Category Archives: Photography

Two graduations

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We went to the Butler University graduation this morning, a young friend of ours was making the transition to a different life, a life as a free standing adult.  The graduation took place in the Hinkle Field House, home of the Butler Bulldogs basketball team that played in the final game of the 2010 NCAA tournament against Duke.  Butler came in second while Duke finished next to last in that game.

This is a large field house and the graduation was well attended.  We got there early because we rode with our friend’s parents (also friends);  his mother, a member of the staff at Butler, would be giving him his diploma so she needed to be there early.

Nearly 900 graduated today.

It was an excellent graduation, well organized and the speakers were the best I’ve heard in a long time.  One of the best quotes of the day said that the purpose of a college education is to move us from cocky ignorance to thoughtful uncertainty.  I think I’ve gotten past the cocky ignorance part, I’m just not sure how thoughtful my uncertainty is.  The big moment came and Keith received his diploma from his mom.  Along with a hug.

As the ceremony unfolded, I was thinking of another graduation, this one much smaller in size and although I wasn’t graduating that day, enduringly meaningful over the intervening 40 years.  I was teaching psychology at Bowdoin College in Maine, an excellent liberal arts college.  The math department had developed a masters degree program for math teachers who attended classes over several summers.  It was time for the first graduation.  Dan Christie was the head of the math department at the time.  Dan was a gentleman out of the old school;  worldly, compassionate, witty and very good at his work.   During a college wide faculty meeting concerned with language requirements, Dan one time proposed including mathematics as a language: in his view math was the queen of languages.

As graduation day approached for the summer math program, Dan sent a request around to all faculty asking us to attend the graduation in academic regalia.  Dan had taught at Bowdoin for many years and of course had his robe.  I called him to say that I would be happy to attend the graduation but that I didn’t have academic regalia.  He said of course I should attend.  Arriving at the ceremony all the faculty were wearing their robes with two exceptions – Dan Christie and me.  This young faculty member was not alone through the grace of a gentleman of the old school.  One doesn’t forget something like that.

There are many trees in the forest.  Some grow straighter than others.

Image processing is important too

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Back when we shot slides, there usually wasn’t much that happened after the slides came back from being developed.  Some were accepted, many were rejected and for those that were accepted there was often some little thing about it that would have benefited from the digital image processing we now have.

Becky and I went over to Fort Harrison State Park this morning to see what there was to see (and shoot).  We were both happy with what we found and instead of spending two hours, we spent three hours wondering around.

There were a lot of shots where it was clear there was something there but more needed to be done to look into the life of it.

It came to a head for me when we went to an area called the Duck Pond.  Yes, there were ducks on the pond when we got there, but  I was more interested in some landscape possibilities.

This image wasn’t bad but it was lacking something.  I converted it to black and white and that helped, but it wasn’t quite there yet.  I added some filters and adjusted the blending mode and was much happier with the result.

This looks a little like an infrared image but it isn’t.  Now this is talking to me.  I tried the same technique on some other images and was pleased with them too.  Here’s another one from this morning.

That was nice too.  Finally, I tried this with some older images that didn’t stand on their own but were good enough that I wasn’t going to throw them out.  Here is an example.

Some object to all of this digital image processing but I don’t think of myself as a documentary photographer, rather I’m a kind of photo poet.  The poetry (for me) is in the interpretation of the image.  Modern digital image processing allows a wide range of interpretations and the main limit now, rather than the image itself, is our own imagination.  More on photography and written poetry in a later post.

A trip to Clifty Falls and more

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My wife Ellie and I had talked about it for some time and we finally got the chance to spend a few days at Clifty Falls, a state park in southern Indiana. 

We went down Sunday and came back Tuesday.  We’ve been married nearly 48 years and since it is easy, over that span, to take each other for granted, I thought I would have flowers waiting for her in our room.  Last week I called the Clifty Inn where we would be staying and yes, they would take care of putting the flowers in the room if I would order them from a florist.  I asked for numbers for some florists in the area and they provided them.  The first one I called said they don’t deliver on Sunday so I called the second number.  A guy answered the phone and I asked if they could deliver a dozen roses to the Clifty Inn on Sunday.  He said no, he couldn’t deliver roses but he could deliver 12 cans of motor oil.   I replied that I hadn’t thought of that as a gift.  It turns out the number I dialed did belong to the florist at one time but that it now went to a car repair shop.  The fellow who answered the phone had received other calls like mine and he was waiting for me.  We had a good laugh about that.  None of the florists delivered on Sunday so I set it up for some durable flowers to be delivered on Saturday and they would still be fresh on Sunday.  All was in order and Ellie loves the flowers.  I told her that flowers are nice but they wouldn’t last like motor oil would.  After all, what says romance better than a couple of oil changes?  She just smiled and said ‘Yes, dear.’

It was rainy when we arrived and overcast when we left but we had a good time.  There was one short period of sunshine on Monday evening and three photographers popped out of their rooms at the inn to get some shots.  There is a generating station near the inn with three smoke stacks.  I liked the soft light on the left stack and in the sky.

It rained most of the time but that didn’t matter, we had a good time.  We saw some wild turkeys in the park Monday morning so we stopped to get in a shot.  They saw me and headed in the other direction but I clicked anyway.  Ellie looked at the shot and said ‘Hey, great turkey butts, Barry!’  They aren’t all mooning me, one is offering a side view.

I partially redeemed myself a few minutes later.  A little soft, but better although there again are two butts and a side view.

We spent some time in the city of Madison, which is right next to the park.   Our camera club had gone on a field trip to Madison last fall and I wrote about it then.  Ellie is a quilter and when she visits a quilt shop, it is a good idea for me to have some way of amusing myself, which in Madison is easy to do if you enjoy photography. 

The overcast sky saturates the colors.  Here’s an unidentified shrub poking through a crack in a fence.

In our initial tour around the park Sunday afternoon we heard a wood thrush.  If there is a more beautiful bird call in North America, I don’t know what it is.  We didn’t hear another until we were leaving the park Tuesday morning.  Great book ends for a very happy time at Clifty Falls.

But the trip wasn’t quite over.  We went home by a different route and along the way found Big Oaks National Wildlife Refuge.  There wasn’t much to see but this shot was worth the side trip.

We were away a little under 48 hours but we will remember this trip for a long time.

Back to photographing little things

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Last fall I wrote a post about shooting little things.  Winter came and I set about shooting big things.

But not all of the images were of large things.

Spring is here and I find that the large scenes I had photographed before are not as interesting as they were when the snow was on the ground.  Compare this

with this.

The scenes are roughly the same and neither was given much treatment in Photoshop; that’s the way they came out.  The only reason for making the springtime image was to compare it with the winter interpretation.  But if it is unfair to directly compare the same scene at different times of the year, it is also the case that, for me, I find I do much better with the smaller subjects in the spring.

I’m recycling through flowers again now but I find I am looking at them a little differently than last spring.  Who knows what next spring will bring?

Creative encounter

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When events are spread out over time, say one now, another in a week, a third two weeks later and the fourth a month after that, we aren’t as inclined to see them as being connected as we would be if they happen over the course of two hours.

I had been working on an image that came out of the camera club trip to Adams Mill, a trip I wrote about in an earlier post.   This is one of those images that seemed like a good idea at the time but which resisted giving up the image within an image, the image with personal meaning that I hoped was in there somewhere.

This was of a set of ropes hanging by a door.  As shown here, it is essentially what came out of the camera.  The subject – whether the ropes, the door, the colors, the texture or some combination of elements – wasn’t coming clear to me.

Easter morning arrived and I was involved in the usual Sunday morning battle with myself over whether to go to church.  My wife and I belong to a wonderful church with an excellent minister, good friends, a strong bent to community service, and people tolerant of one another’s political and religious beliefs.  But I have never liked going to church and the feeling is getting stronger over the years.  Aside from delivering an elderly lady to church who had (thankfully) lost her driver’s license, I had no special demands on me to go.  I could drop her off and go to Fort Harrison State Park to do some shooting.  Or I could go to church.

I was in my studio reading ‘The Courage to Create’, a book by Rollo May.  He was making the point that any creative act is an encounter, essentially an interaction between an individual and a situation, scene, problem, another individual, etc.   The intensity of the encounter is a major force in deciding the outcome.  The encounter for me would be with a scene and later perhaps with the image as it (and I) matured.  The camera, lens, Photoshop and printer are secondary to the encounter; they provide the means for realizing it, or expressing it.

At this point I felt compelled, driven, pushed,  to stop reading and go back to work on the image in Photoshop.  What was needed now seemed entirely clear – crop it down to show some of the ropes and the door and darken the image to emphasize the light seeping in around the door and through the knothole.  That was it.  The light is what this image is about.

I emailed  the completed image to a friend, not telling her the title.   Here is her response:

‘My initial reaction was curiosity and I liked the warmth of the brown wood and the texture of the rope. A moment later,  I began to assign my own projection of danger to it and realized something bad could be lurking on the other side of that door or within the dark space.’

I then told her the title – ‘Doorway into the Light’ – and she responded:

‘That would definitely work. One could definitely anticipate good things on the light side – and there might be a hellish aspect to the dark door and the heavy or possibly threatening rope.’

I was glad to get that response, it is consistent with what I saw.

I decided to go to church, if only to see if it seemed like a mistake when I was in the church service.  This Easter Sunday the minister did not give the usual sermon about resurrection.  Rather, he talked about the essence of the Christian experience being an encounter with Jesus.  There was that word again.  Encounter.  In my frame of reference that made an encounter with Jesus a creative act.  Reflecting on Jesus’ dialogs with various disciples and other followers, in all the cases I can think of, someone asks a question and Jesus answers in an unexpected way, a creative way.  This encounter with Jesus absolutely requires intensity, giving oneself to it.  Through that intense encounter comes transformation.

It was all coming together.  The encounter with the scene of the ropes, door and light; the resolution of the problem of what the image was to be; understanding better the nature of creativity;  coming to see  encounter with Jesus as critical to the Christian experience.

The image now takes on additional meaning.  It can be frightening to pass through that doorway, not knowing exactly what is on the other side.  Better perhaps, to stay on this side of the door in the comfort of what we know.  But hanging there are those ropes which can bind us to the present, hold us back.  That fear can indeed make the experience of passing through the door, the encounter,  intense.  This gives us a better idea of what May meant when he titled his book ‘The Courage to Create’.  It does take courage to step out and create something new, whether it be a photograph or a spiritual transformation.

I think I’ll give church another chance.

No herons for you today, would you take some nice Canada geese?

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Becky and I went over to Fort Harrison State Park this morning.   I wanted to see how the trees were starting to come out across Lake Delaware.  I had taken a similar shot a couple of days ago and this time of year, things change pretty quickly.  That earlier shot was included in my last post.

The trees are starting to turn green and I was glad to be there to record it.  As I was setting up for this shot I was showing Becky where the heron was that I wrote about last time.  It had come in from the left and swept across right in front of me.  But because of the camera settings I had forgotten about, I blew the shot.  As I was talking she was nodding rather vigorously and when I was through she said a heron had just flown behind me.  This was April 2, not April 1.  She was telling the truth.    OK, I can be philosophical about these things but then Mother Nature rubbed it in.  She gave me Canada geese.

There was a nesting pair across Fall Creek and why not get a shot of them?

The nesting pair attracted others and we counted nine geese.  There were probably more.  They were everywhere.

The occasional Canada goose is nice but I’m holding out for the heron.  Next time I’ll be ready.  Unless she (or he) is readier.

Object lesson

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I went over to Fort Harrison State Park this morning, more to see what was going on than to do any serious shooting.  The light on the hillside across Delaware Lake was inviting so I set up to shoot in that direction.

I was so wrapped up in composing and shooting that I wasn’t paying much attention to the camera settings.  Where I usually shoot at f/11 in a focusing mode that allows the camera to pick where it will focus (normally the closest object), here it was at f/5.6 and focusing was set to a point off to the right, roughly where the dead tree is at the right of the image.  The focusing point was left over from a shoot a few days ago.  None of this mattered much for this particular shot.  The distance was such that I had enough depth of field and even if the camera had been free to pick where to focus, it would likely have focused where it did anyway.  On top of that, I intentionally overexposed the scene by two stops because normal exposure produced a rather dark image.  Correct exposure and where the camera would focus quickly became very important.

A blue heron flew across the lake to give me the opportunity for a great shot.  It was coming in from the left and cut right across my field of view about 20 feet away.  But the camera was focused off to the right (not very evident in this shot, but it was).  And the shot was two stops overexposed. 

I looked at the camera settings after the shot.  That’s when I saw how the focusing was set.  As you can see in the image, Photoshop did a good job recovering from overexposure but if the image is out of focus to begin with, it stays out of focus.  I try to remember to put the camera back to my favored settings when I shut it down, but sometimes I forget.  Oh well.

The rest of the morning produced some OK shots.  Here is one.

And here is a black and white shot.  It worked much better this way than in color.

My camera is put away for the present and I have checked it twice to make sure the right settings are in place.  They are.

Adams Mill

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Our Photoventure Camera Club went on a field trip yesterday.  The site was Adams Mill, constructed in 1845.  Originally a mill specializing in cake flour, it is now a museum, for the most part exhibiting old equipment and tools.   Here is a sausage stuffer.

The mill was a center for all sorts of activity beyond commercial milling.  It housed a post office and was apparently used as a church and place for meetings of many kinds .

This was probably an early ‘all purpose room’.

If people are getting together entertainment is going to be part of it.  The upside down box under the checker board was likely delivered in the late 19th or early 20th century.  Tanglefoot is the name of a fly paper.   The Tanglefoot company is still in existence.

The words ‘apparently’, ‘probably’ and ‘likely’ are important here because we, or at least I, don’t really know the stories behind these items.  There is a lot of mystery about the place.

About 12 of us went on this trip and we can be sure there were 12 different photographic interpretations of Adams Mill.

I find it interesting that if I had come into this place without a camera I would have stayed for perhaps 15 minutes and moved on.  But with a camera I, and many of the others on the trip, could have stayed for a couple of days.  That’s the way it is with photography.  For its enthusiasts. 

Spring is here

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I don’t want to come across as a curmudgeon but I wasn’t ready for spring.  I had gotten so deeply into winter photography that when the snow disappeared I was at a bit of a loss.  I’ve always enjoyed spring and I’ve done a lot of spring photography.  That’s part of the problem.   I have a lot of what might be called ‘portrait’ flower images, flowers in profile, three quarter turned, full face, etc.

Chionodoxa is small but very attractive.  So is pink dogwood.

But I have shot enough of that kind of image.   I don’t have a replacement yet so I am just out taking pictures.

This one is called ‘Photography, 2010.’

I got a little closer to spring shooting this morning with this image of a door.  At least it’s green.

I just went out again this afternoon and I guess I may be headed in the right direction.

I’ll keep trying.  Too bad I can’t photograph bird song.  That would be nice.