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My post earlier was so fun I thought I'd post another one! This one looks like (if I were a painter) I took a spiney brush to the image. The tight S curve in the center of this one is why I like it. The red and green are vibrant and soft. Enjoy.
Photographer's notes: 0.5 sec, at f/14, ISO 100.
Anthurium is a very common plant in Hawaii. Some of the more prime (I'm assuming) varieties were chosen for the botanical garden I visited. I did not take a liking to this plant, I find it shiny, falic, and dis-jointed looking. Despite this, the result of my shoot with this plant had me twitching in my seat when I got home. To show you what it actually looks like I took this image:
Photographer's notes: taken at 1/60th of a sec. at f/9, ISO 500, exp. -1 2/3 these settings don't make for a great file, but I just had to do whatever I needed to to get a fast enough shutter speed to hand hold, and I knew it would only be used for the web.
It's a fine plant, really. Nature is beautiful in all forms, but it's just not my favourite. However, something stopped me from just walking away. I think it was the question: how can I photograph this in a way that I like? It's obviously a prominent plant in Hawaii, and I should have a record of it.
So, I switched my thinking. I stopped looking at the flower as "anthurium" and looked at it as red, leaf shapped (which is a pleasing shape), white line, ridged texture etc. Breaking down the meaning of what I was looking at. Then I started thinking of myselft as a painter.
Chris and I were talking about this idea of thinking of yourself as a painter. Painters -these are Chris' words that I'm paraphrasing-have to create a composition completely in their mind, and then bring it onto the canvas. THAT is a challenge. As a photographers, everything we have to work with is out there. It's far easier to work with what's there, and simply arrange it somehow.
For me, "I am a painter" is a quick way to say I am pushing myself past the documentary. Painters, especially impressionistic painters, make decisions about their composition and colour based on what they want to show, or say, or what mood they want to express. I seek to do the same thing, except instead of a brush, paints, and whatever other wonderful things a painter choses to use, I have a camera, it's settings, what's around me, the slider adjustments in the darkroom, my hands, and I won't even begin to list the things contained in my mind that I don't even know the extent of.
So on that note, here is one of the abstract images of the anthurium that I created. I won't tell you exactly what I did, I will leave it to you to trace the path and expression of my brush.
Photogrpaher's notes: 0.5 sec, f/25, exp. -1 2/3, ISO 100
Photographer's notes: I rarely shoot on speed priority ( I usually go with aperture priority) but for this shot the speed really was the priority! 1/500th of a sec, at f/8 exp. +1/3, ISO 200.
Outside my house there is this honey suckle bush, and the snow from the roof overhang driped onto the high branches. Water trickled down the entire bush forming icicles all the way down. It's a beautiful sight, but there are two things I struggled with:
1.) the beauty in it's entirety cannot be expressed in the two demensional frame of a photo. I decided it would be a more powerful to focus in on a small, integral part of this sight.
2.) a photo is a still frame, the beauty of this lies in the constant motion and development of it's existance.
The beauty of capturing a moment is that, we have the ability to imagine the before and after. We experience time and again that things are constantly changing, nothing lasts, tomorrow will not be the same as today. We are facinated by the possibility of capturing what we cannot hold onto. Time, a smile, a wave, a rainbow, love, the list goes on. What would life be like if we could bottle these essences of life?
I decided to photograph this Harold Edgerton style-he's the one that captured the image of a drop of milk that makes a crown, and other high speed photography- in the hopes of taking advantage of the tendency we have to see the before and after. To contrast movement with stillness. Enjoy.
Photographer's notes: this image is purely to show the flower, and what it's called. 1/60th of a sec. (just fast enough to hand hold) f/6.3 ISO 100.
This is one of the first plants I came upon in my walk through the botanical garden in Hawaii. I was totally interested in the aptly named plant, and it's delicate whisker like petals.
To accentuate that, I slowed down my shutter speed, and during the exposure I moved my camera in a U shape. This blurred the "whiskers" and made them look even more soft and delicate:
Photographer's notes: 1/4th sec, f/29, ISO 100, exp. -1/3
When I took this image, I didn't plan on making it black and white. What I saw when I got home was a very distracting green background. There was great tonal contrast, but the green totally overtook the picture and pulled away from the soft edges of the flower. It was a bit gutzy for me, because I don't know very much about black and white photography, but since it's only two tones I figured I could handle it! I feel this image shows the beauty that I saw that day when I came upon this unique flower!
Continuing with the photos I took of the plant life in Hawaii, the below image is of a small patch of asian sword fern. It's a very common fern, although not native to the island.I appologize for the length of this post, feel free to skim over the things that may not enrich your reading....
This fern grows near the ground, and can grow to about knee or waist height. The ferns in the images below are only about five inches tall, so I was actually on my knees when I took this photo.
Photographer's notes: taken at 1/6th sec, at f/36, ISO 100. Made sure I had a slow enough shutter speed to play with, but also had a decent exposure so that my histogram was pushed to the right. If you're wondering, your histogram is a graph, and it shows you how much information you have captured in your image. The farther left and right it is pushed, the more info you have. I always make sure that it is pushed as far right as posible (toward the light side) so that when I get home I have enough info to play with. Although, I just found a Freeman Patterson quote that read: "if you have 36 perfectly exposed photos when you get home, you haven' t done anything new" I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea.
In this setting, the ground framed the ferns in two paralel rectangles, in a horizontal type visual. So, to accentuate the verticality of the ferns, I moved my camera up and down during the exposure -here I am using the word exposure to refer to the length of time that my sensor is exposed to the world's light to make the image, not to refer to my histogram.
I was delighted to see that despite the motion, you can still destictly see the horizontal leaves on the blade of the fern. This gives the fern the look of a comb.
This is the original framing of the photo, but later I made a crop:
I made this crop, because I wanted to focus in on one of the most distinct "combs" in the photo. I was also attracted to the "V" that is formed around the center blade. This forms a pleasing group of three. After I made the crop, I processed this image as it's own image, forgetting it's origins. I think this is important, because the framing IS the image basically. The image would not exist without the method in which it is framed; therefore, when you change the framing, you have a new image.
So looking at this image now, I realized that I had the opportunity to play with the colours to make a very distict relationship between complimentary colours. I changed the saturation, luminosity, and even the hue to make the green "pop". These two colours are directly opposite each other on the colour wheel, making them complimentary. If you think I got it wrong, please leave your suggestion in the comments.
I was surprised and delighted with how this image turned out, as I always am with abstracts. The group of three, the "V" and the complimentary colours were unplanned, and it's amazingly inspiring and captivating when I can bring that out in the darkroom.
Photographer's notes: just a side note, I always use the same camera body, and I only own one lens. They are A Canon EOS 40D slr digital. My lens is a 28-135mm. Not very wide, very versatile. Unless otherwise specified, that is what my photos are taken with.
Taken at 1/4th of a sec, at f/32 ISO 100. I find 1/4th of a second to be a magic shutter speed. Just slow enough to play with, but fast enough to capture detail.
In my recent trip to Hawaii, I saw many beautiful tropical flowers. I even went to a stunning botanical garden near Hilo, on the big Island. There I did a kind of study of the flowers and plants. But I realized that there are plenty of lovely, but documentary, photos of tropical flowers in existance, and I didn't need to create more that would simply crowd up my hard drive.
So instead, I took the oportunity to seek out a way to take photos of the flowers that exhibited the most prominent and unique features in they're design and beauty. The result, I hoped, would be a collection of impressionistic portraits of the flowers that I found so captivating. This to me is the esense of a portrait.
The above image is of a stem of orchids. There are tons and tons of orchids on the East side of Hawaii, including wild ones. To me the most lovely thing about orchids are they're cute faces that remind me of the Chesire Cat! The roundness of they're petals, and they're special markings. So to accentuate that, I lowered my shutter speed so that I would have time to turn my camera maybe 45 degrees mid exposure.I also made sure to include the soft C curve of the stem, because I thought it made a nice path for the blossoms.
I think it turned out well, my token of the orchids of Hawaii.
Photographer's notes: f/6.3 ISO 100 at 1/40th sec.
This portrait actually didn't turn out. But i had to take it! This is Chloe. She's a friend of my aunt's that I stayed with in Hawaii (more on that later) and we spent the afternoon with her. She's a feisty, opinionated islander with stunning spunk and wrinkles.
I may never have forgiven myself if I hadn't at least tried to get this photo. She just made me want to tell the story of her face.
I took one other that did turn out, but didn't have the exact mood I wanted.
Don't you just wonder what she's looking at? So, this is the cunundrum. Does the mood of the image shine through the soft focus? I don't know, but I'm glad i took these two images!