It's something of a tradition for me to make a shot of a honey bee in a crocus flower the first insect image of the season. This year's image is later than most - lingering cool weather and snow storms have delayed the crocus blooms a bit. But yesterday brought a warm spell and a bit of sun - an now the insect season is officially launched!
The Signature Artists Cooperative Elements exhibit is now open!
The opening reception will be Sunaday afternoon - April 6, 2008, from 2 to 4 p.m at the Battle Creek Arts Center - 205 East Emmett Street, Battle Creek, MI 49017.
March is a funny month. The saying goes “in like a lion, out like a lamb” but in reality is more like “Surprise! It’s winter again!”
At least that is how it felt last week, when nearly a foots of sleety powdery snow fell on Good Friday. Followed, of course, by warmer weather, crocuses pushing up through the ground, and then more snow and sleet…
This was probably the last opportunity for snowflake photographs this season, so I gave it a whirl. Nothing but dusty bits of sleet and ice. Oh well – if you can’t be with what you want to photograph, you may as well photograph the thing you’re with (to mangle an old saying)…
Dusty bits of sleet and ice. In past years I’d have a shot of a bee or two by now. Well, that’ll come…
Last week Pam and I headed out on a little road trip, driving from Kalamazoo to Colorado with stops along the way. The purpose of the trip was to attend the opening of the Macroworld exhibit in Fort Collins – though in reality we really wanted to just get away from the cloudy snowy Michigan winter
The drive through the Midwest was uneventful, but not boring. I love watching the landscape roll out around the car and the road – changing from woodland to prairie, rolling hills to flat plains, back to hills and then mountains.
The Marcoworld exhibit at the Center for Fine Art Photography was excellent. This was the first exhibit in their new space, and the gallery looked great. The gallery was spacious, the work was well presented, and above all the quality of every print in the show was outstanding. Many of the artists were present – and some even travelled farther than me to get there.
We decided to stay in Loveland, Colorado, since it was more or less midway between Fort Collins and Denver. On Saturday morning we just hopped onto Route 34 and made out way west, toward Estes Park. At the reception Friday evening, one of the local photographers urged us to get into the mountains before we left, and that seemed like the best way to get there.
The drive into Estes Park was great – winding through mountain valleys until reaching the high broad valley were the city of Estes Park is located. Once there we stopped at the visitor center, where we learned that Rocky Mountain National Park was more or less closed – you could enter, but the roads were closed off at the passes a few miles in. As an alternative, we decided to head out on the Route 7 scenic byway, and then link up to the Peak to Peak highway through the mountains.
The drive was excellent. I only pulled off once to take a few photographs – one shown here - but otherwise spent the time tolling around the mountain roads, hitting the occasional snow shower on the way. We reached the small town of Nederland, which was celebrating Frozen Dead Guy Days, and after that drove in fairly heavy traffic back to Boulder.
Sunday proved to be the most interesting day for photography. On Saturday evening we visited friends who live in the area, and they suggested the Garden of the Gods as a destination. So on Sunday morning we drove down to Colorado Springs to explore this location.
The Garden of the Gods is home to fascinating and huge rock formations. It’s a Colorado Springs city park, and was donated to the city in the 19th century. We arrived at the tail end of an overnight snow, with clouds still low in the air and a light snow on the ground. By mid afternoon the sky had cleared and the surprising warm March sun was shining in full glory. The park was pretty full with tourists and rock climbers, but it still offered some great photographic opportunities. I took lots of photos during the afternoon, and spent the next few nights in hotels on the road working the images in Photoshop.
So that is it – a couple of days of photography and then back on the road, finally arriving in a still snow covered Michigan – hopefully just a few weeks away from a long awaited spring.
A few more images:
Despite record or near record snows here in west Michigan, this winter has been a poor one so far for snow flake photography. The bits of dust and sleet that have fallen by the foot is just not photogenic.
Monday night was typical. Another 3 to 4 inches of snow fell, but the temperatures rose to the mid thirties as it came down. It was far too warm for snow flake photos, and the flakes themselves were way too sleety.
So I was happily surprised Tuesday evening as the temperatures dropped and a gentle flurry of snow blew into the area. For almost an hour well formed flakes fell and the temperature hovered in the mid 20’s. I was able to snake what may be the only acceptable snow crystal photos of the this season – historically, after February the odds of getting some good shots drop off dramatically.
Photos from this session:
It’s been a slow winter so far. It has snowed like crazy here in west Michigan, but the snow has always been sleety, windblown, dry bits of dust – no fine individual crystals. The counties to the west of Kalamazoo have been hit with the most snow – and the Allegan Forest is now blanketed in white. There is at least 3 feet on the ground, and the small two tracks and seasonal roads that lead to the great places are impassable. I’ve tooled around on the main roads, but the landscapes haven’t come together.
So instead of taking new shots, I’ve been re-working old ones. The Signature Artist Cooperative has a group show coming up, and the theme is simply “The Elements.” So I’ve been readdressing this theme, and here are four new digital abstractions addressing the elements as understood by the ancients - Earth, Air, Fire, Water.
Each of these images started out as a digital photo. But I decided to pull out the plugs and use some of the digital manipulation techniques I’ve been experimenting with these last few weeks. Here’s a run down of the images and techniques used to make them.
Earth. This is the most representational of the images. It started with a shot of leaves decaying in my bird bath. Correcting for the glare of the water created an usual tonal quality for the source image. I ran the source image through an old, 16 bit graphics program, which pixilated and distorted the image. (See the prior post on digital abstractions for more on this.) Unlike the other three images in this series, there was little layering in Photoshop, except for tonal corrections and adjustments. I spent a lot of time drawing on the image, using the dodge and burn tools, to selectively enhance specific details in the image. This image, more than any of the others, looses a lot in small web size, since the pixilation is condensed down and blurred together.
Air. The source photo for this was posted here in May, 2006 – it was a light bulb that had blown out, leaving a layer of soot inside the bulb. The image was inverted and the color tone was adjusted to the blue hue shown here. As with Earth, I did a lot of “painting” with the dodge and burn tools. In particular, I made adjustments to individual channels, bringing out some reddish tones and suppressing some of the flare in the corners.
Fire. This began as a controlled motion blurred shot of a trail running through cool green trees. After inversion, color adjustments, and some work with the sharpening filters to bring out the charcoal like textures in the shadows, I over layered some purely digital color patterns to bring out more orange tones. This image started out way too magenta , and as I worked with it I realized that fire is more orange and yellow than blazing red.
Water. This was the last of the images to be completed. It started with a reflection of the sky in Lake Michigan. That image was turned upside down, which distorted the perspective. A couple of grayscale digital gradients and texture layers were laid over that. Initially the color was too blue – too much like Air – so I swapped the blue and green channels to get the aqua green tone shown here.
You never know if you really like an image until you’ve looked at it for a while – but for now I’m happy with these four images, interpreting the theme of The Elements.
Prints of these images will be displayed at the Signature Artist Cooperative Exhibition entitled “The Elements.” The Exhibit will be at the Art Center of Battle Creek, 256 Emmett Street, Battle Creek, MI 49017. The exhibit will run from April 2-26, 2008.
When making photographs there is an undeniable desire to take control of every aspect of the process. Digital photography has enabled us to control our work with mathematical precision – heck, since a digital photo is, in essence, a mathematical table, it’s chid’s play to add here, subtract there, averge across this range or that…
At some point I find myself yearning for just a bit of randomness to creep into the process. Maybe that’s why I keep playing with film – no matter how carefully you work, there’s no way to precisely control each and every step – how much did that stock solution oxidize since it was mixed? Just how did the solution flow in that last tank inversion? Just how old is this film and did it change in the last few hours, sitting in my warm pocket?
The quest for the infusion of randomness is, for me, a major allure of toy and junk cameras. Come on – it’s all random when you can’t control exposure or focus! No need for subtlety here…
The quest for randomness has sent me looking into many peculiar places – but here is one that is perhaps the strangest of them all: my own computer.
Of course, computers and their software, soulless things that they are, are incapable of truly random actions. They can emulate randomness by tapping into tables of pseudo-random numbers, but that’s it. Pseudo-random means that the lists of figures were once, indeed, random, but have since been frozen in fixed sequence and by that are now locked in relationship with each other, and are therefore not random. Though they are probably arbitrary.
So how can you get randomness out of one of these bit boxes? Well, there’s always software malfunctions…
I recently discovered the wonderful world of software emulators. DOSBOX is a favorite – fire it on top of WindowsXP or Vista, and it does a great job of emulating MS DOS from days gone by. I even unearthed my old Windows 3.1 disks, and installed it in the DOSBOX session. “Wow,” I thought, “I can finally get Kai’s Power Tools 2.0 back up and running…” and so that lead to installing Micrographix and the Kai’s Plug Ins.
And that’s when randomness took over – seems that Micrographix doesn’t know what to do with a 16 bit TIFF, and Kai’s has a hard time with files beyond a certain size. But it’s what Micrographix does with those 16 bit files that’s really interesting. It seems to dither them, fold them, crop them, chop them, and otherwise mess them up. So I immediately started throwing all sorts of photos at it, just to see what will happen…
Well, I like the effect. Pictures of trees seem to work the best – lots of trees, that look good when layed on top of each other. As with a lot of this stuff, a little goes a long way, and after looking at the lot of them for a while only a few remain interesting. But – here’s another interesting trick to play around with.
