A walk interrupted, intentionally

ISO 100, 78mm, 1/1000 sec., f/2

Stare at enough scenes of the American southwest and you begin to think the world is composed of irregularly shaped, warm color landscapes.  And maybe much of it is.  But this is not Arizona or New Mexico or southern Utah – this is a fallen tree trunk being lit by the afternoon sun.  I liked how the surface texture, seen up close, resembled the terrain captured in hundreds of images from out west.  Much as a universe exists in a raindrop there is a world just around our feet if we take the time to look for it.

 

ISO 100, 50mm, 1/80 sec., f/8

Sometimes around our feet can be measured in hundreds of yards.  For this scene I’m standing on a very tall bluff overlooking Lake Michigan, just south of Milwaukee.  I liked the curvature of the beach leading to the groins that suddenly recede in linear fashion around the point of land.  And between each groin is a small curve of beach depositing by the lake as it tries to wash Wisconsin’s shoreline toward Chicago.  The waves give me a nice texture in the water’s surface and some breakers against the narrow pebbly ledge beneath the bluffs.

Both images made while just walking around, no particular scene in mind.  It’s one reason I enjoy being an outdoor photographer.  Your pressure is not other people’s time or the urgency of an event’s frantic action, but rather a sense of light and openness to what you see and what it can become in the viewfinder.

The shape of things fluid

While living around the Monterey peninsula biking along the coast was a favorite way to see the landscape and enjoy the area.  One defining memory of gliding along the shoreline was the roar and rush of waves as the Pacific attacked the rocky edge of the coast.  With some large, pounding breakers and some gradual, lapping curves the ocean is eating away at the central California coast, turning it into sand that is deposited on the beaches of southern California.  This process is far too slow to observe but the sounds associated with it are memorable, at times outstripping the human noise up and down the road running alongside.  The brief pause as the water gathers itself, the rushing anticipation as the wave glides toward the shore, the “woomph” of the crash as liquid weight breaks against the solid rocks and the hissing as the sand and pebbles relinquish the water to return for the next assault.

I’ve never been a beach person, never understood the appeal of the sand, sunlight, lapping water and smell of suntan lotion.  But the Pacific at Monterey is not a beach person’s seaside.  It is not friendly to those who wish to languish by the water’s edge.  It intimidates and challenges, daring the venturesome to approach and test it.  Only the hardy dare get close (except for the sea otters, who laugh at the ocean as they go about their daily chore of abalone gathering or the pelicans who glide effortlessly along the wave fronts using the ground effect to swiftly carry them from one fishing ground to another).  But the less hardy can appreciate the sound as it rolls from the water up onto the ground to envelope any who pause to take notice.

Several years on the Great Plains and I still miss that sound.

And now I’m moving to those inland oceans, the Great Lakes.  And I’m finding that sound again, renewing my connection with the waters of the country.  No, nothing like the pounding Pacific but nonetheless the same effect of anticipation, rush, crash and hiss.

Won’t ever be a beach person but I can still enjoy the sounds.

ISO 100, 35mm, 1/800 sec., f/2.8

ISO 100, 14mm, 1/1000 sec., f/2.8

ISO 100, 35mm, 1/500 sec., f/2.8

Strip color, make better image

With all the post-processing tools available now there’s a criticism I hear from photographers about people who change color images to B&W; “what’s the matter, couldn’t get the color right?”  Sometimes it’s a derisive comment, sometimes a search for information, but most of the time I feel it misses the point.  Images are made of compositions composed of what the photographer wants to show the viewer and sometimes it just looks better without the color.

Not that I’m intending to get snobbish about “art” and “black and white” and all that effort at segregating what’s of value from what’s common.  No, I use both color and B&W in my work, although I’m a novice when it comes to knowing which will work best!  The beauty of digital is we can tell quickly whether to pursue it or not; in the film days it required a different workflow to make a B&W image out of a color negative and when I say workflow I mean more than a few clicks of the mouse.  It took literally getting  your hands dirty while working in the dark.

I’ve been going through my Lightroom catalog to remind myself what’s in it and I found the following image.  It’s a scan of a Kodachrome slide image I made several years ago while driving along the coast of the Olympia peninsula of Washington.  I remember liking the shape and contrasts but also remember not being particularly thrilled how it turned out as the colors were dull and the image lacked some spark.  That was back when I thought a great image simply came out of the camera.  Now I know better.

I fortunately exposed the image fairly evenly (the sky was totally overcast so I knew it would be blow out but there were no details to preserve) so when I saw it I realized some post-processing would enable me to turn it into more of what I saw at the time.  And when I started working on it I knew it would be a B&W in the final product – the subtle colors of the rock and water just didn’t bring anything to the story of the image.

Looking at it now I really like how the even lighting of the overcast sky helped give me light all over the rock, including into the clefts and holes.  A more stark lighting, such as bright cloudless day, would have rendered this too harsh.  In this form it recalls the sense I had of the cloudy, cool Pacific coast, a place of not quite shadows and not quite sunlight, with a bit of salty tang in the damp air.

The moral, at least one, of the story is to not throw anything away (cheers from the pack rat demographic, groans from those more organized) because you may have a masterpiece just waiting for a little adjusting.

Wind as artist

A longer than expected snow storm dropped several inches on us a few days ago, followed by sunny, warmer days.  I wandered down to the park to see how it looked.  The wind that generally accompanies our storms crafts all sorts of shapes in snow, while it falls and afterward by remolding the drifts.  These are designs governed by complex physics,  making their ultimate form difficult to predict.  Yet out of chaos comes beauty.

Obstacles

ISO100, 35mm, 1/125 sec., f/10

As most of the traditional winter sports require more change in elevation than is typical on the Plains in Nebraska we take advantage of whatever terrain is available.  A local dam works just fine, offering two slopes in one.  Slalom poles are included – courtesy of utility companies.

The shape of things to see

Went out yesterday specifically to look for patterns at the edge of melting snow.  The idea just popped into my head as I was wondering how to do a better job of capturing the texture of snow, since simply making an image of a snowbank doesn’t give me what I want.  As it turns out, the exercise became a study in negative space (of a sort) as I saw that what was around the melting snow was equally as interesting.  Let me show you.

ISO 100, 35mm, 1/80 sec., f/14

I started seeing some sort of yin/yang compositions where the snow had melted off high spots and remained in the depressions.  Not only is there a contrast between the light and dark areas but since I was looking around in a sandbox, there is a contrast of textures as well.  The sun is about a hour from setting so the low angle cuts across the top of the peaks and reveals the snow texture as well as the sand pebbles.

ISO 100, 53mm, 1/125 sec., f/10

Light and dark, shadow and highlight, edge and pattern.  What is the subject of the image?

ISO 100, 35mm, 1/160 sec., f/11

Where the snow has thinned enough for the darker sand to start showing through I’m able to see the snow’s texture better.  Light requires shadow in order to illuminate?

ISO 100, 100mm, f/14, 6 image HDR

The last image is simply to practice capturing the subtle gradations of tone as the sunlight curves along the gradual slope of the snow.  The transition from light to dark is a fraction of a degree of angle, and right at that point you can see the irregular surface mottling where the snow has melted at different rates.  Macro textures and micro textures – snow has it all.

Elements of the big picture

I’m sure you’ve all run across people who proudly proclaim “I’m a big picture person” when discussing how they approach an issue, as if disdaining any contact with actual details required to get something accomplished.  Don’t get me wrong, there are people who actually are best at the big picture and we need them in order to keep us thinking about an objective or plan or expected destination in life.  Still, sometimes the details can bring out aspects that shouldn’t be overlooked, especially in a photograph.

ISO 100, 100mm, 1/50 sec., f/8, 9 image panoramic

I’m guessing this is a little too wide for this blog but I wanted to show it as a way to point out how you sometimes have to craft an image with what’s available.  There are no mountains in Nebraska so you have to see what the sun will provide in the landscape you’ve got.  This time of year the corn fields are bare so the contour plowing is visible, especially when you include some shadows for depth.  I caught a glimpse of this idea while driving home one day and set out that week to duplicate it.  The trick was finding a field with these berms curving away from the camera to set the foreground apart from the background, on a slope that would allow wide separation between them so the shadows of one wouldn’t hide the peak of another, and waiting for an angle where the setting sun would just cut across the tops of each berm leaving the area behind them in shadow.  The result is the alternating light and shadow curves.  I was fortunate the close-in foreground was plowed across the width of the scene, giving me a firm foundation for the image.  I cropped it close at the top (no clouds, not very interesting sky) and did some post-processing in black and white to make sure the tones were distributed the way I wanted.  And that was it.

I like how the very visible curves give a sense of depth to the image, drawing your eye from the close foreground into the background, and from side to side. sweeping from the left and going downhill to the right.  It’s the way you would view the scene were  you standing there and that’s my objective for shots like this.

The Plains have been compared to a sea of grass.  Standing in one of the remaining prairies in the area and watching the breeze ripple the tops of the grass to drive waves across the fields reminds you of being at sea.  What I like about this composition is the berms solidify that idea, freezing the moving waves to reveal their relentless travel in the face of the wind.

Shape the image you want

One of the pleasures of large format photography is you have so much image to play with.  What I mean by that is you can crop to various compositions and still retain details in the image.  I use 4×5″ film which is scanned as big as I want depending on how much cropping I want to perform without losing much resolution.  If I expect to crop a lot I will scan to a greater number of pixels; crop just a little then scan to a more “normal” number of pixels.  I see no reason to scan every image to 150-200 megabytes if I plan to use the whole image.  Unless, of course, I want to print wall-sized images!

But why crop an image at all?  Aren’t you supposed to get the image you want in the camera in the first place?  Well, different compositions elicit different emotional responses.  Some open your mind to questions (what is that? what is the photographer saying?), some direct your eye to the subject readily, some are pleasing proportions of length and width – there are multiple reasons you might crop in order to deliver a certain response.  And different crops, as different compositions, tell different stories.  With digital cameras this seems like an easy issue to address – just make more images with different compositions.  But one camera and a couple of lenses may not offer sufficient flexibility for your desired image.  And with film you can’t just shoot a hundred variations on the scene (well, not economically at least).  For example, take this image:

This is a somewhat wide shot of a scene in a nearby park.  I liked the strong contrasts between the trees and snow, and the leading line of the snow-covered path pointing to the horizon.  It’s a general shot, nothing really stands out.  But it can be cropped in several ways.

Now there’s more emphasis on the path with the trees as framing elements.

This crop emphasizes the verticality of the trees and shows some of the details of the snow plastered on the side of trunks.

A little closer to the path than the original image, bringing the horizon closer.  Cropping down the top and bottom of the scene provides a wider perspective that focuses the eye along the trees.

Square is a pleasing crop (better when there is more subject than a white sky and white ground) and this one brings more emphasis on the path and reveals a possible subject farther away.

A closer crop makes the path more intimate and now the person walking their dog shows up on the trail as does the snow covered bench on the side.  Essentially this is what I would get by mounting a telephoto lens on the camera but all I had to do here is crop in tight on my already existing image – no lens changes required.

The digital camera companies seem intent on continuing their megapixel war of numbers.  For the vast majority of photographers a suitable file size was passed a couple of years ago but if you frequently find yourself in the position of cropping images a lot you might consider the higher number models.  Especially where there are no lenses that will deliver the composition you like.

Or you could step back and try large format photography!

You never know what might land in the woods…

Icy contrasts

ISO 100, 71mm, 40 sec., f/3.5

ISO 100, 71mm, 1/200 sec., f/7.1

ISO 100, 24mm, 1/400 sec., f/8

When you have shadows, work with shadows.  This is the perfect time of the year for black and white.  Use low angled light (just before sunset or right after sunrise) to bring out the surface texture and details.  Work with exposure to make sure you keep details in the shadows and highlights (yes, that’s a 40 second exposure above – another moonlight image).  Traditionally you want some pure blacks and whites in an image as reference points but with ice and snow that can look too contrasty so I’ve backed down on each a bit.  For the Zone System enthusiasts out there all these images have tonal ranges between Zones 2 and 8; pushing to 1 and 9 gave me too much stark appearance.  If all that means nothing to you then read up on Ansel Adam’s exposure techniques or play around with your own exposures until you get what you want.

If you want to play around with Adam’s Zone System keep in mind the intent was to visualize tonal attributes in the final PRINT, not the intermediate negative (or RAW file for digital).  Many of Adam’s negatives were actually somewhat flat – he brought contrast to selected areas in the printing and developing process.  For digital, keep your histogram even across the center and then post-process to spread information to pixels at the ends to get the contrast you want.  Use local dodging and burning (or adjustment brush in Lightroom) to enhance selected areas.  If I do that to these images I’ll post what I get and how I worked it out.