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 Eight - 2016 in Photographs

Day 50
Stellar Jay in Aspen Tree

I mentioned in another blog I was not the type of photographer who wanted to be able to count the feathers on a bird. I also never set up with a tripod in the freezing temps (well, once with my sister) to capture the perfect bird photo. For me a bird picture is a capture like this one with the vivid blue of the jay in stark contrast with the white of the aspen bark.

Day 51
Sunset with Waxing Moon

And I have done my time trying to capture the perfect rising full moon photograph. Photographers with cameras which attach to telescopes can do better. I was taking a photo of the red clouds at sunset and the waxing moon was just there.

Day 52
Garlic braid

 And, interestingly enough, while I captured a clear and precise image of the garlic on the stucco wall I chose to use a brush stoke filter on the image to make it look more like a painting. But the water drops on the banana leaf I left crystal sharp. 

Day 53
Banana leaf

I love photographing reflections in a mirror. And this was an especially great mirror. The question is do you focus on the mirror details or the image reflected in the mirror. I liked the image with the empty chair in stark focus drawing attention to its emptiness.

Day 54
Mirror on the wall

I do like taking photos of animals but I am also always looking for the different capture. I liked the two young deer in front of an adobe wall below. The day was grey and so no stark shadows. It looks like they posed in a portrait studio.

Day 55
Deer

Took quite a few photos of this squirrel. He was unwilling to leave his seeds so I was able to take the shot I wanted. The classic squirrel photo is a profile. But I liked this heads on one. I used a vignette filter to minimize the background clutter. I had focused on the nose, whiskers and fingers.

Day 56
Squirrel

Creative Process - Intention

Red Tail Hawk by J. Binford-Bell

Yes, this is the second blog in the same day when I specifically stated that my intention was to do a blog a week on the creative process. But there I was walking around with my camera in my hand and thinking about intention.

I had my camera on the walk so my intention must be to take a picture or two or three though I will be honest and admit I have sometimes walked for hours and never lifted it to focus. But I have made myself a promise this year to take the camera with me everywhere (except when I intend deliberately not to take it but that is another blog) so I was out on my morning walk with the dogs and the Nikon D90 went with us. I don't, however, always take the entire camera bag with me. It gets heavier every time I have any money to spend. But I had been using my wide angle of late for those pond reflections featured earlier. I changed to my long lens this morning, checked the battery and the memory card.

My intention was clearly to not take sweeping vistas but to focus more narrowly on my world. My 70mm to 300 mm lens is good for long shots and oddly enough macros. I was looking for evidence that spring has begun to emerge from beneath the melted snow.

Great Mullen sprout

And it can get up close and personal with the pollen blossoms on the tall aspen trees. It was also a desire of mine to get a picture to post on Facebook.

Aspens in Spring by J. Binford-Bell

This photo above was to illustrate that aspens do bloom and that is why we are all sneezing currently. Amazing the number of people that only visit in the summer that have no idea why us locals all bemoan sneeze season. This is it. It was suppose to be a straight forward informational photograph but obviously subconsciously I wondered if one can make such a photograph interesting?

But I digress. We were talking intention. There were several intentions guiding me this morning, 1) use another lens, 2) get a photo of the tall aspens and their pollen pods, 3) look for distant wild life. If number 3 had been my only intention I would have walked around for quite a while not taking a picture. The Red Tailed Hawk didn't show up until I was finally back in my driveway.

My Neighbor

In short I think intention can be very different than focus. You can hold more than one intention in your mind at a time and therefore allow for serendipity. But had I gone out solely focused on snapping a picture of a hawk I would have set up on a tripod in a blind and probably not seen anything worth taking a picture of.

I think the same could apply to painting. If you narrow your focus on only one subject or one approach to that subject you may miss an awful lot of creative happenstance.