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”.
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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 Parts of the Spherical Photograph Experience
Given the nature of spherical photographs as encompassing a complete view of a scene, one result of this is that they are, by nature, interactive. Humans have a limited field of view and trying to present all of a spherical view in a way that can be seen all at once is only possibly by severely distorting the picture. So the only way for a person to see the whole thing is to interact with it, to look at only a part of it at a time.
For my purposes, it turns out to be useful to describe the different aspects of this experience.
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 Spherical Photography
On this site, I will use the term “spherical photography” to refer to pictures that capture the photographer’s view in every direction – 360 degrees around, and 180 degrees up and down. In other words, the image is a complete sphere with the photographer (or camera) at the center.
They are typically viewed in a web browser or mobile app with the viewer panning the view around the picture to see the whole thing.
Google Street View may be the best known example, but they are also commonly used for viewing real estate and hotel rooms and playing some computer games.
Unfortunately, a variety of other terms are also used to describe the images, including photo spheres (Google), 360 panoramas, 360 photographs, virtual reality (VR) panoramas, VR photos, 360 images, interactive panoramas, and immersive panoramas. Various other combinations of the terms are occasionally used, but these are the most common.
I’m less interested in the immersive, virtual reality, or interactive aspects of the images, even though they are certainly involved. Those evoke the way the image is experienced rather than the image itself, and I want to explore alternate ways of experiencing them.
Also, the term “panorama” seems confusing to some people because it generally evokes a wide photograph, typically used for landscape photography. However, even though these pictures are as wide as one can get, they are generally viewed in an aspect ratio that matches typical photographs.
One of the things I hope to explore on this site is the relationship between spherical and flat (planar) photography, which is a little different than creating a “you are there” experience.
So, given the observations above, my particular interests, and the fact that there is no single standard name, I decided to use “spherical photograph”.
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.
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