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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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?
Perspective
How we look at something affects what we think about it. We don’t necessarily see truth without some effort; we need to determine if our perspective is correct.
As a quick exploration of this, I took these pictures:
They were posted on Instagram with the left one visible first with a description that said it looks “like a little green campfire of a plant reaching to the sky”.
Read more Floating Focus
In this picture of a small flower, I modified the background after taking the picture in order to highlight the flower and to separate it from the grass below it. Mainly, the grass was blurred a lot and made darker.
I like the way it worked out – the flower seems to float above the grass and is definitely the thing that grabs your attention. The background fades away even though it is a lot of the image.
However, it occurred to me to wonder what was being ignored in the grass. Surprising plant shapes, some interesting bugs, textures on leaves or the dirt, and so on.
Read more Focused Seeing
This picture of a flower was inspired by another photographer’s work, and I tried this as a learning exercise, and like the way it turned out.
The original picture was color, and although the flower itself was mostly white, there were some other shades such as yellow and green. Also, the background was cluttered, mostly green with some brown branches.
Read more Wonder
This is a moderately close up picture of a rock in the yard down the street. It caught my eye a while ago because of the unusual nature of the holes in the rock.
It doesn’t quite look volcanic. Maybe it’s coral? But it doesn’t look like any that I’ve seen before. Perhaps just a strange type of erosion based on the different materials that originally made up the rock? But the holes don’t look like the kind of shapes that usually result from mixing.
So it’s a mystery, at least to me. What should we make of such things?
Read more Feathered Clouds
This is an abstract picture of clouds, processed to bring out how it made me feel, what I saw in the original scene. In the process of making this, new ideas came to mind, and I further processed it to enhance them. The process was like a conversation with myself.
The result was interesting, and I allude to some of the things I was thinking in the text that accompanied the post on social media:
Abstract. A line of trees being blown by the wind? Something else?
The thing is, I’m pretty sure that some people, or even most, don’t see it the same way I do. They may not see the things I saw, and they may also see other things. Those views are entirely valid, in my opinion.
Read more Seeing Color in Rocks
Here’s a possible example of seeing more of what’s there. In this case, colors in a simple field of rocks. What do we see? What’s really there?
Read more Backlit Leaf
This simple picture of a leaf is interesting, I think, because of the way the backlighting makes the leaf stand out from the background and gives it a richer, deeper color. There’s something about this sort of lighting, perhaps similar to stained glass windows, that we find visually appealing.
It takes two separate elements coming together to make this effect, and I think the combination illustrates a subtle aspect about our minds, especially the nature of consciousness.
Read more Photo Walking with Purpose
A recent photo walk taught me some things about seeing and how we influence what we see by what we are looking for.
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