs of doors are great additions to your