Mining for visual nuggets in what’s commonly overlooked.

It’s a struggle to capture something I haven’t seen before, something that’s more skillfully executed than what I have in mind at a given moment. Also, an instructor advised, if you are drawing a blank in terms of inspiration, go out and shoot anyway. Our recent fire season ruined the atmosphere, obliterating what we would normally see during a favorite time of year, late summer and early fall. This series, for now called “Worried Climate” needs a lot of work to offer the kind of originality that I have in mind, but here’s a start.

Photo-manipulation of Natural Phenomena

Since my digital photography upgrade this summer at Rocky Mountain School of Photography (Missoula, Montana), I’ve been photo-manipulating my shots of natural phenomena you wouldn’t ordinarily look at or think about. If you're interested in seeing more, please open my PhotoShelter Portfolio link.

Making Sad Warnings Permanent

To continue my December 27, 2010 post, a showing of my “Relics” is scheduled for December 2011 at a local gallery (Frame Shop and Gallery, Hamilton, Montana). But the effects need more work. Blacks blocked up. Lighter areas looked bleached. Earlier this summer, I plunged into an intensive digital photography upgrade to get a better handle on the editing software, Photoshop (Rocky Mountain School of Photography, Missoula, Montana). Now I can understand the problems evident in my “Relics” series.

While in the program, I took every opportunity to manipulate an image in Photoshop, specifically to duplicate, flip, and blend a single image – which works better than trying to blend several different images. In one class, the instructor asked us to think in terms of a concept and produce a series based on that concept.

Mine: commemorative roadside crosses disintegrate and are forgotten. I wanted to conjure up a way to make these sad warnings permanent. As four-way symmetry is a metaphor for eternity, from each photograph I took of a roadside cross, I designed a square made up of four blended layers, each lying at a different 90-degree angle.

Scarves can be permanent, handed down from one generation to the next. I converted the above square into a silk scarf, and it looks just fine.

Please don’t drink and drive.

The Otherworldly in Macro

I love the effects of some extreme close-up views and decided to give Macro a try. From last June through the early fall, 2010, I conducted Macro tests. My equipment: Canon EOS 20D with a Canon Macro lens EF 100 mm 1:2.8 IS, using a remote shutter release, mounted on a Slik AMT tripod

The closer you are to a subject, the shallower the depth of field. To try to “fix” that, I used Photoshop, version CS4. I took multiple shots of the same subject, each shot with a different focus point. For each shot I created a separate layer, selected all layers, auto-aligned, and auto-blended them.

Essential help came from iStock contributor Kevin Jay on the site’s photography forum. I learned:

The best light is bright and even; avoid direct sunlight. I shot indoors, placing the subject in front of a window and away from direct sunlight. Sometimes I used a light box under the subject, or a swatch of black velvet; or I painted the subject with a flashlight.

F 16 is the smallest aperture you can use and still get sharp focus. Lock up the camera’s mirror for exposure times slower than 1/60 of a second. When mounted on a tripod, the camera does not need its image stabilizer. If you leave it on when using a tripod, the result can be soft images as the lens spins and fights against a still platform.

Except for the single Macro photograph seen here, each resulting image had something wrong: a blemish on a petal, overexposure, underexposure, blurriness, flat and dull lighting, unintended see-through effects, and/or poor color balance. The worst was posterization in a few images, which can be corrected by shooting and processing in Raw. Raw has more color flexibility than JPEG. I haven’t gotten to Raw yet.

From the beginning, I asked, “What can I do with Macro that I don’t see anyone else doing?” I like to capture what looks like an otherworldly environment. Come spring when the flowers bloom again I’ll give Macro another try.