Portraits of an Intimate Nature

Time for a post on photography...

I've got a few running themes that go through much of my photography. Some time ago, I decided I wasn't a landscape photographer, though I take plenty of pictures of nature. My nature shots tend to be more about details, close-ups — and yet it's not macro photography.

It occurred to me to begin thinking of my nature photography as portraits, intimate portraits in a way. Some quiet natural detail or moment -- often out of context.* I came up with this blog entry's title, meant as a play on words and also as a characterization of many of my nature images.

Rather than spend more words to try to describe what I mean, here is a selection of fifteen images to show you.

Portraits of an Intimate Nature

All of these pictures share a quiet, contemplative feeling that I can only describe as "intimate".

o - o - o

* "Out of context" is itself a running theme I apply to more than my nature photography.

Shots I Wish I'd Taken: Namibian Trees (Lanting)

You may have seen this one... Franz Lanting's image of camel thorn trees circulated around* the internet earlier this year.

One of the amazing things about this shot is that it is not a fake. Though it reminds me of a painting you might get if Gauguin were crossed with Matisse and the resulting artist decided to paint a landscape, this is a straight-up, brilliantly composed, photo. Plus, it's trees!

Camel Thorn Trees, Franz Lanting, National Geographic (June 2011)

- o - o -

* Is "circulating around" a redundant phrase?

Shots I Wish I'd Taken: Shadows In the Desert (Steinmetz)

Speaking of shadows... Wow.

Camels, shot by George Steinmetz for National Geographic, Feb 2005
(This particular version borrowed from Snopes here.
Go to Steinmetz's website for more fantastic images.)

Thanks, Karey.

Seeing Things That Aren't There

As I scroll through my photo collection, something becomes very clear: I like to capture reflections and shadows. In fact, after tree images, such “projection” shots are probably the single biggest category of shots I take.

[Click thumbnails for larger versions.]

Still Life

Three Stooges

Reflecting on Elegance

I used to shoot stacks of chopped wood compulsively. I never met one I didn’t want to immortalize as a priceless and unique little rectangle. Ditto for steps and stairs...couldn’t pass a staircase without snapping it. Even as I pressed the shutter release, I knew it was not the photo I imagined. But *click* went the shutter.

I no longer feel compelled to shoot these subjects. For some odd reason, many many stacks and stairs look alike. Exbhibit A:

It’s not that they don’t sometimes make great images; I’ve simply found that my compulsion to snap them rarely produces “keeper” shots. Now I’m a little more disciplined with those subjects.

Starwood

Woodwall

Woodchuck Challenge

With reflections and shadows it’s different. I not only shoot them compulsively, I notice them everywhere. And here I can say I’ve never — well, almost never — met a reflection or shadow photograph I didn’t like. They’re all keepers! (Someone else’s eyes might glaze over, but I prize every such shot...)

Intruder | Newport | Almost

Montblanc | Berlin Abstract | Kadett | Market Fountain (clockwise)

Trees

Reflecting on Reflecting

What’s so special about reflections and shadows? For me, I think the key thought is projection. These projections refer to something in the physical world, but they aren’t themselves the objects. It’s the fascination of visually capturing something that isn’t really there. When we look at a reflection or shadow, we’re seeing a sort of ghostly suggestion of the original. It’s not even three-dimensional, more like a painting or drawing traced by light on a more physical canvas of water, glass, or a wall.

And it’s a painting that changes constantly, maybe never to repeat itself exactly...

Lakes

Lamps

Windows

Miscellaneous

Windows II

Windows III

Févorites Fauteaux: St Jean Staircase

It's been a busy month in the real world so far, but...

Welcome back to my favorite photos! This entry's title has a faux-French flavor to signal that the photo in question is true French. (Actually, that lame explanation is supposed to cover my meaningless penchant for silly spellings. Can anyone say ghoti?)

Phirst the foto, then a bit about why it's one of my favorites.

St. Jean Staircase (No. 2), Lyon

(I've sort of copped out on the title of this image by giving it a "number 2". I wanted to distinguish it from another shot of this same staircase that some may already know from contests and framed prints.)

This image makes my list of favorites for the following reasons:

• The rich, warm coloring, combined with the gradient shading of the forms and the light, give it a very cozy, timeless feeling. 
• It's got a nice mix of curves and angles in repetitive patterns. 
• There's balance: the pattern on the top (the underside of the stair) balances the one on the bottom, while the darkness toward the top right (under the curve) is balanced by that on the bottom left.
• It's got nothing to distract me (as opposed to Staircase No. 1).

And finally:

• Starting at the top, each of the four macro-shapes leads harmoniously to its neighbor: 1) The honey underside of the staircase forms a stark curving border to outline the top of the 2) eye-shaped back wall. The ochre back wall dissolves downward to the 3) serrated repetition of the left edge of the steps, which in turn make part of the bottom border of the wall. And 4) the vaguely thorn-shaped shadow at left continues the bottom border in an arc back to the top of the eye shape.

The overarching dominant form this interaction of shapes creates for me is — Surprise! — that of a tree leaf, such as a hornbeam or a leaf from my favorite tree of all, a beech. Which goes to show that even when I'm not taking pictures of trees, I'm seeing them. And with that, I'll sneak a real tree into this entry.

Down at the Beech

--o-o--

My apologies if anyone clicked on the "Beta Dad" blog link in my favorites up there on the right and the link took you to a placeholder site for someone else. The real Beta Dad blog's name is butterbeanandcobra.blogspot.com. Go there to find out why this name. I've corrected my link.

Color or B/W? (Part 2)

[Part 2 of 3 in a series exploring the choice photographera have to make between shooting in color and black and white. Part 1 highlighted some of the strengths of b/w.]

Part 2: Color Works

Photography really developed into an art form in the days before color film. So when color became more prevalent beginning around the middle of the 20th century, there was still a hold-over...um...snobbery about it from art photographers. Color was deemed fine for “snap shots” and “commercial work” such as magazine advertising.* But it wasn’t art. (That’s the nutshell version of part 1 of Color Magazine’s history of color photography.) Maybe this prejudice was a little like that of, say, painters toward illustrators such as Norman Rockwell and even comic strip — whoops, I mean graphic fiction artists.

But for photography, that’s changed, with good reason. Each approach — color and b/w — has distinct advantages in art photography. Black and white allows the photographer to emphasize lightness/darkness contrasts, patterns, and shape and light without the distraction of other colors or differently colored elements in the frame. It also helps a photographer create a range of darker moods and reflective emotions.

The advantage of color is, well, the colors. This should be clear without further comment in the before-and-afters below.

Most of us see the world in color. Many have experienced a sort of squeezed-chest joy at the utter brilliance of a sunset, an autumn tree, or some other color extravaganza the world can throw at us. Color photography allows the viewer to go: “Wow! Reality's amazing!”

The art of color art photography, then, comes in presenting a slice of reality — I like to think of excerpting the world — in an artistic way (say, through compositional elements). At least, that’s my take on it.

Here are a few color excerpts to enjoy:

The final installment in this series will consider some images that work well in both color and black and white, and why that is.

* We came on a trove of People magazines from the mid-1980s and early 1990s. It’s hard to believe now, but most of the images in these magazines were in black and white! Only the covers and inside advertisements were printed in color.

Color or Black and White? (Part 1)

Shoot in color or black and white?

It used to be — and still is for some photographers — you had to choose whether to shoot in black and white or in color. The photographer exercised the choice in one of two ways. Either 1) shoot up a roll of color or b/w film, then load a roll b/w or color film to change; or 2) shoot with more than one camera, each loaded with different film. When I started out in the early 1980s, I mostly went with option one, which for some reason had the effect of making me shoot predominantly in one or the other mode for long periods. For a brief time when I had only myself to spend my money on, I had two cameras: a Pentax K-1000 and a Canon AE-1, each with its own lenses.* I felt like a National Geographic pro, with two cameras dangling from my neck as I shot my way around the lovely Monterey Peninsula, camping under cypresses in the rain.

Digital changed that either/or situation. Now, you can choose a setting in the camera, and you just start shooting in b/w or color. Or, and this is what I do, shoot everything in color and then process it on the computer as black and white or color.** The benefits of this approach are that, even if you finalize it as a b/w image, you always have the original, full-color image, and you can even play around in Photoshop to make a hybrid image.

But you still have to choose what the final image will be, and that’s what this 3-part series is about.

I’m no pro. Though I’m working on it, I’m unschooled on most of the history and practitioners of photography. But for now I’ve concluded three things. For me: 1) some images just work better in black and white; 2) some in color; and 3) some work well in both. (I know! Who needs to study this stuff?)

This series considers each of those momentous conclusions above, using before-and-after examples from my own photography, and considers why I made the decisions I did. Of course, there’s no accounting for taste. One person could easily prefer the color version where I prefer the b/w, or the other way around. I hope not, but I admit it’s possible not everyone shares my impeccable sense of taste. But I hope in this series to at least convince you of the logic for the choices I’ve made.

Part 1 of 3: Better in Black and White

How do I decide? What are the factors I consider? There are a number of answers. The most obvious one is that when I look around, there are some things I simply “see” as b/w images. I’ve tried to analyze how that happens, and I think it mostly has to do with mood — whether my own at the time of shooting or more often the location or image subject. Unsurprisingly, black and white accentuates contrasts, creating a stark mood. In that vein, the following image works for me better in b/w.

X-Ray

What I'm looking for from the image above is a cold, skeletal feeling, like paring back the flesh of the summer and autumn to make way for coming winter. The color image is nice, but the transparency of the leaves on top of each other, their veins, and the structural delicacy come through better in b/w.

The following image doesn’t work for me at all in color. It’s an example of “seeing” it in black and white in my head as I was looking around during a country walk. The reason I crouched in the mud to get this shot was specifically the contrast of the foreground blades in shadow with the bright background. My vision of it was confirmed when I got the image big on my computer. If you click on the image, you’ll see better what I mean. In the color version, the green nearly drowns out the contrast, as well as introducing a distracting brown from the mud in the middle ground. In b/w, you get contrast. (I should have cropped the left edge a bit, and will likely do so if I turn it into a print.)

Field Edge

Some images look good in both, for whatever reasons, but one or the other doesn’t convey what I was aiming for with a shot. The following image is an example of such a situation. In the color version, the fading sunlight provides a dramatic speckling of blue sky amid the evening clouds. I opted for the b/w version, however, since my intention was to show an imposing, imperious government building. The title of this image is “Ministry of Intimidation”, and the color version just doesn’t get that across like the b/w.

Ministry of Intimidation

Finally, as noted, a particular strength of black and white is the accentuation of contrasts. Nowhere does this come out more clearly than in patterns and decontextualization of shapes. I was fortunate in the following image while playing around with framing and the choice of color or b/w. I really liked the color version. It had three of the magic ingredients I look for (see this post). But when I started looking at it on the computer in black and white, those ingredients jumped out and grabbed my face. Returning to the color version, I found it weak, with the earthy colors kind of nullifying each other and dragging the whole thing down, as compared with the stark emphasis on pattern and shape that jumps out of the b/w version.

Stuttgart Train Station

Part 2 will look at why certain images work better in color than in b/w. You can probably imagine some of the reasons. But seeing the difference will show you how big a deal it can be.

* Still have that K-1000. Bought it used in 1984 for 50 bucks. It’s traveled all around with me, been banana juiced, beach sanded, and internationally banged around — and still takes great shots.

** Note: I’m not qualified to enter the debate of the benefits of “wet-film” black and white versus digital black and white photography.