Monthly Archives: February 2016

BROAD VIEW

These images were made recently on short trips, some from the car.

The photos take a broad view, literally, and some also take a broader view than typical landscape photography does of what you can do with a camera.

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Brooding skies over the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle, with the Olympic Mountains in the distance. This one uses an in-camera filter for dramatic effect.

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Three roadside shots from the Cascade Mountains, near Index, Washington. The first two were taken from the car as we rounded bends on a narrow, two lane road. Coming out of the camera, the top two were very pale and didn’t look like much, but boost the contrast and increase the black tones, or pull the tone curve shadows and darks way down, and they get interesting. Desaturating the second one adds a bit of mystery, I think.

The third image is straight from the camera, but uses an in-camera filter to increase the drama (same filter as the first one of Seattle). It was one of those dreary gray days that don’t offer good light for photography, but there we were, in a spectacular setting. I was glad I could try different interpretations of the scene.

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There’s lots of intentional blur in this one, where I panned the camera from left to right out the passenger window of a moving car. By panning while moving, the area in the middle stays more or less in focus while the rest is blurred. This is a technique I want to try more.

If shooting intentionally blurred shots intrigues you, there’s a very good book out by an Adobe trainer, Julieanne Kost. It’s called Passenger Seat (click for a look). The book includes her own gorgeous blurred photos with information on techniques. There’s lots of advice on workflow, processing, and presenting your work by sharing it online, publishing a book, etc.

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Last, a phone shot taken at Marymoor Park in Bellevue, Washington. There’s very little processing on this one – the light created the magic, along with the little girls, who I trust are magicians themselves…

 

UNDER WRAPS

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Plastic and the environment – not usually a good combination, but sometimes it can be a photographic opportunity. Like seeing the land through fog or rain, a plastic sheet between you and your subject creates interesting questions about figure and ground as different versions of reality layer on top of one another.

A few weeks ago I noticed a tarp on the ground behind the gardens at the Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle. There was a lot of rain that week, and the tarp held thousands of raindrops. Trapped underneath or beaded up on the surface, they dotted it like a star-packed sky. The plastic flattened and obscured the grass beneath. With wrinkles and folds, bent over on itself or bunched up, the tarp was a subject, too.

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Olympus EM1 with Olympus 60mm f2.8 macro lens, at f/4, ISO 250

Other versions: At Pike Place Market, heavy plastic tarps are hung between the flower stalls and the street. When flowers are pressed against them, the view on the street is of flowers fading into a whole other reality.  In a winter field frost-covered tarps in heaps on the ground become found sculpture.

 

OUTFLOW CALLIGRAPHY

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Thread-like pieces of wetland plants are caught on last year’s reeds and drift in the current, at the outflow of Lake Sammamish where it empties into the Sammamish River. Bald Eagles keep watch from the treetops, mergansers dive for fish, and a Great Blue Heron stalks the river edge.

 

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Some of these were shot with in-camera filters – soft focus and dramatic tone. Some were processed later using Onone’s Perfect Photo program, others in Lightroom. What I didn’t do that day was bring a polarizing filter – shooting into the water on a sunny day, that would have helped reduce the glare. Oops! So I tried to work with the glare, playing with different effects.

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Mid-winter days offer no pretty flowers, but the arc of drifting water defined by errant grasses is lovely in itself. And after you get home, changing up the photo processing can be another way to beat the winter doldrums. Below, converting to black and white, and next, adding texture layers.

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