Tag: light

Couldn’t let the day pass by…

without acknowledging my father’s birthday. When I came across this pastoral landscape accented by light falling on a distant mountain, it struck me that it was the kind of scenery he would have loved to have painted. I can almost see him slathering color upon the mountains with his palette knife and scratching detail into the hay bales in the foreground with a stiff, tapered brush.

My father’s been gone for almost twenty years but the memories linger. He wasn’t the perfect father but I always knew that he loved me and he knew that I loved him. I’d give almost anything to share with him what my life’s like now.

Love is imperfect, but that’s as it should be. It lives in darkness and light—touching some for a day and others for a lifetime—a gift, not a right. If you love someone, tell them today, in case tomorrow never comes.

Happy birthday, Dad!

Water Caustics…

The beauty of light as it interacts with a creek. The rays refract and converge through the water’s surface—their flickering forms created by an almost infinite combination of depth, wind, solar angle, and surface.

It’s (almost always) about the water.

Burning with Light

Caustics… envelopes of light waves reflected or refracted from a curved surface and projected where they can be visualized. Some of the earliest drawings were done by Leonardo Da Vinci, as he drew reflected caustics from a circular mirror in his notebooks.

I’ve photographed these types of images for years, drawn to them perhaps because of their transient nature. Fleeting, ever changing, flashing prisms of color—they’re related to rainbows.

My father, who was an artist, would have enjoyed this conversation but he’s not here. He died twenty years ago and even after the passage of two decades, I keep him close. He wasn’t perfect, but he loved me and made sacrifices in his role as a father.

Fathers…they step up in ways that can go unnoticed. They stay when they should go, they give when they should take, they abandon dreams in their quest to provide security.

Happy Father’s Day to the amazing men who are fathers, or filling in for fathers. You make the world a better place!

Thoughts on inspiration…

from under a bridge.

a colorful underside of a bridge with sharp light segments and some snow

“First you must have the images, then come the words.”

Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

I photograph first and then I write, for it’s the images that speak to me.

I rarely go out with expectations of what I’m going to photograph. It’s far more interesting to look around and see what’s there, which was how I ended up under this bridge. I can’t even begin to estimate the amount of travel this bridge sees as it leads to one of the most picturesque mountain sites in the country.

Great movie, by the way, the Bridges of Madison County. Written in eleven days after the author spent some time photographing bridges proving once again that inspiration can come from the most simple of events.

One…

a sure sign that IT is coming.DSC_2960-Edit-2-Edit-2

Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.

Louis Aragon

Spring is trying to make a comeback.

As temperatures drop at night, the battle between snowflake and raindrop ensues leaving behind a wintry mix.

A sure sign though that it’s winning is the lone goose.

Soon we will be seeing bright pops of green in photos as people embrace the new season.

I see spring in black and white…what does it look like to you?

 

Light…

and weather.
DSC_6191-3Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy – your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself.

Annie Leibovitz

The Cloud Appreciation Society believes that clouds are nature’s poetry and I would have to agree. I’ve embarked on a self guided study of them and the more I watch them the more disappointed I am to wake up to a “blue sky” day!

This day was filled with endless drama: rain, hail, wind, and the very occasional pop of light when the sun broke through.

If I hadn’t been sitting in my Jeep with the window rolled down and settings dialed in, I would have missed it. I’d been hoping for some lightning but that brief moment of sun worked to add the perfect highlight to my gray study of the lake.

Two things that were invaluable for my shooting set-up that I always have in my Jeep…a trash bag and a beanbag. The trash bag becomes a poor man’s raincoat for my camera and lens and the bean bag gets draped on my window ledge to hold my camera steady. Not always easy during stormy conditions.

Have a great week and remember: having your head in the clouds is a good thing!

Capturing artistry…

what does it take?

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Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Frank Zappa

After many days of gray skies and rain I took to my archives in search of some light.

This image with musicians Nicholas Crosa and Pansy Chang of Pink Martini was taken at an outdoor concert in the early evening.

Their music is a joy to listen to and the visuals of them playing together is in itself like watching a ballet.

I rarely use a flash preferring instead to compose using whatever light is available; in this particular case the stage lighting was soft and dramatic and the slight noise added by using a higher ISO of 800 was negligible..

Minimal lighting creates lost and found edges that leaves so much more to the imagination than illuminating every detail would have.

Artistry for me goes beyond simply mastering a skill and takes it to that level where you no longer have to think about the technical details but can fully immerse yourself in capturing the moment.

Moments are not guaranteed to come on a daily basis and that is why one needs to shoot every day, under all conditions so that you’re ready and not fumbling with settings when you see something that moves you. Having your camera set on auto would not have captured this moment.

The duo of components that I am always looking for and that bring me the greatest joy when captured are movement and light; they are rather like a tango; intertwined and passionate.

Her arm, so gracefully extended, wrist slightly cocked; his smile, soft and gentle. The light just touching part of their faces…their duet pure artistry.

And the music?

Perfection…

On composition and snowboarding…

and how light affects them both.

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How the visual world appears is important to me. I’m always aware of the light. I’m always aware of what I would call the ‘deep composition.’ Photography in the field is a process of creation, of thought and technique. But ultimately, it’s an act of imaginatively seeing from within yourself.

Sam Abell

I’ve been thinking a lot about composition lately. I am going to use snowboarding here as an analogy to one of its components. Being winter in the Northwest I have encountered a lot of flat light which makes riding with your feet strapped onto a waxed board down a mountain just a little more challenging. Even when there is just a hint of light one can see the curves take shape and it becomes far easier to pick a line.

And so it is for photography; just that bit of light allows the eye to move through an image highlighting a curve here, marking a shadow there. When the light is not available composition takes on a different tone and I find myself relying more on a braille approach where I move around framing the shot using visual clues until it just feels right.

Years ago one of my mentors told me to learn the rules first, then break them. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me at first but it does get you into the habit of looking at the whole image instead of just whatever it is that you perceive to be the main subject.

Composition can be aided by so many factors: color, light, lines, vanishing points to name a few. It is an interesting process to look at other mediums in addition to photography and see what draws you in.

There is a lot of emphasis placed on finding your style and developing something that you become known for and I think that this spans across the different mediums, not just photography. Composition and how you see things can play a huge role in this.

January is a great time to look back on the year’s body of work and see what is working and what is not. Think back on those times when someone returns from a trip and you get invited to see the slide show or to look at the photographs and… there are hundreds of them. Nothing has been culled and more than likely, nothing has been edited. This for me is the quintessential difference in being a photographer and being someone who owns a camera.

It’s the start of a brand new year which makes it the perfect time to see where you are at and more importantly where you want to be.

One picture is worth a thousand words…is your voice being heard?