Week 18 - 2018 in Photographs

Day 119

In spite of this lead landscape this week was mostly horticulture. That is what happens when you are left in charge of a greenhouse while spring swings back and forth between snow and winds. The snow did give me this great image of the town of Eagle Nest being highlighted by a bit of sun showing through the clouds.

Day 120

Days 120 and 121 are the same photograph but with different treatments. College, my father always said, was not about getting an education but teaching you how to educate yourself. And in the last couple weeks I have discovered that the 365 day photographic challenges I have been doing for several years now are about educating myself as a photographer. So the journey formally begun in Photography 101 continues. And weekly I give myself little exercises. This week it was largely in front of the computer working on processing possibilities. B&W or color?

Day 121

Also crop. The joy of a mega pixel camera is even when cropped there are plenty of pixels to play with. And sometimes you cannot get as close to the subject as you want even with a long lens. A couple years back an article I read said it was unnecessary to include the tops or bottoms of a tree in a photograph. I have achieved some delicious results playing with that and have even deleted both tops and bottoms of aspens. 

The question is how much of a rose needs to be in the photograph to know it is a rose. Surprisingly little. I have included the original photo and two alternative crops. 

The Original photo

Day 122

The extreme crop

Of course an exercise never is just one homework assignment. I give you the example of the purple shamrock. 

Day 123

With the shamrock I wanted to delete all the green. Just for the fun of it. The resulting crop below achieves that and also asks the question, yet again, how much of a photograph has to be in focus. Very little.

Day 124

And day 125. Is just a photograph of one of my orchids in the morning light coming through the studio windows. I cropped to minimize the background distractions and then did a dark vignette to highlight the colors of the flowers. The first photograph of this blog and the last is all about that spot of light through the clouds or the window. But then photography is all about the light.

Day 125

This week I am working on black and white. So next week's blog will be all without color.

Week 25 - 2017 in Photographs

Day 169

 If there is a theme to this week it is landscape. This was the week I wish I had the extra wide angle lens my sister owns. Everything I pointed my camera at seemed to sweep beyond my wide angle lens. So the photos here are a just a segment of what opened before.

Day 170

 Framing of a photograph may be becoming an art of the past because digital and mega pixels means you can just shoot and come back to your studio and crop to the important part.

I began photography at seven and so I still frame in the field. Though I admit with the zoom lens I have learned to bracket manually. Wider than I think I want and then narrower than I think I want, even though narrower can be achieved with cropping back in the dry dark room. What cropping there was this week was off the top and the bottom.

In the wetlands photo below there is a road and a culvert where I am typing. 

Day 171

 And in this cloudscape the camera lens captured sky and fence I did not want. The original still exists as a digital file on my computer, but this is the crop I like.

Day 172

 I love the dawn views from my deck. I have photographed them a lot. But below the bottom fringe of trees are telephone wires and the neighbors' houses. A horse barn made of scrap materials and a horse trailer which has seen better days.

Day 173

 And these daisies bloom in an open lot between two houses beside a road.

Day 174

 And this field of wild irises goes beyond both edges of the photo; beyond the expanse of my wide angle lens. The mountain behind and the road in front was unnecessary. But I decided I liked the dry grasses in the bar ditch and even the snow fence. They define the seasons before the purple spring. And the cattle add scale and depth.

Day 175