Topics and Projects in Photography

I wanted to make substantial changes in my style of generating images. I also wanted to work more toward telling stories rather than just making pretty pictures. I decided to embark on some extended projects, each involving multiple images. You can call them experiments or stories if you wish. Here are a few of them.

Most projects involve a series of images, but some complex composites are literally projects in themselves. Click on image to expand.One bleak December day I wanted to test a nodal gimbal for taking panoramas. I went out hoping to get a sunset, but …

Most projects involve a series of images, but some complex composites are literally projects in themselves. The result is a single image that replaces all of its predecessors.

One bleak December day I wanted to test a nodal gimbal for taking panoramas. I went out hoping to get a sunset, but alas it was December and the clouds rolled in an hour too early. The result was one of the most dismal pictures I have ever taken. So dismal it was almost artistic... OK, we have an image with a conspicuous lack of any animal activity. Nature abhors a vacuum. How about putting a seal in the river? But for a viewer to be able to see it at all, it would have to be gigantic. Hmm, perhaps from the Paleogene Period. OK, animals from different places and periods are popping into this ecological vacuum. The cockatiel, from Australia, had better beware the green mamba, from Africa.

Loosening Up

TACKLING THE FEAR OF FREEDOM

Taking several images and combining them allows the artist to generate images that do not exist except in the imagination. This enormous freedom of expression can easily result in a severe case of artist's block. At least it did for me. I realized that the only way out was to produce a series of images that were imaginative, but highly unlikely to be the best images I would ever create. Here are some of the steps along this path.

Birth of Garlic

The Garlic has landed

Audience with Pope

Image Series: Metamorphoses

Often an object or scene will remind you of other objects or scenes. Sometimes a relatively small number of modifications to an image can make such a resemblance more explicit.

Gourdian not

Lichen battle

Scavengers

Image Series: Changing time

An image is taken at a specific point in space and with a specific orientation. Because of the basic nature of a camera, it is an averaging of what happened over a specific time interval. Normally, the interval is so short that we can think of the image as being taken at a particular instant in time. For time exposures, we can think of it as being taken over a particular time interval starting at a particular time.

Landscape photographers are often obsessed not with absolute time but with time of day, for this determines the ambient lighting. With post processing it is possible to mimic different lighting, at least in some circumstances. In other cases, long-exposure photography can be used to either show motion or to eliminate rapid motion, such as wavelets on a water surface.

This series of images explores these ideas.

Wind Orchid

This is a kinetic sculpture in the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. Long exposure is used here to make more explicit the shape of the surface carved out over time by the movement. It was taken at 1PM on a sunny day. I used dodging and burning to make the lighting more interesting.

Dark orchid

It is certainly true that lighting changes as the time of day and as the weather changes. Some artists will spend years trying to find the perfect lighting for a scene. However, with modern high-dynamic-range digital sensors in affordable cameras, it is easier to change the lighting in post-processing than it was in the past.

Here is the same wind orchid, taken in early afternoon on a fair day in June. However, I decided to use dodging, burning, and masking to make it appear more as it would at night.

Imagined scenes

At the instant you record a scene or event, you see a real image generated by photons hitting your eyes. At the same time your imagination envisions modifications to that scene. I think that this is what we see at night as dreams. So far at least, cameras do not have their own imaginations, so all they can record is the photons. Compositing allows the artist to embellish a camera image with imagined modifications. Here are some images that illustrate this.

This image was taken in the early afternoon at the Maine Botanical Gardens. I was there as a student at a workshop given by the garden photographer Lee Anne White. The Maine Botanical Gardens are gorgeous, by design. Garden designers laid out everything carefully on plans and many dedicated gardeners worked diligently to carry out those designs and then maintain them. So, my role here was as a documenter of one of the nicer elements of a professionally-designed garden.

As I worked to compose and execute this image, I could not help but think about how the garden bench was designed to be sat in and how many people over the years must have done just that. So, I tried to depict this:

Since I was using one element to represent many, I purchased a license for a stock image of a woman reading. To make it clear that this was a figment of my imagination, I blurred the image, made it translucent, and blended it into the underlying scene. (screen blend mode)

This pattern opens up a lot of opportunities for expression, but it is only one of many possible patterns. One obvious extension would be to represent two or more examples in one composite image. Specifically, perhaps we could show two separate events where people sat in the same bench but at different times:

The idea here was to imitate the repeated images formed by two mirrors that face each other. Clearly this new design pattern provides many new means of expression.

So far, the ethereal images are just faint glimpses into the frozen past or into some imagined other reality. In particular, the images aren't "aware" that they are being observed, let alone be able to interact with the photographer. In dreams, this barrier breaks down. The figures you see in dreams can definitely see you and often react to your presence. Of course, an artistic pattern that incorporates the full freedoms of dreaming would be really complex and probably contain insurmountable technical challenges.

In order to dip my toe into these stormier waters, I envisioned a sort of multiverse or time thread policeman. This guardian could see both worlds, as it were, just like the photographer, and could warn the targets that they were being observed. The guardian would be fully visible to the photographer. The guardian would want to look fierce to the photographer and protective to the targets. Not having models to work with, I took a photograph of myself under dramatic lighting:

OK, it's not a very finished image but as at least a conceptual mockup it contains many of the elements I required. I then inserted the image somewhat back in the foliage. I figured that an electric blue glow would make him look fiercer.

Displaying the Art of Others

One topic that is always controversial is making images containing works of art made by others. At one extreme would be a composite image where you used an Ansel Adams landscape as the background. A somewhat milder version of this would be a snapshot of a rather ordinary building that happened to have graffiti by Banksy on one wall. At the other extreme would be an image whose purpose was to display an art work as compellingly and accurately as possible and to credit the artist for their work. We all include art from others, but we need to always be aware of the boundaries of ethical acceptability.

Eskimo sculpture

When my late wife and I visited Alaska, we purchased a sculpture of an Eskimo chanting and drumming. An Inuit artist made this out of weathered whalebone. I have used this sculpture at times to practice studio lighting. I consider such images to be documentary rather than artistic.

Sometimes we have to learn by practice. This particular image shows why you sometimes need to use a longer focal length even if it puts your camera in an awkward spot in the room. The Eskimo portrayed in Bifurcation has better perspective.

Eskimo at bonfire

People argue, for good reason, about the ethics of taking a picture of someone else's art and presenting it somehow as your own. As I stare at my Eskimo sculpture in my living room I imagine a real Eskimo drumming. This composite image attempts to capture the vision evoked by the Inuit artist's sculpture. I hope it is within the range of what the sculptor wanted.

Image Series: Growing Old

We all grow old eventually and then die. There are expectations, of course, but ultimately no individual knows when they will die or how healthy they will be before that. In particular, we do not know the order in which friends and family will die. Growing Old is an image series that tries to show my perspective on this universal tale. As such it is neither a literal story of my life nor a universal outline for all mankind.

Welcome Home

After my wife died, our home in the country became just a house for me. I moved back into the city, where there were better services for older people living alone. The "Welcome Home" banner on my apartment key fob has always seemed to gently mock me.

You might have fun working out where the leading lines go in this composition. Or don't go...

Bifurcation

This is not so much a telling of my particular story, but rather a narrative about families of mortals: a member of the family dies, but the survivors go on.

Music was a central motif in our marriage, as was learning new things. My training was in physics.

Image Series: Rising Waters

Who knew I would make a documentary?

I enter into most projects with a substantial amount of prior planning. Sometimes, however, you have to just adapt to what nature and chance provide you. Cape Cod is a wonderful place, but for most of the year it is choked with traffic and tourists. I often go in early spring, especially when nor'easters bring heavy snow to Boston and rain to the Cape. This year has been especially stormy, due to unusual conditions in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Arctic. The Gulf waters are unusually warm this year, providing large amounts of humidity to fuel big storms in the American Midwest and East Coast. In addition, a huge surge of warm air invaded the Arctic, making it warmer than Sweden. The result in Europe was "The Beast from the East", a powerful storm moving backwards from Siberia into Great Britain. For the US, the cold air displaced from the Arctic formed a blocking high pressure dome east of Greenland. This meant that for two weeks the big storms generated by Gulf moisture were blocked by the high off Greenland. Cape Cod endured hurricane-force northeast wind gusts and large waves for several days in a row. Unfortunately this coincided with astronomical high tides to cause massive beach erosion.

For me, the bad weather simply meant too many days indoors, so I booked a room on the Cape for two days (March 9-10). I wasn't out for anything particularly special, other than some much-needed exercise. I took my trusty crop-sensor Sony, a macro lens, a simple wide-angle, and a general-purpose zoom. As I began to visit sites on the Cape, I quickly realized that I was there at a critical point in coastal history. Even though I don't consider myself a documentary photographer, I realized that there was a story here that needed to be recorded.

For three days of astronomical high tides, the Cape was pounded by relentless northeast winds. Enormous amounts of ocean water were pushed into Cape Cod Bay. 25-foot waves pounded the eastern coast, open to the Atlantic Ocean. Winds gusting to 97 mph caused some tree damage, but the Cape is used to such winds. The first beach I visited was Head of the Meadow, on the east coast north of Truro. The parking lot was mostly covered with sand, but there were a few spots to park. A small sign stated that the beach was closed and people could enter only at their own risk. The beach was mostly gone, as far as I could tell. I was there at low tide and could record some waves coming in. The next place I visited was the Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Sanctuary. This is on the bay side of Cape Cod, so it escaped the big winds and waves. However, some of the trails were littered with debris that floated in on high tides. The trail goes down to a salt-water marsh that, by definition, floods at the highest tides. As the trail neared its low point, Mass Audubon had placed posts indicating where recent estimates showed the high tide line would be in the future. I happen to know that the very latest research shows that these dates are too optimistic. Still, it was a warning of what changes we must adapt to in the near future.

On the second day I decided to trace the Pamet River, which starts in some kettle ponds on the eastern side of the Cape near Truro. The river then meanders west and empties into Cape Cod Bay. It is an important fresh-water ecosystem for the outer Cape. Although the river's headwaters were close to the eastern border, there was a comforting 40-foot high bluff between it and the open Atlantic. I looked the area up on Google Maps. The satellite images showed a distressing looking circle of sand where part of the bluff used to be. This "dune blowout" covers several acres and spills into one of the headwater ponds. The parking lot is almost all gone under mountains of fresh sand. I found some historical documents that showed a minor "blowout" in 2011. Local community groups were hopeful they had it under control with innovative fencing and dune grass replanting. All of that is simply gone. I took some pictures on the blowout area which show substantial amounts of water had recently been washing over the entire breach and into the Pamet River.

If a channel forms, which looks to me like one more storm into the future, the differentials in water level between the open Atlantic on the east and the Bay on the west should start rapidly scouring a deep channel. At that point, Provincetown will be geographically on an island. (Disclaimer: I am not a certified expert on all this.)

North Truro waves

This is at a small beach at the Head of the Meadow in North Truro.

Wellfleet Bay Mass Audubon Sanctuary

This is looking west, toward Wellfleet Bay. The latest research in Greenland and Antarctica indicate that these estimates are too far in the future.

Dune blowout at headwaters of Pamet River

To get a better idea of how big this area is, use the satellite view in Google Maps and look for Ballston Beach. You can see by the marks on the sand that a lot of saltwater has flowed over this area in the past week or so.

The Kelp Worm Composite

Disclaimer: I know very little about the varieties of seaweed. I'm pretty certain the seaweed that is common in the Northeast US isn't actually kelp. However, I will shamelessly use "kelp" as a generic term.

For me at least, composites often have a long gestation period. I presume that for many advertising composites a team meticulously plans an entire composite in advance, complete with detailed instructions for each component image. The images are then shot, often all in one session, and later assembled. For an amateur like me, a composite often starts with an image that contains interesting elements of a good composition, but also has one or more fatal flaws as a standalone image. The image sits in my database, perhaps for weeks or months while I mull over why I like it and what I need to change.

Here is an example, taken in early Spring on Plum Island after a big coastal storm. Very high storm tides had washed a number of large logs onto the beach, along with big piles of seaweed (kelp!). One log attracted me because it was curved like the back of a large fish or seal. It had a "mouth" somewhat like a shark and the mouth was filled with seaweed. The mouth at the target point of the powerful curvature of its back made the core of a good composition. I adjusted camera position a bit until the background seemed to fit. Here is the starting image:

The more I looked at this image the more I liked some of its elements and the more I despaired about some of the other elements. I became fixated on the idea that this creature was really at sea and was cresting a large wave. However, this caused the boardwalk and trees to be quite a problem. I discussed the image with some of my friends and they all agreed that the background had to go. I also knew that turning a big pile of kelp and other beach refuse into a nice clean wave was probably beyond my skill level, to put it mildly. So, I went on to other things for a few weeks.

The first big hurdle to making any sort of composite for this image would be to separate the creature from the rest of the image. Generating a precision mask for this is definitely not a job for a beginner in Photoshop! Nevertheless, I thought it would be an interesting skill-building exercise, so I devoted part of yet another stormy spring day to doing that. Once I had the first version of this separation mask done, I was hooked. I spent a day or so thinking about how to build a suitable background. I got basically nowhere. I decided to "deconstruct" the old background to see what elements seemed important. The first element, of course was the horizon line. For a natural scene you don't have to get the horizon exactly in the right place but your foreground image will look weird somehow if the final composite moves the horizon very far. The second important element was the curve where the bottom of the creature met the ground and the kelp pile. The third element was the line where the beach ended. At this point, I was still fixated on having a viewpoint out on a stormy ocean, with a distant shoreline. So, I drew lines on a separate Photoshop layer to depict the simplest essence of those elements. Here I have superimposed them on the original image:

With all that in mind, I scanned my image database for a suitable background. Since I had already decided that this was a sea creature cresting a wave, I needed a viewpoint either from a boat on a very stormy sea or at least on land overlooking a stormy bay. I had no such images, so I put the entire project away for a day. Looking again at my database, I realized that some big storm waves on the east coast of Cape Cod were a good geometrical fit. I found an image that after cropping matched my "essential elements" diagram rather well:

At that point I started to really like this background. Too bad it's backwards. The waves and water are far away and the sea creature would have to be back on land. It took another hour of feeling bad about that before I realized that my initial assumption about the creature was just an assumption. It wasn't going to destroy the composition if my kelp shark turned into a kelp worm or something. Then the problematic wave could turn back into the big pile of kelp that was already there. After that, the entire composition fell into place nicely. I won't say quickly because the separation mask was a real challenge to get just right. Here is the result: