Category Archives: Water

iPad Home Screen: Single Leaf and Foliage Reflections 2013

iPad Home Screen - single leaf and foliage reflections

Another iPad Screen, a little late for seasonal use this year. This fits into my ideal of a photographic ipad home screen: it shouldn’t interfere with the clarity of the app icons; it should be interesting and perhaps colorful; it should have some not-in-the-way element that is clearly photographic. Often a shallow depth of field image will work for these goals.

As always with these iPad posts, email me if you’d like an iPad resolution copy.

The obligatory musings: This image was actually flipped horizontally, just for the purpose of iPad screen goodness. In fact, I think it does help the composition. If you keep each of your screens with a free spot, a missing app icon or two, the leaf will show up in the empty corner.

The funny thing is that now in the digital era, when it’s so easy to do things like this, I very rarely do flip images. I tend to try to cling to some sense of reality, now that reality is so malleable by digital means.

In the old days, by contrast, I used to do that in the enlarger. When I saw a composition on the ground glass of my 4×5 view camera, it was upside down and backwards. This actually helped develop my eye for abstraction. Often I would get excited about an exposure, but then I would find it just didn’t “move” the same way (the flow of the eye through a composition) as when I envisioned it, focusing on the upside down and backwards image. Upside down never worked, of course, and I didn’t go there. But sometimes flipping horizontally worked. I can’t think of any of my currently published online images that are flipped, but some of the film work might be.

This print is for sale here.

Two Maple Leaves in Pond, Water Weeds, Sky and Foliage Reflections, VT, 2010

two maple leaves in pond, water weeds, foliage and sky reflections

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between meditation practice and photography lately, as I’ve worked with fall colors and water. (This image is from a few years ago, and it was about time to publish it).

I’ve practiced meditation a lot, and this “modern” phase of my photography very much coincides with the period in my life (since 2003) that has been most committed to sitting meditation practice, which is now very regular and taking up some hours of each day. Of course the practice has great influence on my life, on everything I do; and, it seems, especially on photography.

I think that in spite of several rewrites of my meditation in photography page, I haven’t articulated it very well, and maybe I can advance some clarity now (and I may rewrite that meditation page once again.”

I’ve recently realized, or realized more deeply, some things that photography and meditation practice have in common.

1) You work with what you’ve got, and nothing else.

In photography, we only have what is in front of the lens at any given moment. We can work to change circumstance, to catalyze causes and conditions to create a photograph we want (in some cases by using one’s own lighting, props, etc, or in my case by being in a light or environment that might provide opportunities for an image I might want). Just so in meditation: we learn to work with our experience, the actual only experience that we have in the moment. There is nothing else. Obviously in both photography and in the mind we could “post-process,” gussy things up and fabricate after the fact. But at some point that becomes a departure from both real photography and actual meditation. We work with what we have, in both cases. Through that process we become more familiar with reality. We learn to see better and cut through the conceptual thinking that gets in the way of real seeing.

2) You patiently await whatever arises.

The great meditation master Ajahn Chah once gave the following meditation instructions:
“Put a chair in the middle of a room.
Sit in the chair.
See who comes to visit.”

And of course he’s not expecting a real person to show up. But certainly something will show up.

And it’s the same with a camera and lens. The image from this week, and many more I’ve made, have really been made with this principle. For example this image is made from a certain corner of our little backyard pond. When I have some time, at this time of year when the trees are turning, I go there. I don’t know how it will look, only that there is some chance there may be foliage and sky reflections, and leaves, etc. But the light, the breeze, the state of the trees and clouds — I don’t know what they’ll be like. And they won’t be the same from minute to minute.

This print is for sale here.

Foliage Reflections with light breeze, Hartland, September 2013

foliage reflections vermont autumn

People sometimes ask if I “photoshop” my images much. I was just asked that the other day.

So, two answers:

1) a fine art photograph is not (usually) something you just click on an iPhone, just as in the past a fine art photograph wasn’t just clicked on an instamatic or a point and shoot. I always talk about how a photograph is something that needs to stand on its own, apart from whatever “reality” may have been reflected in the exposure. As such, it might be developed as any photo will need some burning and dodging, finding the right contrast and color balance, tonality, etc.

I like to tell the story of studying with John Sexton at the Maine Photographic Workshop in 1982. He brought in a series of Ansel Adams prints — he was working as Ansel’s assistant at that time. The prints were a straight print through a series of work prints, and the final print. There was pencil writing and drawing on the back of the prints, a practice I came to follow in my darkroom years — drawing showing the burning and dodging sequence, writing about the exposure and chemistry details. Ansel Adams’ straight print in this case was “a good shot,” but really it was pretty dull. It wasn’t until he burned the sky to darken it, dodged areas, played with the chemistry and paper grades, that it really began to sing. Essentially, he worked the overall tonalities and masterfully worked on local tonalities until the whole thing worked together. Ansel used to say that the negative was like the score in a piece of music, and the print was the performance. His performances varied over the years; he changed the style of his printing so that some of his more famous works, such as “Moonrise, Hernedeze, New Mexico” changed to some degree over the years he printed them.

Though of course I had been dodging and burning in the darkroom before that, at that point, in 1982, I started working on prints to really “perform” them, and I still do it now, even though the “darkroom” is “Lightroom,” (and photoshop, and other software sometimes). But I still consider myself a “straight” photographer.

My digital camera files always start out as “raw” files, which is the raw camera data. With the raw file comes an interpretation of how the camera and the software thinks it should look. That’s an initial, rough interpretation of the data. It’s up to me as an artist to refine the interpretation. This is also true of course when I’m working with a scan of a negative or transparency from my film days. Interpretation.

2) As crazy as it sounds, my photos actually reflect what I see, and even what the camera sees. I see the world this way. Don’t tell anyone though, or they will lock me up.

The photo above was exposed in my backyard a couple of days ago. I went out with my cameras, the reflections of the maple trees across the field filtered through the birches on the edge of the pond had caught my eye. I was going for the way the still water looked, but the breeze cam up briefly. I made this exposure for the heck of it, though it wasn’t really why I had come down there. But looking at it afterwards I was kind of blown away by it. The distortion on the water was pretty cool, and my straight-up reflections were rather more boring by comparison.

I did in fact tweak the  contrast a tiny bit over the image, and I “dodged” some of the orange areas to brighten them. But the differences are so subtle I think it might be hard to notice unless you were looking pretty seriously and going from one image to the other. And in fact for this image, though I was tempted to work on it, I held back with some restraint, because the straight image already is so outrageous.

Two Lifeguards in a Boat, Ocean Grove NJ 2013

two lifeguards in a boat at dawn nj

There was some timeless time this summer; beach time with loved ones; Cape Cod and then NJ.

As usual, there is a big backlog of material I want to post, but I thought I would post something pretty fresh.

That week in August in Ocean Grove NJ was a mix of so much that is New Jersey — there is a rich and vibrant ecosystem, and then there is the bustle and bluster, the Chris Christy, the opposite of a sane and harmonious landscape.

There is always timelessness, always space. Just as the atoms that build us are almost entirely empty space, just so, spaciousness of mind permeates even the densest sense that we are caught-in-time. This is good for me to remember as it is about to get cold in Vermont, and I am behind in my chores and also some photographic work.

In my sense of life being too dense, I have to remember that it’s not really. I make it dense with my thinking, but the thoughts themselves have no substance, no density, no reality.

This print is for sale here.

Frog Eye

Frog Eye
Well, I guess I already broke some kind of direction I was heading out on, last week, but in a sense that was heading out in a new direction. That was with my new Micro Four Thirds camera, with which I am quite impressed. It’s obviously great for candid shots and portraits, anywhere I want to be casual and not sticking a big SLR up to my eye. But this week I got some amazingly great glass for it, in the Olympus 60mm Macro lens.

I’ve spent hours with this lens, and I’m pretty sure it’s the best macro lens I’ve ever used: sharp, nice bokeh (though this image doesn’t show that off particularly well). Also the small camera is good for getting close to things without bending, stretching, crawling (as much) and generally contorting myself — which gets exhausting in a long session.

I’ve got other backlogs of projects to post in this space, but no doubt there will be more macro, and more frogs too.

New pond
No sound of a frog
jumping in
-Ryokan

Four Water Striders, Maple Leaves, Autumn, 2007

(Editing on 6/3/2013) I’m going back through these blog entries and adding links to prints that are now for sale, and it seems there was no writing with this entry. Maybe it got lost?

Anyway, this is a different selection from a series of images I made in 2007 — a different selection, and also I think a better interpretation of the image. When I posted this in 2012 I was inspired to go back through those images and reinterpret the files (a bit brighter than I had before) and also maybe to pick a few of them out. They are tagged, selected: on the to-do list.

This print is for sale here.

Snowy Fall Cattails, Vermont, 2011

I’ve been meaning to post this for a good while, probably over a year. This is only the second cattail-featuring photo I’ve published, despite some lifetime affinity for the plant.

When I was a kid I had a thing for cattails, because they were where the frogs and turtles were. They were exotic plants, somehow eradicated from the suburbs where I lived. If I saw them through the car window, I wanted out of the car, right then, and to run to that spot.

Later, I came to see beauty in the rhythmic semi-chaos and lyrical arcs and juts and dips of them. Now that I have a patch of them in a little pond, I sometimes pull them out so they don’t spread too much and fill the pond, as they will. Still, lucky to have some, and certainly lucky to have a pond.

We just got a bit of snow late last week, quickly gone; it’s been unusually mild again this early winter here in Vermont. No snow on the green cattails this year. Despite the mildness, it is December, and the still-got-some-chance vibrance is gone from the leaves.

On a morning like the one this exposure was made, I might dash out with one camera, or load up with as much gear as I can carry. In this case I had both the DSLR and the compact camera. Though the compact “isn’t as good” as the bigger camera, sometimes that is the device that really nails it. On this morning I’ve got several more good exposures, and many of them are from the compact. This image was from a really good morning with the camera. I really need to work on some more of these!

This print is no longer on the site, but let me know if you’d like to buy a print.

Water Weeds, Autumn Foliage Reflections, Hartland VT 2010

Sometimes in the Autumn I go mad with the push/pull I feel in photography. On the one hand, here in Vermont at this time the landscape is the kind of beautiful that would be worth traveling half way around the world to experience. On the other hand, it’s hard to avoid cliche.

On one hand, the colors are vibrant and electric, the environmental energy is dynamic and constantly fresh: moving from heavy gloominess to bright, crisp, sharp and thousands of shades between. And on the other hand, the plants are dying, the days are shortening, and we’re spending much more time indoors.

On one hand, this is one of the most clear manifestations of the changing of seasons, touching into the eternal cycle of life on our planet, a timeless quality. On the other hand, here in Vermont there are so many gardening and household chores to do, that it’s hard to find a moment to look up and pick up the camera. And that struggle starts after I manage to get away from my desk. Luckily (though not from the photographer’s perspective), work always seems to gear up at this time of year. It’s our constant human dilemma: existing in eternity, with the capacity to touch the timeless — but stuck in time and too busy to look up and notice.

So here, I found a bit of time to look, opened up, avoided cliche (I think) and made an image I like. This is literally in my backyard, our little pond reflecting our maple trees.

This print is for sale here.

reflection of hot air balloon with ducks 2010

This image was exposed around the summer solstice this year, the reflection of the balloon bright with rising sun as a family of mergansers swims toward it. Unfortunately I think it works better as a larger print than at this size on screen; here I miss the detail of the ducks and the detail of the curl of water at the bottom of the dam.

It’s funny how this image came up this week. All week I’ve been spending time looking at Ukiyo-e prints. Ukiyo-e means “floating world,” and everyone knows at least one of these images: Hokusai’s Great Wave. Maybe we know a few more Hokusai images or Hiroshige’s, or any number of the countless fantastic prints still available for viewing in museums, galleries and private collections. Also reproductions are available, and now with the magic of the indra-net, we can see thousands of them.

It’s been too too hot, and work a bit slow. Taking time to cool down and look through Ukiyo-e images has been a beautiful thing this week, and they float in my mind through the day and as I lay down to sleep and wake up.

It’s funny, even back when I only made black and white prints, many of the compositional techniques from this genre appealed to me — and even before I saw very many of these prints. Really, so many elements of the genre have permeated my work all along before I even knew much about it: the heartbreaking beauty, the transience, incongruity and tension between elements, and a dynamic tension in the composition. There is a quality of image-as-poem that I’ve always aspired to. The Henri Cartier-Bresson attention to geometry in composition is a tie to the photographic medium, and the Ukiyo-e images also simulate a sense of a “decisive moment” like Cartier-Bresson — though the woodblock carvers were far more free to work with their imagination instead of the far more restraining constraints of actual-moment that we photographers have to deal with.

Though I haven’t seen a hot air balloon or a duck (rabbits, swallows, frogs, carp, and cats are common), I like to imagine this image above as a modern Floating-World print.

Here are a few ukiyo-e images as thumbnails. The first one of these I bought as a reproduction on ricepaper while I was still in high school (inspired by a similar print on the wall of my flute teacher); I kept it thumbtacked to my wall all through college and for a few years after:

This print is for sale here.