Author: Jim

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Concepts Essay Photographs

Isolations: A Volunteer

This is a simple picture of a tree in a field. Unremarkable, but the composition can be seen as a different example of “Isolations” as described in a previous post – Conversing with Photography.

To me, this picture is not just a lone tree in a field, but when related to the line of trees just beyond it, it is a volunteer.

Imagine some people standing in a line, all facing the same direction, and a volunteer is asked for. It may be for a dangerous mission, or a tricky sports maneuver, or even just being the first to taste a new ice cream. As often happens in such cases, imagine that only a single person steps forward.

“I’ll do it.”

That’s what I see here. The individual standing tall, just a step forward from those remaining back in the line. Anonymous, undifferentiated except in willingness.

The isolated tree looks taller from the vantage from which the picture was taken, but I don’t know if it really was or not.

I wonder if anyone else sees this? And if they didn’t at first, do they now that I’ve described it? If so, does that make the picture any more interesting?

This is an open question for me – the relationship between taking a picture and explaining it. Part of me says that pictures should stand on their own. But on the other hand, that seems like an arbitrary requirement, like saying that the visual part of a movie should stand on its own without sound. Both silent movies and modern movies are valid, they just are different. So couldn’t it be the same for photography?

Perhaps some creations involve both image and text. But then, would that sort of creation need a different name than “photograph”?

Interesting questions, but perhaps not that important. I find it helpful and fun to occasionally enhance photos with text, and so will probably continue to do so.

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Essay Photographs

Escape

This is a picture of a leek blossom, just opening up. It’s actually a bundle of small flowers.

I like this picture because of its beauty. Part of that, to me, is the sense of things moving towards the right. There’s a tension, a leaning in that direction that makes it seem as if individual flowers are straining to move that way. The tilt of the blossom, the curve at the top of the casing, the loose spacing of the flowers at the right, all work to give this sense.

It looks as if the blossoms are bursting out, trying to escape and get away from the pod, like some alien capsule discharging its crowd of travelers after a very long voyage.

This sense of escape is something we can all identify with. Aren’t there times in our lives when we long to escape? It may be from the daily grind, from a bad job or relationship, from a disease or other uncomfortable situation.

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Essay Photographs

Seeing Life

One of the persistently difficult questions that comes up in science is how to define life – how to determine if something is living. To most of us, it’s fairly obvious. Plants and animals, including humans, are alive. Rocks, water, and so on, are not.

However, the question gets more complicated for scientists that study things like viruses and other very simple organisms that, although they are organic and interact with other living things, do not have all the characteristics of other life. Nevertheless, they often have DNA and it seems troubling for some reason to not think of them as living.

Regardless of what one thinks about this issue, the initial observation, that it’s obvious to most of us what life looks like, is worth some deeper consideration.

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Concepts Essay VR Photographs

Viewing Spherical Photos as Cylinders

Previously, I described an alternative way to represent pointers to spherical photos. Usually they are static online pictures, which works since a hyperlink can then send the viewer to the full, interactive picture. However, another possibility is to make the pointer a physical picture, printed out and maybe even hung on the wall.

The same thing can be done with the spherical picture itself. Ideally, the pictures represent the inside of a sphere, the view one gets when looking around. However, it can be printed on the outside of a sphere, and the experience of viewing it still more or less works.

Such spheres have been made, and it’s possible to order something very near from companies who will print them on pieces that snap together. Also, some people have experimented with mapping the picture to the outside of a cube, which gives six fixed views. That’s obviously less interactive, but still gives some idea.

In many spherical pictures, though, the top and bottom are not interesting. These represent looking up and down. A spherical picture taken outside while standing on cement, for example, would just have sky above and gray below – not very interesting.

This leads to another possibility: removing the top and bottom, straightening the sides, and making a cylinder by printing it on the outside.

Viewing a cylinder just means rotating it so that the area of interest is seen. Seems like this should work naturally.

A small cylinder could be the size of a Christmas ornament, while a larger one could sit on some sort of stand. On a stand, the viewer could easily turn it, approximating the experience of panning left or right in a regular online spherical photo. In addition, the stand could be motorized so that the cylinder moves on its own, just like online versions sometimes automatically pan around.

Going even further, the user could interact with the motorized system to be gently directed to certain views. There are more options for placing lighting inside the cylinder, coupling cylinders, generating the view dynamically from a projector instead of printed, and so on.

It seems like this approach has a lot of interesting possibilities, and I may end up building some to check them out.

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Concepts Photographs

Seeing With Awareness

I took this picture recently while on a photo walk. During the walk, I was intentionally open to new perspectives, so it’s easier to notice things that I would normally miss.

In this case, it seemed like the box appeared to be a face. Now, this box is in our front yard and I’ve probably looked at it hundreds of times without noticing that. But with an open mind, the association jumped out.

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Essay Photographs VR Photographs

New Ways to Engage With Spherical Photos

In an earlier essay, I talked about the different pieces of a spherical photograph experience. Here, I want to look at the static introduction image piece a little more closely.

Spherical photos are inherently interactive because humans cannot see an entire sphere at one time without severely distorting the image. Before interacting with the image, people often encounter a representation of it that is static. This is often a thumbnail image of one portion of the whole sphere. Occasionally, it may be most or all of the sphere as a highly distorted image.*

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Concepts Essay Photographs

Another Way to Focus

I recently took a picture of some plants that had interesting leaves. The picture had a calm aspect, the details on the leaves looking almost fuzzy. A little later, I reprocessed it to be black and white. The result gave a different feel to the picture. With the green color removed, the unusually shaped leaves and almost spiky texture jumped out.

Here are the two versions:

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Essay Photographs

Not A Photograph

This picture started out as a photograph of a crack in the street. The shape reminded me of a lightning bolt, so as an exercise, I processed it in Photoshop to enhance that freeling. Carefully cropped it, inverted it so the black crack became white, and so on.

The result is a little abstract, but I think gets the idea across of a lightning bolt striking in a field.

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Concepts Essay VR Photographs

Spherical Photography as Metaphor

Spherical photographs provide rich ways of exploring remote locations and giving a “you are there” experience. But in addition to photographic value, they also offer an interesting metaphor for seeing our world more clearly.

To understand how the metaphor might work, consider the following illustration.

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Essay Photographs

Conversing With Photography

A couple years ago, I developed a photography project called “Isolations”. The idea was to make a series of pictures, typically close-up, of things isolated from their surroundings. The most common technique was to blur the backgrounds, but dimming it, desaturating, and so on, are all reasonable possibilities.

One of those pictures wasn’t quite that simple, in that there were a series of items that moved progressively out of focus, while the main subject was clear. I took the picture casually, not thinking it was a great example of what I was looking for, but interested in what was there, what might be made of it.

Here is the picture:

Looking at it later, the weeds seemed to be playing “follow the leader”, and this led me to think of how this was a picture of leadership. It was a positive metaphor in that the leader was involved, in the front, blazing the trail, rather than in the rear telling other people to do all the work. On the other hand, it was also a picture of leaders who are “prickly”, who may be difficult to work for, abrasive to the people they are leading, and so on. Both worked, it just depended on what one wanted to bring out.

It was interesting to me that these concepts were not in mind when taking the picture, but really jumped out afterward. I actually learned some things about leadership and how to think about it. The process led me to think about what other things could be pictured as part of a photography project.

This back and forth sequence was like a conversation between myself and my photographic activities. Seems like an interesting idea – to use photography itself as a way to think through things. Even if a good picture does not result, there would be value in the process just like with any other conversation. In fact, might this be a comment on the artistic process in general?