Week Ten of 365 Day Challenge - Landscapes

Day 63 - The Heart of the Sangre de Christos

I live in New Mexico so of course I know how to take landscapes. But when I read that portion of a digital photography book I was surprised to find tips I had never considered consciously, so I figured maybe a week of conscious taking of landscapes was in order.

Rule One -- wait, there are no rules in photography or art -- merely guidelines. One guideline, therefore, would be foreground. Really easy with the long lens on to zero in on just the snow capped mountain above. But per this book on photography foreground is critical to the composition. Ergo I did not walk forward and photograph over the fence. The fence and highland mesa vegetation provides context and depth. 

Not day 64 - Blowing snow

This is using the long lens to zero in. I really like this one but very little foreground, if any.

Day 64 - Wheeler Peak

Better photograph? Frankly for me the jury is still out. I think the one that breaks the rules - oops, guidelines, has more impact. But if I am entering contests where the judges are stickler for rules?

Day 65 - Taos River

Guideline two - landscape does not have to include the complete scape as it were. Sky and complete trees are not necessary.  Snap takers have a tendency to point their cameras at the horizon and see how much of the landscape they can get into one frame. This was about how little. And movement. Horizons often have a static effect so if the horizon is not key do not include it.

Day 66 - Shadows on the snow

Guideline three - complete trees are not necessary. If you have the bottoms you do not need the tops and if you have the tops you do not need the bottoms. I played around with this a bit on a grove of aspen and found that you do sort of need one of the other. Not done playing with that limit, however. And in this photo the concentration is on bottoms and the shadows the trees cast. But the tree on the far left has neither bottom or top in the frame and I think it works fine.

Day 67 - Wide Open Spaces

Guideline four - this one is mine - what originally prompted you to stop the car and take the picture? I have driven by this particular spot on the road between Cimarron and Raton more times than I want to acknowledge and never stopped but always turned and stared. On this particular day I was racing to get home to avoid the snow storm that was moving in. The clouds in this picture are the precursor to that storm. I stopped. Was it the clouds to give a break to the often endless blue? The cattle pens in the foreground? Or the line of fence and power poles that gave a sense of the distance between where I stood and the bluffs and mountains beyond? Or some combination of all that?

I was in a plein aire class once and was confronted with a beautiful canyon along old route 66 to watercolor. After taking a few reference photographs I found myself painting out the line of power poles that ran through Tijeras Canyon in the middle of my composition. I got home with my masterpiece and when I sat down to do the detail work I put the power poles back in per my photograph.

Day 68 - entering Moreno Valley

Guideline five - this one is also mine. You do not have to live with power poles and lines if they have no purpose in the composition. There were two poles in the foreground of this photograph and more annoying, power lines in stark black across white snow. To crop them out eliminated the foreground detail so I decided to practice my cloning in the dry darkroom. Tip - I find it easier to work down than across with the cloning tool and you can rotate the photograph.

Day 69 - Palisades in Cimarron Canyon

Guideline 6 - Not all landscapes are horizontal. Though it is amazing how often I think of landscapes in that context and I have been to Utah.

Having done a few weeks of intense study on dedicated subjects next week is going to be "What I see is what you get." If you want to see the day by day posts go to Binford-Bell Studio 365 Day Challenge - March. There is also an extended discussion on days 67 and 68 about power poles.

Time and Tide

Meal Beach, Burra Isles, Shetland
by Robin Gosnall

Time and tide wait for no man

Out of time

as the tide rolls out

wanting to follow

but afraid

to go.

Time of man

just a concept of clocks

tides ever eternal

wash away

care.

J. Binford-Bell

March 2013

The Mag 159

visual prompt by Tess

Ceremony - The Creative Process

Grand Procession

Grand Procession was one of the first of my large paintings inspired by the canyons of Utah and Arizona. Everyone seemed to want it but nobody bought it though it won prizes as it went from exhibit to exhibit. Then one day it came back from an exhibition with a huge tear in the canvas. I cut the canvas off the stretcher bars, cut off the damaged portion and rolled it up for possible future use in the collage I keep talking about.

When I painted Grand Procession I was working with stock sized pre-stretched canvases and this one was 24 x 36. Since those days I stretch my own canvases in sizes that fit the subject. I pulled out the original sketch one day and decided I might like it better square. A friend had given me a 24 x 24 wooden frame that needed some repair. It seemed perfect to be painted creatively to match a painting.

Black frame in process of sanding and repair

But first it needed sanded and repaired because of nicks it had suffered before it came to me. I rather like working with frames. I have in the past repaired some very ornate and antique frames for clients and small museums.

Frame painted and gesso applied

I wanted to paint the broad flat gutter of the frame and I wanted to use liquid watercolors and inks like I paint with on canvas so I had to apply and sand and reapply several layers of absorbent ground in the gutter.  And paint the edges. I began with the idea of silver or gold and here I am trying out both.

Revised Grand Procession

Next step was to begin the painting. Frame has to match it and not the other way around. I have done paintings where all the figures continue on to the frame but I didn't want to do that this time exactly. I wanted the painting framed in sky and water.

Further progress

But I was not happy with the oranges and Indian Reds. And as a consequence I got sort of stuck here. Fortunately you can lift colors up from the watercolor canvas I use. Decided to paint the frame with the sky and water colors and then see what naturally presented itself for the transition between the two and try them on as it were. Even less happy with the colors in the picture.

First pair up of frame and painting

Ceremony with the color changes

And then I had to lay the frame over the canvas and match colors on t he frame to the end colors on the painting. Paintings with frames that matched was done a lot by artists in the 1950's because they could not afford new frames and were constantly refurbishing older frames. Today a painting from that period with the original painted frame are collector items.

Ceremony with frame

Week Nine - 365 Day Challenge

Day 57

It is all about color

The weather took a turn toward spring in the final days of February. Blue skies and no wind are hard for photographers to resist so my friend, and fellow photographer, Jessica Duke and I grabbed cameras and set of on an all day exhibition around the Enchanted Circle with a deviation down the Rio Grande to Embudo Crossing in the hopes of capturing some pictures of Bald Eagles.

I came back with wonderful pictures of the rivers we visited, the birds, the ice in process of melting, and even big horn sheep, more elk, and memories of seeing bald Eagles flying over my head. But the photographic height of the trip for me was just being out of the studio and focusing on things bigger than a creamer. And being able to play in a riot of color.

Day 58

So, you might ask, isn't the back tail gate of an aging truck a still life? But not of my design. Just of my focus as it were. And I image when this truck is rolling (that is a current license plate) nothing in this picture is still. I personally can hear the rattle and clank of gate and chain.

Note to self: Do not get so engrossed with one photo opportunity that you do not turn around and see what else is the neighborhood.

 

Day 59 - To be a girl

One of the digital photography books I have on my Tablet to read in those moments waiting for the sun to come up or the eagles to appear makes the suggestion to always turn around and look behind you. The photo above was literally right behind me as I was photographing the tail gate of the old truck. And even with the colorful display I almost didn't click the shutter. I spent too many years in film photography and sometimes I worry about the cost of taking bad shots. Why I did not want to waste flash card space was because of the signs. I could not cut down my area of focus with my wide angle or get far enough away with my long lens. I ended up taking multiple pictures because I remembered I could always crop or clone out what I didn't want. In the final analysis on the computer, however, it turned out the signs were a plus.

Note to self: Do not prejudge the photo opportunity.

Day 60

On the day in question I took over 600 pictures. Unless I am desperate for flash card space I do not delete from with the evidence in that tiny screen on the back of my Nikon D90. Here again my years of film experience. I always printed at least a contact sheet and studied the pictures with a magnifying scope before deciding on what to print. Now I get home and upload to my computer and review each photo before post processing begins. There is obvious trash in every batch. And the more photos you take the more trash. You get very ruthless with 600 plus pictures before you. And I confess this one almost got deleted. Spring isn't here yet, the only color is plastic or cloth flowers, the cross is made of rebar, the foreground is messy. I could go on. But in the end I sort of liked what all those things said about the culture that these cruxes exist in. So I decided to make it look like Easter.

Note to Self: Do not always go with your first reaction on your first review.

Day 61

This is that same truck. In the sequence of the photos as they were taken it was after the dress shop and the church that ends this blog (It is the cross that was posted out of sequence from the flash card. I post as I process). I had thought I had digitally recorded everything of worth and turned to walk back to find my photographer friend and saw the part of the truck I had ignored.

Note to self: Completely circle your subject if possible. Be aware this works with trucks but not buffalo.

Day 62

As I previously mentioned I post for the 365 day challenge as I process a photo. This was one of those photos that was rather begrudgingly not deleted. I was playing with focal depth and am ashamed of how many pictures of this one seed pod I took. I deleted all but three on the first pass while I debated that time in memorial argument of all photographers: How much of the photo has to be in focus.

Note to self: Not very much.

Day 63 - The church at Arroyo Seco

Before I began actually printing my photos professionally and entering them in photographic competitions I took a huge amount of pictures of old adobe churches and missions in my area of New Mexico. They were generally toss away shots which I put in a folder on my computer called Art Inspiration because I painted them. I was a painter. Not a photographer. I am still a painter but I do not paint as many churches any more. I photographed this one out of habit mainly and only took a couple shots. I walked forward enough to get the power lines out of way but didn't think it worth walking across the muddy road and through the snow to explore my subject further. I painted it in post processing. I love the shadow of the cross on the roof. A detail I did not notice at the time I took the picture.

Note to self: Go back to Arroyo Seco in the Spring with the sun just a bit lower in the horizon.

I will end this blog with something I am beginning to find quite valuable in my camera bag - my Galaxy Tablet. I started taking it with me because I have two books loaded on it I often want to access - Field Guide to the Nikon D90, and the first of a series of books on digital photography.

I have, however, just begun using it to record important data about a photographic trip. Things like when the sun finally hits the Rio Grande, where we found the Big Horn Sheep, places I want to return to, what time was the cross shadow thrown across the roof, when were the elk in the faraway meadow, what besides Bald Eagles can be found in Embudo Canyon . . . the list is quite long. And unlike my notes taken on paper which get lost in my camera bag these are dated and titled and with me for the next trip.

Happy snaps.

Week Eight - Seven Days with one Still Life

Day 50 - The Creamer

I mentioned in last week's blog about the 365 day challenge that it might be interesting to spend one week with one subject. I decided to do it out of a certain sense of ennui. The weather has been horrid and it is February. And historically a lot of artists have revisited a subject over and over like Monet with his waterlilies, conveniently located in his back yard, and Chartres Cathedral just down the block. Photographers too have seemed to make extended studies like Ansel Adams of Yosemite National Park or Ranchos de Taos Mission.

Besides what could be easier for a photographer than daily photographing a still life arrangement set up in her studio? Just a bit of rearranging, adding or subtracting a minor player, changing the light, picking a different time of day, or rotating the base to catch the light in the windows differently?

I posted on Binford-Bell Studio Fan Page seven photos of my still life with creamer but I took a lot more. So this week on this review of the last seven of the 365 days of 2013 I am going to post some of the also rans.

Day 52 - Also Ran

Same arrangement as Day to but on a sunny day with the studio lights on for the shadow. Warmer colors because of warmer light. I was drawn to the shadows on the basket and so played in the dry darkroom of my computer to bring them up to greater prominence in the composition.

Day 52  - a black and white

Day 53 - Dried Amaryllis flower added

I added an element on day 53 and rotated the tile base just a little and turned on more studio lights to heighten the shadows. I also turned the creamer just a bit to almost a profile view.

Day 54 - Light from windows only

Subtract flowers, turn off lights and try to catch the effect of just the morning light coming through the windows of the studio. Notice the dust on the creamer? Back to the 3/4 view of the spout. And I used a selective focus post process program.

Also ran for day 55

I polished the creamer and the brass vase. Brought back the flowers and added the ball. Right after I took the picture I noticed the yellow seed or something just in front of the candle snuffer and used the scratch remover to delete it. Was going to post that version for the day but decided to play. Ergo the real Day 55.

Day 55

This one when posted has been mistaken for a painting of mine as opposed to a photograph. And I guess in someways you could say it is a digital painting of a photographic image. And available as a Giclee print. I do not do prints of my paintings but all photographs when printed are Giclee which is just blown ink. All my photographs are for sale in a size of your choosing and printed on paper or canvas. This one on canvas would look even more like a painting.

Day 56 - Creamer takes a bow

The polishing of the creamer allowed a wonderful play of reflections of the studio windows and plants. Always have to make sure as a photographer I am not in the picture but the curved surface of the creamer made that easier than mirrors.

Interestingly enough I have not dismantled the still life in the studio. Who knows some interesting combination of light and shadow may cause me to snap it again. I learned a lot from this concentration on one subject. I feel as if I have taken a graduate seminar in photography.

BTW this next week will be very different. Weather improved and another photographer and I decided to erase cabin fever with a road trip through the neighborhood. I promise no creamers.

And just to close off an also ran in Black and White.

Shapes and shadows

Oh, and I did not post day 51. Check out the link to catch that one. Frankly it was the lessor of all posts this last week.

Our Bodies to Abuse

Venus de Milo with Drawers by Dali

Our Bodies

they abuse

thinking they have every right

to invade.

Poison our minds

take our breasts

penetrate our wombs

as if theirs.

Turn our hearts

against us

making us obey their will

by rape.

Rape

legal or illegal

we are slaves to the narrow mind

of men.

J. Binford-Bell

February 2013

With special thanks to the GOP

Week 7 of the 365 Day Challenge

Day 43 - Surfacing

Another week of catch as catch can photos as my energies were directed else where. This propane tank emerging from the winter's melting snow was a happy surprise when I got it to the computer and played with it in post processing. Because of the pattern of snow melt it even looks like wakes from the action of the submarine surfacing.

Day 44 - spreading wings

And happily the butterfly Amaryllis came to the rescue with a second set of blossoms opening up. The reducing of the saturation on this photo shows off the form and makes the photo about something other than color. Photographers should always have plants around to pose as models.  And attractive knick knacks for impromptu still life subjects like my creamer below.

Day 45 - The Creamer

Wasn't it in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that the wicked stepmother steals Sneezy's sneeze by capturing it in a creamer with peppercorns at the bottom to hold it there. I picked up this delightful little creamer at a flea market a decade ago. How to deal with its reflective surface in contrast with the iron candlestick behind it provided a nice mid week challenge. It is sitting on a glass table which added another dimension to the image. I used selective focus in post processing to quiet the background. I did another series of photos with the magic creamer today which no doubt will be in Week 8 of the challenge.

Day 46 - Almost Gone

Continuing the study of my withering amaryllis blossoms. There is one more step to this withering process. It does it so gracefully I will no doubt feature it next week too.

Day 47 - Thorny issue

I first post my daily captures on my fan page Binford-Bell Studio  and a lively conversation came about concerning this photo. There are a million ways to see a subject and with digital manipulation or dry darkroom a million ways to alter it. I thought I would post a couple of the other alternatives for Throny Issue.

Actual colors

Heightened colors

As you can imagine my artist and photography friends have their opinions as to which is their favorite. But the heightened color one got the most likes on my page. And in the process of creating the last one I learned a few more things about my post processing program.

Day 48 - Reflections in Old Town Raton

My natural tendency is to go for the color so the stretch for me in the 365 day challenge is to do black and white or hue/saturation reduction. So day 44 through 47 was the exercise. And after the exploration of the cactus image I was back to color but out of free time. So Day 48 and 49 are images I took in November on a trip to Raton and never found the time to work with. If I am out and about and fill my cards with more than 100 images I snatch out the best and sadly forget the rest sometimes. Which is why I modified the nature of the 365 day challenge for me. It can be a photo I took that day (or often the day before) or one I post processed that day. I love reflections so I am not sure just why I did not work with the one above before now.

Day 49 - Shadows in Old Town Raton

A much simpler image but great shadows and contrasts. Windows are always a focus for me whether they are reflective or not.

Photography does not have to take an entire day like painting so when I only have limited time because life has intruded upon creation it is photography that fills the void. And when I am immersed in painting I can always grab the camera while the paint dries.