Tag Archives: Photography

Time to get back to it

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The last several days we have been having an unsettled but recurring weather pattern.

The clouds go dark in the early evening, the wind whips up to as much as 50 or 60 miles an hour and a deluge starts with lightning and thunder accompaniment.  After a few minutes the wind dies down and the rain stops.  The thunder rolls into the distance.   It’s all quite dramatic.  Too dramatic for the dogs:

They head for the stall shower and stay there well into the night.

Unsettled would describe my photography recently as well.  I’m not seeing the opportunities that I know are there.  Flowers, such as these begonias are alright but I’d like something a little different.

The opportunity came today in the form of taking the long way around to go to the library.

The tentative name for this is ‘Can I get there from here?’ which might be symbolic of my slump recently.  Perhaps the best thing to do is close my eyes, take a deep breath, open the eyes and look around.  Who knows what there is to see and wonder about?

That calls for some reflection.

Geometry

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We could talk a long time about what makes a good image.  We could list criteria and features, we could have rules, we could have recommendations.  But when it comes down to it, rigidly following rules and meeting criteria just don’t hack it.  An acceptable image would probably result but it would likely be as memorable as the artwork on the wall in a hotel room.  Visual Muzak.

All of the criteria, features, rules and recommendations have their place and we can certainly point to spectacularly good images that share at least some of them.  There is one criterion that, at this moment anyway,  I would like to pursue a bit,  if only to see where it goes.  The criterion is simplicity, especially geometric or graphic simplicity.  Human structures provide excellent material.  Here, for example, is the arch in St. Louis:

And part of the entrance to the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta:

Here are some structures in Indianapolis:

Interesting geometry is not limited to buildings.  Here are a couple of examples from nature:

When looking at a photograph a common question is ‘what is the subject?’   Sometimes the subject is simply the texture and there is no specific area of the photograph that is more important than any other area.   This, however, is not often the case.  Most often, there is a specific main subject in the image and with geometric, or graphic simplicity, it is easy to find.  If you want to make good picture making as simple as possible, simplicity itself is a good place to start.   As is the case with other rules and suggestions, simplicity isn’t the be all and end all of composition but more often than not it helps.

A simple spirituality: Part 4

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Spirit and seeing, spirituality and photography.  I believe that each nourishes the other.  Right, but how does that work?  How do they fit together and nourish one another?

This is one of those things I know to be true but it is mysterious and I find it difficult to put into words.  I’ll begin by repeating what I have written before about the nature of spirituality.  Here’s the working definition:

‘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)

This is essentially the definition of personality with the addition that the Sacred is placed at the center.  Viewed most broadly, an individual’s spirituality is always a part of what that individual thinks or does.  It doesn’t have to be a thought or an act with spirituality actively in mind, it is there whether we recognize it or not.  In an important way then, our spirituality as well as our personality colors and frames the way we think and behave.  Of course there are times when we don’t act according to our best spiritual selves.  The apostle Paul made this point when he wrote

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin.
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
Romans 7: 14-15

I would be surprised if all major religions did not share this lament.  So we don’t always act according to who we are at the profoundest level.

In my simple spirituality, everything is interconnected.  God is in all, all is in God.  So when I go out to shoot, there is a strong sense of wonder at God’s creation.  Looking through the viewfinder of a camera intensifies that sense of wonder.  I see this most strongly with close up, or macro, photography.

Getting close to a flower opens up a new world.  Flowers are small, and if we think of the distance between our eye and the bloom in terms of diameters of the bloom (e.g. this flower is half an inch across) we are almost always at least 10 diameters away and more often, when we are walking past them, perhaps hundreds of diameters away.  So when we are close we see a lot more of what the flower is about.  And there is more to it.  We aren’t just close, we are looking at it through the viewfinder which considerably restricts our field of view.  If we are close enough, we see just the flower and little, or nothing, else.   A sense of wonder is then all but inevitable.

But the sense of wonder is not restricted to just flowers.  A flower just provides one good example.  Looking closely at a flower readily gives rise to wonder in just about anyone.  Most things we see, hear, feel or otherwise sense can be a source of wonder.  The quote from Meister Eckhart in the banner at the top of this page says it very well:

This then, is salvation: to marvel at the beauty of created things and to marvel at the beauty of their Creator

What feeds wonder in me probably wouldn’t be the same as it would be for you.  That’s why we could stand next to one another with cameras and come back with different portfolios.

I believe that sense of wonder is an expression of spirituality.  It is God in me seeking God in the world.  So is it surprising that spirituality would nourish photography?  Or that photography nourishes spirituality?  I’ll write more on this soon.

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?

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.