Can’t see the rocks for the trees

How do you show depth when the scene is almost monochromatic?  And I don’t mean black and white – actually all the same color.

I ran across this old stone wall in the woods and thought the contrast of man-made with nature was a nice image.  I was able to get some compositions I liked but the lack of color or tonal difference made it hard to make the wall stand out from the woods.  Here’s what I mean:

I tried with the light behind me and the light behind the stones but neither gave me the type of contrast I needed.  Composing from the side didn’t work because the moss-covered stones simply vanished into the green background.  I’m wondering if waiting until later, when the sun was obliquely lighting the stones if that would let the shadows make them stand out.  Or perhaps putting some flash on them just to lighten them up compared to the forest.  I didn’t have time or equipment to try these ideas but will definitely keep them in mind.

Don’t know the story behind the wall.  It runs along a wooded hilltop that’s a state wildlife refuge.  It’s not really tall enough to be called a wall, more of a line of stacked stones.  Perhaps in the past a farmer cleared stones from the hill so he could plant crops.  The area is surrounded by wetland so the hill would be about the only good land to plant.  This part of Wisconsin was scoured by glaciers and they left many rocks displaced from Canada but I don’t think even glaciers are this neat and tidy with their rock movement.  I just thought it was an interesting reminder of how we shape the land when we want, and the land shapes back when we turn aside for a bit.

I did find something with enough contrast to photography, however.  Some blooming bush sent a tendril out and snagged a limb, giving a nice arrangement of blooms in a minimalist sort of display.

Nice to see nature has a sense of style.

Little pieces make great objects

As much as I like the spring colors popping up everywhere I’m really enjoying a pursuit of textures in this new landscape, and nothing says texture like B&W.

I’m sure part of it is that texture is all about details and the sharper the details the better the texture.  It appeals to my perpetual striving for sharp images.  What I’m finding out is the more I work on sharpness for the detail images the better my grand landscape images get, probably because I’m forcing myself to use the same techniques for both:  use Live View and manual focus, put the camera on a sturdy tripod, use the mirror lock-up to reduce vibration, set the aperture at optimal for the lens and let the shutter speed fall where it wants (hence the sturdy tripod), and use lighting effectively to illuminate the details.

I’m also seeing where extreme contrasts are not always effective at conveying the details I want.  The image above doesn’t actually have any deep blacks or brilliant whites and the key subjects (stones on the left, ripples on the right) have a narrower dynamic range than the overall picture.  But there is enough contrast to show off the details and hopefully make you pay more attention to the subjects.

Not that everything needs to be crisp.  Depth of field can help show off details in just the subject, leaving the other elements to complement it with their soft yet apparent details.

All of these images started out in color, but I found the colors distracted from the nature of the image I wanted to portray.  Oddly for me, working more and more with B&W helps me learn how to bring better focus on the subjects of my color images, showing the viewer just what I want them to pay attention to in the end.

After going through many lenses over the past three years I feel the kit I have now really delivers on my expectations.  I used to wonder why photographers were always talking about the plethora of lenses they had gone through and how many they had in their bag.  Now I realize you really have to shoot through many lenses to find the ones that deliver what you’re seeing to the final image.  Reading technical specifications and other people’s reviews can be helpful to sort for major aspects of lenses but really aren’t useful in the end.  Like a good pair of shoes, you have to put them on and walk around a bit before learning whether they fit you or not.

Yeah, it can get expensive, but for me the value of seeing what I saw show up on the screen or on a print has been greater than the frustration I’ve felt in the past trying to create an image with a lens that would never live up to my expectations.

Glad to see that spring didn’t forget us this year

Seasons are definitely changing now.  The landscape is undeterred by the whipsawing of temperatures up and down – plants have work to do getting flowers out and the thermometer isn’t slowing them down.

Even though I was wandering around looking for spring I did take a moment to try a compositional challenge.  Neurobiologists tell photographers our brains are wired to almost instantly pick out the human figure or face in an image; we can’t help ourselves.  As such, many outdoor photographers are urged to include people in their compositions, either for scale or for perspective or just for that human touch most landscape photographers don’t get the importance of having in their carefully crafted images (“Ansel never put people in his images!”).  I don’t know – should we be arguing with millions of years of evolution?  You be the judge – which of the following is more interesting?   And why?

Growth and color rushing into the warmth

It feels like the plants are frantically trying to catch up with the season as the weather is noticeably warmer for longer than even a couple of weeks ago.   The longer days help, I’m sure.  Nice to see some color working its way onto the palette after what seems like a very long winter.

Been driving around exploring parks in the area, which there are many.  Some are more “wild” than others but everywhere a bit of spring is arriving.

Slowly the seasons creep in

For a couple of days it really seemed that spring was here to stay.  Visited a local park over my Lake Michigan after work to enjoy the nearly 80 degree weather and found it teeming with playing kids, biking enthusiasts and people just strolling around in shorts.  Most of the lakeshore south of Milwaukee is parkland and I imagine it gets well used when the weather is nice.  Great to see the water’s edge hasn’t been completely boxed out by narrow-gauge subdivisions.

Nature believes the seasonal change is upon us even if there are days we’re wearing heavy coats.  The forest floor was littered with little yellow flowers that apparently popped up in just a couple of days because they weren’t there earlier in the week.  Don’t know what they are – perhaps someone out there can identify them?

Walking around the park I noticed there must have been quite a bit of damage from storms this winter as several trees were blown over and had been cut off the trail.  I took advantage of this to continue my without-a-good-reason photo series of tree rings.

The park seems to have been around for quite a while – I’d guess it dates back to the early 1900′s.  The trails are paved with flagstones and where they circle around the hills there are stone walls lining the cuts made for the trails.  I really liked the way the sun was coming through the still leaf-less trees and weaving a shadow web across the trail.  Felt almost medieval, like a lost castle in the deep woods.

All of these images were made with my recently purchased Olympus film lens, the 35-80mm f/2.8.  Unlike the new digital lenses that have been designed from the blank page to optimally cast light onto a digital sensor, this lens was created to put a circle of light on a flat piece of film.  It’s hard to describe but the resulting image almost has a film-like quality to it.  Perhaps I’m simply dreaming and romanticizing what I want it to look like but I’m finding my compositions are slightly different using this lens, and that has me seeing things different as well.

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.

Stable balance left to right

Visited the geographical center of the US once just to see what was there.  It was interesting to think about how you would determine such a site.  Of course it would involve surveyors, transits, complicated instruments and calculations by men huddled around a table littered with maps and such.  Right?  How else would you pinpoint the exact center of the country?

Simple – balance a cut-out map of the US on a pin and where the map balances flat is the center.  And that’s how they determined it.

Elegant solutions are so great if for no other reason than here’s one that can be repeated by any class of 4th graders in the country.

We generally crave balance, a position of moderate force in all directions acting equally on each other.  It’s so important to many things in our lives from bicycles to skyscrapers to bridges to ballerinas that we take it for granted, as if nature continually moves toward finding balance.  Not exactly.  Physicists tell us the universe strives toward unbalance, a state of disorder measured by an increase in entropy.  Still, we continue to find a sense of stability where balance is provided.

Photographers generally prefer balance as well, guiding a viewer through a scene in an expected way, allowing the mind the dwell on particular aspects measured against other elements.  There are even rules about this, advising where to put dominant subjects and how to use design elements to highlight or diminish certain parts of a scene in order to push the viewer to or from that area in the image.

ISO 100, 80mm, 1/400 sec., f/8

This scene was intentionally balanced as much as possible.  I saw the scene emerging as the ship moved across the horizon toward the breakwater opening and the sunlight moved across the water as the clouds blew by.  The horizontal lines are easy – the line of the horizon (which is never to be in the center of a picture unless it needs to be), the lines of dark and light on the water mirrored in similar lines in the sky.  The line of the ship balanced against the line of the breakwater.  There’s even a balance between the light on the beacon and the ship in the shade of a cloud.  It took three shots to get the sunlight on the water just the way I wanted but the wind was blowing briskly and I could see the openings for the sun would line up in the space of just a few minutes to get the beacon in just the right spot.

Sunlight has been absent here for a week so it was great to finally have some contrast to work with.  Might be all we get for a while…

By the way, if you’re in the Milwaukee area drop by the Art Museum to see the special exhibit on color photography  Color Rush.  It’s a great historical look at the development and use of color from autochromes to Kodachrome.  In it you can see how balance has played an emerging role in photography once color became an alternative to B&W.

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

Does artistic genre affect what I see?

When I stumbled on this scene my first reaction was “how pastoral this looks” which is odd since I don’t usually think in terms of artistic genre.  Nonetheless, what I saw was the peaceful, soft, illuminated aspects of color, shadow and light I’ve come to associate with paintings I’ve been told are Pastoral in their style.  Turning to the go-to universal definition place (Wikipedia) I expected to find a comprehensive article on this painting style, the influences on its development, major contributors to the genre and how it was supplanted by the continued evolution of visual arts.  At least I was hoping to find some aspects of why we find some scenes “pastoral.”

Turns out this term is used to covered a lot of art, from writing to poetry to music, and yes, painting.  What isn’t seemingly clear, at least in language I could understand, is how the genre is defined.  Reading several critical pieces on the form it seemed all the writers class this style of art not by what it delivers but rather what it is trying to avoid.  Pastoral turns away from urban, civilized, organized, routine aspects of life to embrace the wild, natural, agricultural.  It uses simplicity as a way to forestall complexity.  Some critics indicate it’s simply art about shepherds and their lifestyle (not sure why shepherds are more pastoral than cowboys, farmers or conservationalists other than all those Greek plays and pottery extolling the lives of shepherds).

Way too much information.  I finally found a comment about how the Hudson River school arose in this country as an off-shoot of English Pastoral tradition and then it clicked for me.  The Hudson River school was about romanticism, showing how humans and nature co-exist peacefully.  Portrayals were at times idealized, at times realistic, many times showing the wildness of nature as a backdrop for the idyllic state of agriculture.

Thomas Kincade is probably the most well known American painter using this type of portrayal (although his work is not traditional Hudson River school), a style characterized by the self-proclaimed phrase “Painter of Light,” which was originally attributed to J. M. W. Turner.  Perhaps it was the light that caught my attention immediately in the above scene.  Or the warm vs. cool color palette.  Or just how inviting the composition appeared.  For whatever reasons, it seemed pastoral to me so I make this image to share the moment with you.

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.