Category Archives: Photography

Creative typo

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My brother and I spent part of  yesterday at Fort Harrison State Park.  A couple who were out for a walk stopped and asked what I was photographing.  I replied ‘Anything that will stand still long enough’ which is true enough that it didn’t seem to require any further explanation.   _MG_8452

What I was really doing would have required a bit more conversation but would probably have been worth the time to say it.  I was out wondering.  Not wandering, but wondering.

About a year ago I was emailing back and forth with a friend.  I was intrigued by a photograph she had done and asked how she got it.  She was busy doing other things and wasn’t paying attention to what she was typing and she wrote that she was ‘wondering’ around and saw the image.  That word ‘wondering’ captures it for me.  It was a typo but when I pointed it out to her and how great a choice of words it was, she agreed and now she goes wondering too.  Or maybe we’ve been wondering all along and didn’t know it.

Wondering.  Sometimes that leads to seeing something we might not have noticed before and sometimes it means asking ‘I wonder what will happen if I move the camera during the exposure?’ or try some other creative technique.  That is what I was doing yesterday beside Fall Creek.  Most of the images weren’t very interesting but some were, at least to me._MG_8455

It’s time to go out again.  I wonder what I’ll see?

Halloween gift

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We have iris growing next to the house and we hadn’t gotten around to cutting them back.  Yesterday my wife noticed one with buds.  It was going down into the 30s last night so she cut it and brought it inside.Iris_8305_4

It bloomed during the night and I photographed it in late afternoon sun today.

This, my wife tells me, is a ‘rebloomer.’  It blooms early and then it blooms late.  The squirrels, chipmunks, trees of various persuasion, grass, weeds, most kinds of flowers, are all settling down to winter – gathering food, shedding leaves, bringing sap back to the roots and in general going to sleep.  But this flower is blooming.  That’s extravagantly beautiful isn’t it?

Some believe that the origins of Zen Buddhism lie in what has come to be known as ‘the flower sermon.’  The Buddha held up a white flower before his disciples and said nothing.  The ‘suchness’ of the flower, the way it was at that moment, was the point, saying anything about it would have added nothing.  We need say nothing more about this iris.

This is turning into a favorite place

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My friend Becky and I went to Fort Harrison State Park the other day to see what there was to see and photograph.trees_7880_2

I find that sometimes it’s good to go out with someone else; each of us sees things the other doesn’t.  This doesn’t mean, though, that we end up shooting the same scenes.  Sure, there are some shots that are very similar to one another but the majority aren’t.  We could be standing side by side and the shots would still be very different.teasel_7765

The conversation was good and the shooting opportunities were plentiful.  It is always a source of wonder to me that what I bring back from one of these jaunts is nothing like what I would have anticipated getting.  So I usually just don’t try to anticipate.  Great encouragement for living in the moment.trees_7635_3

It is in those moments in the present that the connection is felt.  After a while the dialog with Becky drops off to brief exchanges as we walk from one place to another and the dialog with the scene picks up.  I have no idea what the content of that dialog is, it obviously isn’t words.  But it is there and it is in the connection.  I’m coming to think that these felt connections are traces and hints of our spiritual identity making contact with the world.  It is something to celebrate.backlight_7800_2

Just a good day to shoot

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Some days are a gift.  It was nicely cloudy this morning when I had the dogs at the bark park.  In between throwing tennis balls for Prince and Tuck I was able to get in a few shots.BP_7436

The clouds largely disappeared and later in the morning I was on the Fall Creek Trail at Fort Harrison State Park.  It’s hard to beat an autumn day, a good day for smelling the leaves and kicking through them.  Inside every six year old boy there is a six year old boy.  Inside every 70 year old man, there is a six year old boy. We were having a warm spell and a lot of people were enjoying it.

It being toward the middle of the day, lighting was more harsh than it was in the morning but shooting high dynamic range eased that.  The camera was on the tripod and shots were bracketed plus and minus two stops.  I later combined the resulting three images in Photomatix Pro and was quite pleased with the result.  There are times when I want some of what has come to be called the ‘HDR effect’, an effect that can push colors to the cartoonish side while the range of illumination is taken from, say, 13 stops down to eight or nine stops.  That cartoonish effect can be effective in some situations but not here.  All I wanted to do was compress the range of captured light into the range that can be displayed and keep the colors pretty much as they were.   Here is the result:Fall_Creek_7523_4_5Enhancer

One effect of compressing a wide dynamic range into a narrower dynamic range is that tonal transitions become more smooth and gradual.  Compare the above with this image, the one the camera recommended and was included as part of the HDR work:

Fall_Creek_7523

This is very nice too but the brightness on the right side of the tree to the right of the path suggests why it isn’t a good idea to shoot at this time of day if it can be avoided.  All in all, a good result with new technology and better yet, a good day to be outside.

I have/had trouble praying

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From the time I was small, I’ve had a problem with prayer.  As long as I stick to standard prayers – the Lord’s Prayer and some other memorized prayers- I am alright but as soon as I go off into prayers for specific people or situations I get stuck and my mind wanders.  But that isn’t quite true, my mind also wanders during the Lord’s Prayer, any prayer or any time for that matter.rock_5343_2s

I got into a conversation about this with three of my friends, all of them solid church goers and dedicated contributors to the community.  All four of us admitted to problems with prayer.  All of us are men and one of us is a minister.   Now that I think about it we never did pursue that problem very far, perhaps none of us knew quite what to do.

Some weeks later and in a different context the minister friend recommended Barbara Brown Taylor’s ‘An Altar in the World:  A Geography of Faith.’  Ms. Taylor had been an Episcopal priest for several years before going into writing and teaching full time.  She had been named by Baylor University as one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English speaking world.  I had been prepared to take her seriously anyway but that pushed her book to the top of my reading list.  The deeper I got into the book the more interesting it got.  And then there was this:

‘I would rather show someone my checkbook stubs than talk about my prayer life.  I would rather confess that I am a rotten godmother, that I struggle with my weight, that I fear I am overly fond of Bombay Sapphire gin martinis than confess I am a prayer-weakling.  To say I love God but I do not pray much is like saying I love life but I do not breathe much.’  (p 176)

Now she really had my attention.  And to cap it off a few pages later she took her cue from Brother David Steindl-Rast, author of ‘Gratefulness, The Heart Of Prayer’, in suggesting that

‘Prayer…is waking up to the presence of God no matter where I am or what I am doing.’  (p 178)

Alright!  Prayer isn’t just a recitation of fixed passages or verbal requests for God’s attention.  I knew that all along but for a truly outstanding minister to admit she has trouble praying, as I suspect many of us do, was quite a revelation.  But she went further than our little group of four men had gone by pointing out that just being aware of the presence of God no matter what we are doing is a form of prayer.  And_there_was_light_7289_7289_2

If we are wiping a child’s nose, running a backhoe, mowing the lawn, watching a ball game, helping out in a soup kitchen, playing with the dog, any of these activities – and are aware of the presence of God, we are praying.  I think that would include the activity of photography.

Meanwhile, back at the walnut plantation

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I wrote a couple of days ago about a walk through the walnut plantation at the Fort Harrison State Park and how I ended up shooting little things instead of big things such as walnut trees.  I have a bias toward little things but in my defense there is a lot of distracting underbrush around the walnut trees, as beautiful as they themselves are.

I went back today and much as I would like to say that I was determined to shoot big things and big things only, I just went to shoot.  It occurred to me to try a technique I learned reading William Neill’s ‘Impressions of Light’ which is available as an ebook at his website.  I regularly go back to this book for inspiration.walnut_plantation_7192

The technique is simple.  Slow the shutter speed and move the camera while the shutter is open.  I had done this before with images of water (I’ll cover that in a later post).  I put a four stop neutral density filter and a polarizer on the lens and shot at f/11 and  ISO 100.  This slowed the shutter down to 1/13th to 1/6th of a second for various exposures.walnut_plantation_7140

The camera was on the tripod and I simply moved it up and down more or less vertically to emphasize the trunks of the trees.  The brush is still present but instead of being distracting, it now it adds a bit of color.walnut_plantation_7207

Camera motion can be an artistic tool.  I can’t say that I know how an image is going to turn out as I am setting up the shot; I can’t previsualize with any accuracy what it is going to look like.  The ‘take’ rate, the percentage of images that turn out well, is small but I do like what the technique can do.  And the bonus is that parts of the image that are potential distractions, such as underbrush, can, with some luck, turn into desirable features of the image.

In looking at these images, I get the sense that we are seeing something about the scene that we wouldn’t see any other way.  Somehow, to use Wordsworth’s phrase, we are seeing into the life of things.  We are seeing something for which there is no immediate verbal label, something that for a short while at least, we can treat as new.  That is something we expect of art and something we hope for as spiritual seekers.

Shooting little things

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Fort Harrison State Park is nearby on the northeast side of Indianapolis and I stop by once in awhile to do some shooting.  A couple of friends had been there recently and got some magnificent shots in a stand of walnut trees, a stand large enough to be called a plantation.  I went over this morning to see if I could do as well.

All I found was row after row of trees with a lot of brush growing in between.   I got a few uninspired shots and then started looking at other possibilities.  I’ve noticed that, given a choice, I shoot small things rather than large ones.  My defense is that there are a lot more small things than there are large things and if you are in the woods the range of lighting on small things is a lot broader than it is for large things such as trees.  That’s my argument and I’m sticking with it.

There were back-lit possibilities all over the place.  Here is one:WP_6969

That, by the way, is the bark of a walnut tree.  Two walnut trees in fact.

A problem with shooting small things, and large things for that matter, is the background.  It can be pretty difficult to get the ‘right’ angle for the subject while avoiding a distracting background.   The image above is OK in that regard – the background doesn’t overwhelm the subject.

But here is the problem in spades. Autumn_leaves_7081_pre

There are three leaves that attracted my attention but they are lost against the background.  This has happened so often that some time ago I took up removing the background altogether for some subjects.  Autumn_leaves_7081

Exactly the same image as above but without the background.  Georgia O’Keefe made the comment

Nobody sees a flower – really – it is so small it takes time – we haven’t time – and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.  I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

I don’t do large images, I just remove the distracting part and leave the image relatively small.  Removing the background certainly calls attention to the subject.  Works for me.  Some day I really will make images of large subjects.  Just not today.

Field trip to Madison, Indiana

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The Photo Venture Camera Club, the club I belong to in Indianapolis, goes on field trips nine or ten times a year.  Yesterday ten of us went to Madison, IN, a picturesque town on the Ohio River, about two hours from Indianapolis.  We couldn’t have asked for better weather on this crisp fall day.madison_6545_3_4_tonemapped

The weather had been rainy all week but Saturday morning was clear with some fleecy clouds.

I haven’t been much for photographing buildings but this trip was to an area known for its architecture.  I’ m not sure that a number of images I got of buildings and details of buildings were what the Chamber of Commerce had in mind but I would go back for more shots like this:madison_6682

I have images of beautiful homes from this trip but none of them come close to competing with this window and clapboard wall that have seen better days.

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That black space at the top of the garage was perhaps once a window.  Its gothic shape, coupled with the cross-like appearance of the structure on top (an old antenna?) lend it the appearance of a church.

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There are a lot of alleys in Madison too.

And then there was the Tea Room:madison_6810_12_photolift

What is it about these old buildings, details and alleys that makes them so interesting?  One answer won’t hold for all of them but a couple of ideas pop to the surface for me as I look at them.  One is they all have texture, they have a definite tactile sense to them.  They seem to want to be touched.   Their histories seem to be told in their roughness in ways that an image doesn’t quite convey.

This leads into another part of the attraction of these subjects.  They all have stories that we can only guess at.  I have a friend who spends a lot of time photographing an abandoned farm, the location of which she protects about as well as some people protect the location of a good fishing hole.  She is thinking of doing a photo book about it in which she shows the images and tells her own version of what life on that farm might have been like.

I don’t know the stories here but I do know that I plan to look more closely for old abandoned buildings.  They speak to us in ways new buildings, living buildings if you will, don’t.

Why Spirit and Seeing?

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The name of this blog is ‘Spirit and Seeing.’  Why isn’t it called ‘Spirit and Photography?’  That’s what it’s really about isn’t it?  The surface reason for not calling it ‘Spirit and Photography’ is that name seemed too long  for people to type in; it’s just a bit more cumbersome than I would like the title to be.  The deeper reason is that, for me at least, seeing is at least 75% of what goes into successful photography.  A good camera is nice, a good lens is always welcome, technique – at least as far as operating the camera is concerned – is also good.  But the selection of what appears in the viewfinder and the way it is composed there is even more important.

Spring impression

Spring impression

A modern digital camera – I’m using a Canon 40D – automates a lot of what used to trip me up.  Autofocus is a boon, image stabilization is great and automatic metering is good too.  Having a histogram adds a critical dimension to image making.  All of that taken care of automatically to one extent or another means that the bulk of the job shifts even more over to image selection and composition, or seeing.

As complex as it is, the English language often compresses multiple meanings into a single word.  Take for example the word ‘seeing.’  If I’m absent-mindedly walking along and managing to avoid running into trees, dogs, people and parked motorcycles, am I ‘seeing’ in the same sense as when I’m composing a picture that people will find interesting?  The answer, obviously, is no.

One of the benefits of a strong interest in photography is that it helps us see more of the world.  Not more square inches of the world, but more per square inch.  When we first start out with a camera and have gotten to the point that we don’t have to think too much about the camera settings, it often happens that we see more and more interesting things when we have the camera in our hands than when we don’t.  With more practice, that difference decreases and we see more ‘photographically’ even when we don’t have a camera with us.

I take our two dogs for a walk around the block every morning at around 5:45.  We’ve been doing this for years.  It is usually dark and there isn’t much that changes from one day to the next but thinking photographically helps me see things I hadn’t noticed before.  The photo below was taken one winter morning.  I had been by that tree hundreds of times but perhaps because of the frost on the ground and who knows what else, it was different.  When we got back home I picked up the camera and tripod and went back to see if it was what I thought it was.

Do you really want to know what is behind that tree?

Do you really want to know what is behind that tree?

The light being obscured behind the tree makes a huge difference.  Moving a few inches to the left or right turns the image into nothing very interesting.  I’ve looked at this tree many times since and the shot just isn’t there for me now.  Maybe when there is frost on the ground, then again, maybe never again.

So yes, this blog is about photography but then photography is largely about seeing.  I’m happy with the title ‘Spirit and Seeing.’

The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust

A definition of spirituality

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In the last post I asked the question whether my experience of photographing two Canada geese coming together on a spring morning could be described as ‘spiritual.’  People use the term spiritual in many different ways so before going much further it would be useful to have a working definition of the term.

Canada geese at dawn

Canada geese at dawn

What the word “spiritual” means for you is unlikely to be exactly the same as what it means for me for a very good reason – we are different people.  Start with this definition of spiritual identity:

‘the pattern of beliefs, attitudes and feelings about the Sacred and the world – a pattern that defines who you are at the profoundest level.’ (From Skylight Paths, Who Is My God?: An Innovative Guide to Finding Your Spiritual Identity, Skylight Paths Publishing; March 2004, p5)

Beliefs, attitudes, feelings about the Sacred – a defining pattern.

This definition looks very much like the definition the American Psychological Association gives for personality:

‘the unique psychological qualities of an individual that influence a variety of characteristic behavior patterns (both overt and covert) across different situations and over time.” (From http://www.psychologymatters.org/glossary.html#p)

The APA definition explicitly ties personality to behavior, the definition of spiritual identity implies behavior.

Some could go on for years making finer and finer distinctions between these two definitions but at a practical level they strongly overlap. Work the term “Sacred” into the APA definition and the definitions are indistinguishable in a practical sense. Our spiritual identity and personality, to the extent they are even different from one another, are entwined and an attempt to pull them apart would do damage to both. Our personalities are all different, our spiritual identities are also different. An attempt to offer a more precise definition for spirituality that works for everyone is not a fruitful exercise because the form spirituality takes depends so heavily on the individual.

Our definition describes spiritual identity.  I am going to treat spirituality as the way that identity manifests itself.  Here is where things get a bit complicated because spirituality is just one of the factors contributing to the choice of what we photograph and how we photograph it.  A shooting agenda (I’ve got to get a picture of sunlight dappling the leaves in fall color), responding to the influence of other photographers  (I’d like to do one like Freeman Patterson does it), other things being on our mind (my 401K is going down the tubes) and other factors contribute as well.  We will have more to say about this in future posts.

This is all wonderful stuff but what does it mean for us as photographers?

Here are some implications:

  • If you and I go out to shoot within the same two acre plot, we will come back with different images.  We are different people, we see the world a bit differently and our photographs are different.
  • Whatever we do, whether it is eating breakfast or looking for that next great photographic inspiration, will involve our spiritual identity to one extent or another.  After all, it is part of who we are.
  • We often aren’t even aware of the spiritual component in our everyday lives, let alone in our photography.  It may be crowded out by agendas and other competing factors or we might not even be aware of a genuine spiritual impulse.  By tying spiritual identity to the Sacred and not God, the door is open for people who aren’t religious or perhaps don’t believe there is a god to be included in this discussion.  Just about everyone holds something sacred and that may be the touchstone for those peoples’ spiritual life.  In a later post we will talk about ‘The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality’ by Andre Comte-Sponville.  Comte-Sponville provides a fresh understanding about how atheism, for some people at least, can be compatible with a spiritual life.

    Reflection, Fall Creek Gorge, Indiana

    Reflection, Fall Creek Gorge, Indiana

I don’t know that many will agree with my definitions of spiritual identity and spirituality, I offer them here as a place to begin and as a reference point for what, at least, I believe.