I’ve been wrestling with some newer images — hard to decide about those. But then sometimes some older ones snap into perspective: Oh yes. I put this panorama together from the iceland 2007 trip the other day, and it’s one of those, “Why didn’t I do that sooner?”
I also have a lot of “Why haven’t I done that yet?” images. Well, it’s clear why. Not quite enough time for everything…
Moving on after the exhibition spanning the holidays — lots of work to do on the site and the images.
Well, it’s been a while since a new photo of the week has been published. The exhibit is down. It’s been a busy time.
One thing I’m up to now is reworking a lot of my images. Hint for photographers, but not for lazy photographers: always shoot raw. As algorithms to demosaic raw sensor data evolve faster than sensors, some high end modern raw processors will do a much better job of rendering images than when they were exposed, if they’re not brand new.
In that process, I’m sorting through the catalog and making piles and piles of work for myself; older images to redo, and new images to bring to light.
This is one that has been on the list for a long time. It’s one example of an image that makes me want to print everything and not show on computer screens. It’s better a bit quiet, and if a screen is bright and cranked up to quite-bright, this image is a bit too hot somehow. The energy is all wrong. I almost didn’t publish it a few times, seeing it that way on the laptop, but when things are calibrated, it’s good. I’m confident it will be a good print.
Ahh. Two amazing prints out of the printer in the last few days. These, which I’ve been printing for over 25 years! I’ve sold prints of these over the years; one has been published on a journal cover. I’ve worked and worked on them, and they’ve reached a new peak. Yay!
Both of these are from 4 x 5 inch sheet film. The bare apple and stone wall is infrared sheet film, which is amazing and horrible to work with. Very difficult, unpredictable, and prone to scratching and pinholes. The row of willows is on Tri-X.
When I printed them on silver, they got different treatment, as they are different images. The willows went on a warm tone silver chloride heavy paper like Portriga, and then was toned with selenium to give the browns a warm reddish tone. The Bare Apple, on the other hand, would go on a cool tone Silver Bromide paper like Ilford Gallerie and also get selenium toning to give it a cool blue.
Moving to the pigment-print era, I’ve kept them unique. The bare apple is on Velvet Fine Art paper, a textured watercolor-like paper which is beautiful when combined with the grain of this infrared film. The willows get Cold Press Natural, a warm tone paper that works well with the rich brown tone I’ve kept using for this.
When I started taking photography and post-darkroom printing seriously around 2004, I thought digital cameras were still pretty fun toys, but to do real photography I’d have to work from scans of my old film. So I started in with these scans, these very ones, a decade ago. I’ve worked and worked on them.
Over the last year my “digital darkroom” tools have improved quite a bit, but most of that has to do with how I open Camera Raw files. I’m finding I get better results with software other than Adobe’s, just a bit, so that’s making a difference. Also some post processing tools have helped a little with subtle refinements.
But in this case, it’s not that. I think I’ve just been working a lot, and my eye is better. I’m working on a large show, so that is a kick in the butt. My computer is faster than ever, so I can work with these cumbersome multi-gigabyte files with less hair pulling. It’s still slow going. These are big files, scans of big film.
These two prints will be in the show as big as I can print them at home 16.5 x 21 inch prints. I could print them bigger, if I sent them out, but this show is a handful to get together as it is.
Can’t wait to see them on the walls!
The Row of Willows image is available to view larger and purchase.
The Bare Apple photo is also availabe.
Sometimes these posts come because I have a photo (or several) pressing to be published, and sometimes it’s because I have something to write about. Sometimes it’s neither, and I do this out of discipline. I think it usually works out about the same.
I’ve been listening to The Moth podcasts while gardening lately. These are true stories told by the people who experienced them. The one that triggered this thinking and writing was by Krista Tippett, who broadcasts interviews with a broad range of what might be called “spiritual” people. The striking thing for me in the story she told was a mention of her time in Ireland, and an ancient Celtic idea of “Thin Places.” I had never heard of this as such, by that name and tradition. As she put it, a Thin Place is “a place where the gap between the temporal and transcendent is very thin.” Well. Yes.
I have experienced many such places throughout my lifetime, and arguably the discovery and exploration of such places is what got me to squander so much time with a camera, and then in the darkroom and then on the computer with photos. I could elaborate endlessly, and I think I should do it in a book, and in bits over various posts.
I have found as a photographer that sometimes these places are just dripping with good photographs. Other times, these places make it actually harder to photograph well. Sometimes a good photograph is made of essentially tricks — ways that compositions move the eye, textures, tones, and colors. All the normal ingredients of art applied to create a piece in the same way paint is applied to a canvas. The thing is, you still have to work as a photographer and exert the right skills, whether in a Thin Place or next to a Burger King.
I have also found that the application of effort, skill, and one’s own spiritual energy to a piece of art can create a “Thin Place” right there in the art, from scratch. I realized this over 30 years ago in MOMA, Museum of Modern Art, standing in front of van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Each dab of paint radiated some energy and was a portal to Vincent’s mind — he made that happen.
So in my experience, the relationship between a Thin Place and art is very tricky. 35 years of exploration have not unlocked all the secrets, or very many of them.
Back to this particular spot: A few miles from my house there’s a grove of birch trees right by the road. If I’m walking or riding a bike, I stop there, almost always, and I look and feel. The other week I was stopped on my bike, when a man on a walk I had passed caught up to me and stopped: A neighbor I hadn’t met. We hit it off, had a lot in common, and chatted for probably over an hour, more time than I should have taken as I had client work promises to keep. One thing that came from that conversation was the news that the owner of the land of that birch grove allows walkers.
I have been photographing a lot in recent weeks, which is another set of stories. I am in love with two new-ish cameras and some very nice lenses. I was in the emerging spring, just right in it, watching the buds swell and the leaves break out of them as if in time-lapse. I scrutinized and photographed and savored the bud-bursting leaf popping time, and I felt attached, not wanting it to pass. I wanted the leaves to stay so small and bright with light passing through them and dappling the ground and the other small bright lit-up leaves. But also enjoying the transformation, let it evolve, as everything will.
So a handful of walks in this newly found trail through birch groves and pastures was part of it. It is in some ways such an old time quintessential Vermont paradise of a sort that gets harder and harder to find as there are fewer farms and less mowing, and the fields grow up to brush. But this is very unusual as such an extensive stand of beautiful birch trees. The effect of this place on me is quite profound. But I’ve found it to be very hard to photograph there; I think I go over the gap into the other side of the Thin Spot, into the transcendent. I don’t keep my wits about me as well in terms of what works, what makes a photograph, how to (as a photographer) dab the brush into the paint and onto the canvas. Somehow I want to smear the canvas right on the scene and have it transfer. But it doesn’t work that way, does it? Not in painting or always in photography — you need the intermediary of the brush and paint — or some technology — to move the energy from around you and through you and to create some kind of thing that is related to it but separate.
This print is for sale and can be viewed larger here.
Well, I’m going to cut back the philosophy for a bit and step up the photography for a bit. There are a lot of photos I want to publish!
This one just grabbed me, as they do; I hadn’t intended to post it this week. But for one thing I think it will make a great triptych with my other horizontal ascension infrared pieces from Iceland: this staircase, and this (different) ladder.
This print is for sale here.
Sometimes the photo-of-the-week choice is inspired by something I want to write about, which helps, given how many photos I have to choose from. Sometimes the photo pops up in my face, and I have to post it, and there isn’t much to say. This photo has been trying to get itself posted for some months now.
Today I decided to post “this” image, or in any case a panorama from this side of these rocks. The other side has been online for quite a while. I had already worked on the image, so I thought it might be easy to post. Oops.
This was late in the day. It was cold; we were cold, and I’d already been spending too much time at this spot. The light was failing and I was hurrying. Instead of digging out my tripod and working slowly, I pushed up the ISO a little bit and underexposed a bit in order to be able to make hand-held exposures. The original panorama I had made had some noise problems in some of the images. Luckily those weren’t the only ones I had made, and another series was able to work out too. Always slow and fiddly work to make these panoramas. It’s crazy, but they are so glorious when printed large.
Iceland seems to suddenly be a huge destination for photographers. In keeping my ear to the ground, I hear “Iceland” all the time. So for all you traveling-to-iceland photographers: enjoy and be careful. Take your time even if you’re freezing. Use a tripod more than you want to. You won’t be back for too long, this is your chance. It’s just like the rest of life, really.
This photo can be seen larger here, and it is for sale.
I’ve been working on panoramas a bit, thinking of infrared as I prepare to send off a better camera to get another dedicated infrared conversion (still not sure whether to use Lifepixel or Kolari Vision). And, Iceland has been in the US press lately in regards to the Hidden Folk.
First, for the panorama: this has been a tricky one. Just a little bit off-vertical on a few shots, and it’s very hard to get the ocean horizon to line up. Thanks to a few new tools in my box, and mostly due to the development of patience and technique, and even more due to stubborn determination, I pushed this one through. I got the sense that it would be good, and worth it, so I spent hours and hours. I actually have a handful of variations of this rock/fjord in panorama, both with the infrared and conventional DSLRs, but I liked the way the triangles worked in this composition.
Also, I wanted to talk about the (now no longer linkable) AP article and its ilk that were bouncing around right before Christmas this year. I think this story ran because they used the word “elves” for the beings that many Icelandic people believe inhabit the landscape. Christmas. Elves. Get it? Our guidebook used the word “fairies,” which strikes me as better, more ethereal and less tangible somehow –which is what this is all about. I’ve seen many Americans in the comments section mocking the notion. Well, whether we do the usual human thing of projecting a human personification upon that which is too big to grasp, or however we try to reach out our mind into that which is bigger — it’s no matter. We do the best we can. But better to reach than to close down.
The idea is: “There’s more going on here than I can articulate or grasp. There is energy, beyond what I understand, beyond the merely human.” Call it elves, fairies, god, drala, magic, whatever. Me, I just try to make a good photograph with it as an ally.
This print is for sale here.
This is a funny example of how an image can slowly bubble up to the top of my pile. I don’t think I even noticed this image as noteworthy in sifting through the images once back at my desk, home from iceland. I don’t think it even got a rating, so it stayed hidden in the vast murk of unrated images in my Lightroom catalog. Noticed more or less by accident and rated, it started popping into the overview of possible images. Like a bubble rising out of deep water, it gained speed and size as it popped to the surface of, “Yes!”
This was around the ruins of a herring cannery in the West Fjords of Iceland. We mostly had been camping on the trip, but we stayed, lingered, in this area a bit at a very nice inn.
This print is for sale here.
This is not my usual style, out of all my usual styles, but I like it. Like the last few weeks’ entries, there is a strange juxtaposition of the image and the context. There was a long line, about an hour, to gain access to the James Turrell installation on the fifth floor of the Guggenheim. Because the open interior of the spiral was closed off, the hall with so many of us in line felt a little bit claustrophobic, and certainly echoing the busy energy of a crowd in New York City on a Sunday afternoon.
But strangely, in that crowd, the light and space create an image of spaciousness and openness here in the photo.
Unfortunately I was disappointed in this exhibit, at least in that context on that day. The museum was all abuzz, and it was crowded. Turrell’s work is meditative, and all about opening to a slow, quiet experience of light, space, and our own role as a perceiver, as a participant in the light and space. I love his work. But on this day for many of the pieces I couldn’t slow and open enough to participate in this slow dance of perception he invites. At least that day on the Guggenheim I did slow enough to experience light and space, and humanity in 2013, to make this exposure. I had a chance to see a rather extensive show of Turrell pieces well over a decade ago in a quiet space, and I really hope I get to do it again.
A page about James Turrell is here. If you ever get a chance to see a show of James Turrell works, do it.
This print is available for sale here.
I haven’t done this yet, in this photo-blog, but here’s a variation on the exposures from the last post. The last was done with the infrared camera; this is the regular-light camera, with the image as a black and white. In rendering this panorama I tried to bring to bear the sensibilities of a good darkroom silver print — good rich blacks but lots of silvery grays in between. Though usually I like infrared best for the hay bale images, I like this one a lot. Though of course it’s far from many aspects of ukiyo-e aesthetics, there is something very floating-world about it to me, an energy-of-the-land.
This print is for sale here.