The Dance

The Couple prompt Mag 254

He swayed

into the kitchen

grabbed her 

to 

Dance.

Off balance

she turned 

to avoid

his 

Kiss.

He reeked 

of alcohol 

off balance

they

Danced.

She asked

herself yet again

why had she

said

Yes.

Jacqui Binford-Bell

Week Two - 2015 in Images

Day 8

I began the week with color. January can be so grey sometimes. But then a freezing fog turned the drabness to a fairy wonderland and I got drawn back into landscape. So it is a mixed bag this week: three for color and four landscapes.

I toyed around with making the photo below more colorful and there is even a black and white version. I have watched the sun hit this corner for a couple weeks. I liked the strong bands of light intermixed with the textures of the wicker and the pillow. This particular post processing solution seemed to bring out those bands of light most and add to the contemplative nature of the Buddha.

Day 9

Freezing fog  produces ice crystals on the branches and needles of the trees. And causes ice crystals to fall from blue skies. It is a fleeting effect, and does not form evenly. I am unsure as to why it will be on one side of a tree and not another. But I do know once the sun is up and fully on the ice it melts. I love the forecast of a freezing fog.

Day 10

I have used these two colorful chairs as props for orchid pictures. But on this particular day as I was re-positioning them  to serve that purpose I decided they enjoyed their own moment in the spot light.

Day 11

Pet sitting is my "day job." It fills in the bare spots in the art market. And it gets me out of the house with my camera when I might just sit at home and brood on winter days. Sometimes I quickly attend to my furry charges and go home, but others are just too fine to not take Big Blue on an outing. And so the landscape photographs.

Day 12

Since the landmarks are the same I try for a different take on the scenery. I had on the long lens for this photograph and the last one for the week. I thought of switching to the wide angle but stopped myself. Why not an up close and personal view of the mountains that surround me. I like the results on Old Mike and Wheeler. Day 14 is Touch Me Not. The sky was boring but the hills brushed with the freezing fog were great.

Day 13

Why day 13 did not get posted with the other freezing fog photos is the barb wire in the foreground. Oh, yes I could have cloned it out but then why not clone out the snow fence. It was when debating that I realized both of them echoed the slant of the tree line in the distance. And it is a perfect illustration of the freezing fog only effecting parts of the tree and a portion of all the trees. And who says every photo I post in the 365 Day challenge has to be perfect. They are instead illustrations of the steps in my learning process.

Day 14

Tomorrow begins Week 3. Stay tuned day by day at Binford-Bell Studio's Page.

Week One - 2015 in Photos

Day One

Beginning of a new year of 365 Photography Challenge. Still time to begin your own challenge. A great way to keep your eye sharp and your camera within easy reach. And try to keep up your enthusiasm in January.

Day Two

When I need color I just go to photographing cars, tractors and green house flowers. But there have been some great epiphanies with trees this winter. I find when I feel reluctant to aim and shoot it is time to push, stop and take a few more minutes to find the beauty in a stark winter scene. Easy with snow. Especially the fairyland snow of Day Three.

Day Three

But when the snow has gotten glossy, the ponds frozen, the skies grey, and the trees bare of even a bird it is a bit harder to keep up my enthusiasm. That said the following photographs of winter trees have been rewarding. Love particularly Day Four with the grey skies, and stark outlines of branches and trunks.

Day Four

Day Five was a lone Aspen trunk against a stucco wall with snow falling. And I was in a I-need-color mode. Posted directly below it is the original photo. One of the things I want to do in the 365 Day Challenge for 2015 is randomly post the original of a modified photograph.

Day Five

Original of Day Five

And once a month I want to focus on a subject for the majority of the week. This week was trees and the shadows they cast as in Day Six below. Winter gives us long and dark shadows especially of the melt and freeze slick coating of old snow in the woods. Trees are five of this week's seven.

Day Six

In January we have only gotten slight changes of some snow but the photo below was taken the morning after a 10% chance of 1/2 inch of snow max. I really liked the results because the little bit of snow does not hide the skeleton of the trees. And on the morning I took Day Seven it was clearing but also still snowing. The air seemed to sparkle.

Day Seven

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The Stand Alones of 2014

Pastel Sky

Assembling paintings for my solo showing in Trinidad, Colorado this last July I had to step back and judge my own work on a new level - inclusiveness. The exhibit was about more than 45 paintings. It was about 45 paintings which belonged together.

With the 365 Day Photographic Challenge it is about picking one photo which merits being the best for that one day. And then in this process of doing a recap on the best of those 365 it was about putting seven or eight photographs together on a blog. Photographs which belonged together because of subject or as an example of getting lucky. The photographs in this blog are examples of the art I would have left behind when doing the solo show this summer. Great photos but they just do not belong with the others.

Pastel Sky is a great dawn photo but it is pastel. It stands out among all my other dawn pictures because it is a different color. The photograph below is a more "normal" dawn at my house. But when I first posted it a photography friend told me I should not over saturate. Made it look fake. I didn't play with the colors on either of these two photographs. If you hung them together on a wall everyone would assume one was a post processing lie. The exhibit would be about that and not the other work.

Red Sky at Dawn

With a large segment of my photographs I just adjust for brightness and shadow. Maybe tweak the contrast a bit. But I also really like going all out on post processing. Painting with digital filters and effects. Like the bowl of fruit in the sun below. The photograph was taken from the interior of the room and back toward the direct light streaming through the windows. What my first photography instructor (and maybe every one since) told me not to do.

Not having to pay for every shot in cost of film and processing frees up the creative side. When I got my first digital camera it took me a long time to get over the "worshiping the shot" mentality. I loved the light and colors on these orbs, and the original is not bad but by playing with enhancement of colors and highlights the tomatoes began to look like glass so I used an enamel filter. I guess it fits in the category of still life but this was not my year to do those. Lots of still life studies in the 2013 365 day challenge.

Fruit Bowl

The next three photographs would fit into a category called reflections, but while reflections remained a favorite in 2014 I also began to regard them as ordinary and so fewer made it to the post a day. The photograph below was of my new-to-me truck. There is something about its teal blue color and the tint of the windows which turns it into a mirror. This is not a photograph of my truck but of my back yard reflected on my truck.

Big Blue as Mirror

Just like this isn't a picture of a pink dress on display in a window but of Main Street Trinidad where this window is. It has won an award in an exhibition and two prints of it have sold. One on metal and another on metallic paper. It is available for sale on my artist's site of Fine Art America. Print number one is hanging in my studio in Black Lake, New Mexico.

Main Street Reflections

Of all the pond reflection pictures I took this year this one made the cut and it isn't even a great reflection but it is a marvelous photograph of the surface of a pond being rippled by a faint breeze. Okay, maybe you have to be a photographer to be thrilled by that.

Trees of Water

Photographers are also thrilled by old trucks. And New Mexico has a lot of old trucks. A lot of them still run but a lot have become lawn ornaments. The one below is at Eagle Nest Museum. I like this picture because like the first truck picture I ever took it is just part of the truck. It is truck as sculpture.

The Old International

If I went back several years there would be enough umbrella pictures for their own blog. Not sure why I like umbrellas, but this is the one for this year. Maybe it is another photographer thing again

Umbrella

The 365 Day challenge for 2015 has begun. Visit Binford-Bell Studio for daily posts.

Buildings and Walls 2014

Las Vegas, New Mexico

I love photographing buildings and walls. They are the urban cliff walls. And in places such as off the plaza in Las Vegas, New Mexico they tell stories of not just the era in which they were built but the lives they sheltered after that, the hopes of the people who loved then and began the process of restoration.

In towns such as Las Vegas, New Mexico and Trinidad, Colorado they tell of richer days and crafts and skills lost. I see my recording of these buildings as preservation of their memories. I often joke that the bulldozer is under appreciated as a remodeling tool in northern, New Mexico, but it is also true we often torn down our history to make way for the "new and improved."

Trinidad, Colorado

The buildings pictured above are often those people want to raze to put in the new. And the one below which is an adobe building in Cimarron the new folk in town want to save. But these three all come from roughly the same time. They were all built and loved when the Santa Fe trail was new and the railroads were moving into town. Sadly for all three renovation often means just a new coat of paint.

Cimarron, New Mexico

Belfry of San Francisco de Assi in Ranchos de Taos

Adobe churches are, however, lovingly restored by the parishioners, and since the advent of National Historic Landmarks overseeing the process, in keeping with the original structure. But every once in a while pipes or tie bars have to be added to preserve the structure. Adobe is mud and mud melts in the rain. This picture of the church often photographed by Ansel Adams was taken in the rain. The adobe walls with the straw are wet and reveal a texture the tourist does not see on a sunny New Mexico Day.

Entrance San Francisco de Assi Mission

I began studying church architecture of New Mexico when in the Fine Arts program at University of New Mexico. I did not begin photographing them until about ten years ago when I would use the photographs as a basis for paintings. I am to introverted to set up an easel in a public plaza to paint. Besides Water colors dry to fast and the light can be too fleeting. This photograph of the reflection of the bell towers in a puddle caught a brief moment. The desert drinks the water from a chance rain very quickly.

Ansel Adams photographed this church a lot. It and he are partly known because of those photographs. His favorite angle was from the rear and I have believed he like that angle because it reminded him of the sheer canyon faces of Yosemite and other western parks like Arches and Canyonlands. In that way be are both a like. And it is why I photographed a modern building in Santa Fe when taking a friend to Eye Associates of New Mexico for cataract surgery. Later I would go myself. But the first time there I had three hours to kill which meant, of course, I had my camera.

Santa Fe, New Mexico

I took dozens of pictures of this building because its walls were a canvas for the light which played on them. These are just two of my favorite. And not just favorite building pictures but maybe favorites of the 365 photographs I took in 2014. They were included in the top 32 after all.

Santa Fe, New Mexico

So why does a photographer pick one picture over another? Good question. For me it is seldom tied up with technical perfection. Nor is it the magic of digital manipulation on the computer. In the photographs on this blog the most manipulation was color or saturation. Black and white is reducing saturation. And except for this last photograph I just tweaked the saturation a bit. Yes, people painting those buildings that color.  The first photograph has a polarizing filter and the second a enamel layer.

This last photograph really had the saturation played with. Adobe walls are amazing to play with in post processing. But heightened color was all. The outline of light on edges, the cracks in the stucco, and the orb were all there in the original digital record from the camera. Yes, sunspot from the sun striking the lens and filter of the camera, but those are usually hexagons.

So to answer the original question: why does a photographer pick one photograph over another? Combination of things would be the easy answer. The difficult one to get people to believe is, "when the magic happens." And you know you could go back to the same spot at the same time and not get the same picture.

Top Landscapes of 2014

Herd Before the Storm

I consider myself primarily a landscape photographer. And I live in an area with fantastic natural beauty. So out of the 365 days of posts a large percentage were landscapes. Those which made up one of the 365 for 2014 were culled from an even larger amount photographs taken. The six photographs included in this blog I consider special for one reason or other. The first photograph could be just another picture of clouds. And I have so many pictures of clouds. The combination of clouds with the herd and the light created a great photograph. Even the slant of the land and the bit of snow fence added to an otherwise ordinary picture.

If you live in the Enchanted Circle of northern New Mexico you are definitely familiar with Old Mike's and Wheeler Peak, the two highest points in the state. Needless to say these two peaks are photographed a lot. Old Mike's in the predominate mountain in this photograph and the all white tiny point to its left is actually the taller Wheeler Peak. The aspects of this photograph, which to me, make it special among the dozens I took in 2014 are the early fall snow, the patch of golden aspens on the foot hills, the clouds, and the play of light and shadows.

But especially important was the point of view. This photo was taken on a walk up the hill from my house. It is not just the mountain but the grass meadow, the near by forest, the distant hills, and the mountain all of which adds to the feeling of distance and size. And to me the mountain itself has great mass when not entirely covered in snow. The early fall snow left the rock structures of the Sangre's not only visible but defined. And, the morning light on the pines helps too.

The Top of the Sangre de Cristos

Ansel Adams said a great photograph was about being in the right place. I would add, at the right time. On a drive back from Albuquerque a friend and I stopped at the top of the Horseshoe turn at the Taos Volcanic Plateau overlook because of smoke rising from a prescribed burn on the distant Apache Reservation to the west. The smoke had drifted into the plateau and filled up the Rio Grande Gorge which splits the plateau.

Here again an often photographed subject by tourists, professional photographers and myself. I have always been rather disappointed at the results. I figured with the smoke this was not destined to be satisfying but, heck, it is digital and I do not have to pay for film or developing so I snapped a few of the smoky gorge. The resultant images were colorless enough that I wondered what they would look like in black and white. And got this great image. The smoke defined the gorge rim and added to the perceived depth of the canyon. BTW it is about 400 to 600 feet deep at this point along its course. It also increased the reality of distance often flattened by full sun.

The Crack

The photograph below was taken in the neighborhood. It is a road I often take. And too often stop to photograph. But an 18 inch snow storm transformed this road through the woods. And the long winter shadows of the morning added to the depth. Never neglect the familiar.

The Road Often Taken

I loved these rocks on a sandstone bluff near Aztec, New Mexico. There they were with no other rocks around. The sandstone underneath them had been worn away by wind and rain to leave these former cap stones stranded. But all the photos seemed ordinary until I tried one on the slant. It is one of my favorite landscapes of the year but obviously impressed nobody else.

Aliens?

While the photograph below turned out to get more likes than any other posted from that same trip. It was for me a "throw away." One of those photos you take just to prove you were there. Or in the old film days to take the one more photo on the roll so you can reload the camera in case a herd of elk come over the hill.

Homestead

In fact, I did not originally even post it as one of the 365 photos for 2014, but to my Back Country Page on Facebook.  When it proved so popular I had to take a second look at this abandoned homestead outside Pagosa Springs. All I remembered were the weeds (thistle) and prairie dog holes. And that I did not want to walk through either to get a better angle or close up on the buildings. But time and distance from the subject revealed the composition and clouds and shadows and light which made it a good photograph.

Tip: Don't consider only your opinion.

All these photographs are for sale. Many are featured on Fine Art American site.

Flowers of 2014

Poppy in Wane

It was a wonderful year for flowers in my neighborhood. And right in my yard. The poppies in the front yard grow like weeds. I often even forget they are there until they put up buds and then I will water them furiously out of guilt for neglect. It seemed a good year to practice taking photographs of flowers because I was often too busy with my solo show to go much further afield. And why go further if your subjects are right there.

Purple Double Ruffle Hollyhock

The hollyhocks seemed to be in competition with the poppies. There are two major issues with flowers as far as I am concerned, one is the breeze, and two is depth of field. Both the poppies and the hollyhocks because of size seem to be challenges. I should have started with daisies. My default cheat was the sport setting on my camera. Greater depth of field than the "flower" setting and it stopped the waving around of petals and stalks.

But sometimes as I mentioned in the previous blog on the photos of 2014 you just get lucky, like the day I arrived back from hanging my solo show in Trinidad, Colorado to find the first poppy of the year blooming or the one below of the last poppy of the year when I returned from another day trip. Both were quickly snapped in landscape auto. The salmon colored poppies were numerous and made appearances all over my timeline on Facebook in between those two solo shows.

First flower of the year

I planted the double ruffle hollyhock this year but a volunteer was this single hollyhock in the same color. I think it was from seeds I picked at the houses of friends and threw into the bed in front of the studio. And when photographing this blossom I was so intent on the focus of the outer edges of this 3" across bloom that I did not see the bee until I uploaded it to the computer. The exercise I had set myself was to not try to encompass the whole flower in the frame. That was also the governing exercise on the opening photo.

Volunteer Hollyhock with Bee

When you have tons of flower pictures they begin to seem ordinary so you dive into post processing techniques to to make the photo special. Though flowers, when you really get to know them, are quite special and also a pretty good challenge for any photographer.

Poppy in the front garden

The other temptation to override with flowers is the full frontal or looking down on them. The hollyhocks were no problem about looking down on because the stalks brought them to my level. But the poppies only grow to about 18 inches so you get to practice squats and getting down on your knees sometimes in other flowers. Glad my long lens does such great macros. I could get far enough away to not crush anything else.

The first flower photography exercises I did were with house plants. Most specifically, orchids. House plants have the advantage of being pose-able. You can be in complete control of the light, direction of the light, background, neighbors, etc. And the breeze. None of which is within your control with plants out of doors other than changing your location or position.

Orchid

And just when you think you have your flower bed and its subjects all pegged for the best photos the plants change the rules. In the case of the hollyhocks the blooms move down the stalk. Back to deep knee squats. The good news is there is an natural tripod to be used in that position. Place legs hip width apart, squat, spread knees, and place elbows on your knees. Also improves your balance as well as leg and hip muscles.

One of the last of the Hollyhocks

The tinge of fall in the leaves I think added to the interest of this photo. Winter is here and it is back to the flowers in the studio and greenhouse. No accidental bees or raindrops as on the hollyhock picture in the previous blog. A misting from a water bottle works to add interest to the inside flowers. But nothing quite beats nature for lighting and gentle rains.

Hollyhock in the morning rain

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