Alternate Reality - The Real Cabbage

The first image represesnts the 'straight' colour image of the frozen ornamental cabbage, the second a black and white conversion, and the previous post the 'colourized' version in which I manipulated the curve to have several peaks and valleys to generate the odd coloured result.

I leave it to you to decide which version (if any) you prefer.

Is It Legitimate?

So what happens if you bring an image into Photoshop and manipulate it beyond reason, but like the result. It isn't really a photograph, so what do you call it, do with it, and do you call it art?

The photograph is of frost damaged ornamental cabbage, I happened to like the pattern, and while adjusting the curves, started doing odd things with sinusoidal waves type curves.

Barrels, Barrels, and More Barrels

Shot with the 90 ts-e and taking advantage of the tilt mechanism to set the plane of focus across the barrels, about one ring in.

ADM Mill

Humble Beginnings

This is an image which attracted me enough to shoot it, but was so boring in the thumbnails I didn't do anything with it for a considerable time. Eventually though, during a quiet moment and looking for some possible images, I decided to see what would happen once I corrected perspective and converted to black and white.

There are two lessons here - sometimes our instinct for a photograph was right, it's just that the image needs so much work the proof just doesn't show it. If shooting only a few images, you are likely to remember this was one worth working on. If on the other hand, as so many of us do when shooting digital, you shoot lots of pictures, the odds of remembering this was a goody are slim to none.

The second lesson is that images which look awful in colour can look really good in black and white. Not only do clashing colours (the red brick and green windows) not interfere in black and white, there isn't the same ties to reality which prevent ramping up the contrast and creating texture where little was seen in the original file. Once manipulated, those windows glow. This image was one selected for Lenswork.

Raw Rebar

Coils of 'wire' 3/4 inch thick are the start of various forms for concrete pillars and other construction items. I used Helicon Focus to blend three images to acqiure the tremendous depth of field necessary to pull off an image like this.

Article On Luminous Landscape

The first in a series of three articles on assessing your own level of skill, both technically and aesthetically is now at Luminous Landscape.
Article one discusses some fairly arbitrary levels of skill I came up with which none the less will I think give you a useful idea of how you are doing.

Since personal bias is an issue, article two goes on to talk about how you might go about getting some help assessing your level.

Since it's of only minor help to know where you are at, if you can't figure out where to go and how to get there, article three discusses some ideas of what to do with the information gathered in parts one and two, hopefully leading to more rapid improvement in your images.

All three are written though the third article needs significant polishing and I don't know what Michael's schedule is for printing the others (he doesn't even have them yet so I'm guessing not until he's back).

Bottom Of The Barrell II

There is some cheating in this series of images. I needed to clone in the corners in two of the images and in the 'pink' drum, there were flaws in the drum and some bright sun in one corner and it was too tightly cropped across the top, all fixed complements of cloning.

Scouting Expeditions

To make the above image, I first visited the site on New Years Day and shot the rebar shot posted some days ago, through the fence. I then went back yesterday and got permission to return today to photograph. I received a tour round the plant and my guide very patiently let me photograph in the cold wind. I came home, loaded the images and realized that some drums were the most interesting thing and that I should move in close. I therefore returned a fourth time this afternoon to do the close images. This is 3 images from my 90 ts-e.

Drums

Storage Bins

17 mm. from my 17-40, perspective and barrel distortion corrected in filters/distort/lens correction in Photoshop. Rather than warming the whole image, I used selective colour in the layers pallete and then the yellows and increased the magenta of them, thus warming the already warm parts of the image without messing with everything else. Sometimes this works better than hue/saturation even when adjusting the individual colours.

I also used Akvis Enhancer. I always sharpen the image before enhancing - sharpening an enhanced image produces some pretty wild artifacts though to be fair, they are only visible on screen and in really large prints - but you never know how large you might some day make the image.

Grain Processing Plant

Shot today as I wandered around east of Calgary. They were very accomodating and assigned a worker to escort me.

More on Cropping

Steve Durbin has sugggested some minor (but significant) further cropping to my image of the previous post. I have posted his version above. I like it very much. I think it does three things to the image. First it eliminates those distracting background elements in the upper left corner which I have been staring at in the print I made and even wondering if I could clone them out (I think he has the better idea). Second, the way he crops the upper left corner means one of the curves comes nicely into the corner. Third, although potentially interesting, the 'lenses' (thanks Steve) in the middle top don't in fact add to the composition and I have failed to take my own advice of a previous post about eliminating everything no matter how interesting if it doesn't actually add to the image.

On the bottom, the change is more subtle but there too perhaps the new version is a little cleaner, not quite so heavy, showing that little 'tuft' of wire in the far left bottom corner to better advantage. Conceivably we could take even more off the bottom to make the curves meet the two bottom corners, but for now I think that wouldn't be a good idea. I think it's good to have some lines go to the corner but one can get a bit carried away with the idea. When two lines head for a corner, it's often better to have the two lines bracket the corner rather than have one hit it and the other miss. That way the 'material' between the two lines is what actually reaches into the corner.

This re-cropping speaks to the need to consider images a work in progress and it's worth reviewing whether in fact you have done the absolute best you can and consider other possibilities. This could be a recropping, but it might be a completely different look to the image, much darker or lighter, or it might be an adjustment to the colour balance (warmer, cooler) or to the saturation. It could even be a reconsideration that the image is better in black and white, or in colour. It's not a bad idea to go back to the original raw file or the negative and start completely over rather than further modifying the present version. Perhaps the new one won't be better but if so nothing is lost, and just maybe it will be a lot better.

There's nothing written to say that first ideas are necessarily best. Sometimes they are and everything else subsequently just weakens the image but other times...

Thanks for your input Steve, not only does it make the image stronger, it strengthens the blog to have insightful feedback and suggestions.

Exercise in Cropping

The image above is my interpretation but in doing the cropping I also realized that there were a number of ways this abstract image could be cropped. For example, I cut off the white elipses (are they elipses when they have pointed ends?) and it would seem to fit the rules of composition if I had cropped right at the point of the elipse. I didn't because I prefer it this way. How would you crop this image?

The original image is below.

By the way, this is the first ever image from my 300 mm. plus 1.4 ex. that I have actually used and I have been carrying the lenses for almost a year now.

The Interest Comes First

I wrote yesterday about not being stuck with preconceived ideas of what to shoot, for fear of missing something new and possibly better. I want to take that thought a bit further and say that I think that 'trying hard' is probably the worst thing you can do as a photographer. I don't mean not being careful, I mean that the harder I look for a good photograph the less likely it is that I will find one.

This of course leaves us with 'so how the hell to I take good photographs if I'm not allowed to go looking for one?'

What if instead of hunting for great images, you were to go out looking for things that interest you. I didn't look for an interesting image in my bedroom, I simply observed that the shorts hanging up made an interesting pattern and I THEN wondered if it might make an interesting photograph despite being such an ordinary subject. The point is THE INTEREST COMES FIRST.

When I photographed ADM Flour Mill, the interesting patterns made by the cracks in the concrete cought my interest and then the question was asked, could that make an interesting photograph.

Imagine your English prof assigning an essay on a particular topic about which you have absolutely no interest. It's possible to do the assignment, but the chances of creating a work of art in the essay has to be considered slim at best. On the other hand, if it is a subject about which you feel very strongly, you might well write an essay, whether anyone asks you to or not, whether anyone is going to give you credit or pay you for it or not.

Mind you, you could easily argue that unless I'm pretty odd (entirely possible), I didn't have an interest in underwear (mine at least, other than to find a clean pair), then the interest can't have preceded the photograph. But even with underwear, it was a simple observation tha clothes dumped randomly on the floor or casually hung up made interesting patterns. I looked at those patterns for a few years before deciding to photograph them.

On the weekend when I photographed the wire forms, it was the way stacks of them formed interesting patterns that interested me - I have no interest in wire forms per-se. Hell, I don't even know if Edward Weston ate peppers!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the interest usually precedes the finding the photograph and that what we should be looking for is not the photographable but the interesting, and I don't think that's the same thing at all.

More On 'Cruzin Fer Snaps'

Perhaps it's just me but sometimes I don't go out photographing because I'm convinced I won't find any good images. Of course this is self defeating as the one sure way not to get any good images is to not take any. One of the ways to anticipate failure is to go looking for images that are similar to those you have already shot, only different, and while you are at it, better.

this preconceived idea of what successful images look like completely blinds us to all the wonderful images which are completely different and are just waiting to be taken. That's not to discourage assignments, only that having chosen an assignment, you should be open to whatever comes along. Do you really think that Edward Weston was on an assignment to photograph dead birds when he came across his Pelican, that Ansel was on a trip to photograph grave yards when he shot 'Moonrise over Hernandez'. Of course not, they were open to whatever subject matter came up. They didn't let preconceived ideas limit their options. No wonder they took great photographs.

When I went out shooting yesterday, I stopped at an industrial site, dirty, rusty, old, but what I ended up photographing was new rebar, with brightly painted ends, and labels, I had absolutely no conception that I would find this. Later in the day, I simply happened on a hill overlooking a large yard full of concrete piping. I realized that this was a location I could photograph into the yard without the trees and fence getting in the way. The picture I got though didn't feature the concrete at all, it was after trying to find an image amongst the stacked concrete that I started wandering down the road and discovered all the wire forms stacked up, and got excited, and spent a wonderful hour excitedly creating images.

I think the message here is to not be afraid to go out photographing no matter how unlikely you think the chances of an interesting image. If you look, you will find. Maybe not every time, but more often than not.

More Wire

Manipulating Reality - Say Yes!

Just read the Alain Briot essay on Luminous Landscape about the issue of answering the question 'is it real or is it manipulated?'. I had previously discussed my dealing with this question and I find Alain's solution makes perfect sense. I too tried 'explaining' and absolutely, it's a slippery slope down which you don't want to be going. His solution to simply and proudly say Yes!, I do manipulate the colours makes perfect sense to me. Besides, these were never customers in the first place - if you define customer as someone who has even a remote chance of buying a print.

Well said, Alain.

Rebar

This I found before the cement fabrication plant. Fresh colour coded rebar ready for the construction boom in Calgary.

Wire Forms

I discovered these at a cement fabrication plant this afternoon. This image is a work in progress but I'm quite excited about the possibilities.