Just north of Santa Fe, aspen trees cover much of the western face of Santa Fe Mountain, starting at about 7,200’ elevation up to 8,000 – 8,500’, as part of the Sangre de Cristo range. During September and October, aspen leaves change to a range of vivid electric yellows and oranges that are especially striking against their tall, slender, nearly white trunks.
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One of my favorite locations in New Mexico — the Bosque Del Apache — is situated along the eastern side of the Rio Grande 160 miles south of Albuquerque. It reminds me so much of where I lived for 12 years on the eastern shore of Maryland — 10 miles up the Miles River from the Chesapeake Bay — before moving to Santa Fe.
The eastern shore is very flat and surrounded by the Chesapeake Bay to the west, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, with numerous rivers, and lots of wetlands and marshes; the Bosque del Apache too is very flat and is surrounded by the Rio Grande and its canals creating its wetlands.
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A leitmotif is a recurrent theme throughout a composition, associated with a particular person, idea, or situation. More often used to describe a repeated musical or literary strain of thinking, I want to apply it to a visual theme. I am currently in the throes of creating and assembling a series of visual studies of the same visual composition whose variables have been reduced to the available light and camera stroke utilized in blending their elements.
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Modern China is the strangest place I have ever visited, overwhelmed with people and staggering amounts of new construction throughout the country, all obfuscated by the very controlled media.
From the first night, upon logging onto the internet, China’s government-imposed censorship was immediately obvious. The Chinese people really only read what they are allowed to read, hear what they are told to hear… What can their citizens know for sure? It certainly makes me appreciate the privilege “freedom of speech” in our country.
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Sixty years ago I got my first taste of Asia, and of photography. What an exciting and impressionable summer it was, before returning for my second year in “prison” at Missouri Military Academy.
Because my father was living and working in Taipei as VP of Public Relations for Civil Air Transport, Taiwan’s flagship airline, I spent the summer in Asia, at the age of 14. While living with Dad in Taipei for a month, he arranged for CAT to fly a group of Taiwanese Boy Scouts to Japan to climb Mt. Fuji. Since I was an Eagle Scout he thought it only appropriate that I join them. Viewing the iconic mountain from a distance, and up-close, and then to actually climb it was so memorable and sparked my understanding that vastness of space brings me peace.
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2014 is a curious year for me to write a photographic end-of-year wrap-up piece as I shot less this year than almost any other. But everyday life gets in the way of all of us — even photographers — so I thought my lessons learned might still carry some value. Here are my top five:
• Set Big Photographic Goals & Make Them Happen: Fifteen years ago I set a goal of traveling to one of my dream photographic locations each year. But in order to truly make that happen, I’ve found that you must plan well in advance or a year will slip by without your notice. So now I’ve made it a top priority. I created a visual list of locations that inspired me. Pinterest is a great tool for this so get on board if you aren’t already. And I realize I have to choose my location at least a year in advance and begin collecting data on weather and light as the basis for my trip timing. Otherwise, the trip won’t happen.
This year, although weak on photography in general, did include a trip to one of my big “must see” locations: Antarctica.
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Recently I have been doing a lot of traveling, but only a few days here and a few days there. While time is invariably limited, I’m always interested in photographing if possible. The problem is if it’s new country for me, I end up spending most of my time figuring out logistics: the best location, perspective and most advantageous lighting. Last week while visiting South Carolina’s coast I was intrigued by the long stretches of beaches and even more interesting, the delta ‘low country’ landscape interlaced with miles of inland waterways as the coast gradually transitions west to higher ground.
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Photography satisfies my need to convey how I feel about what I see. Because I am hyper aware of movement in everything, I am consumed with the need to convey the motion I feel to others as my way of connecting visually.
To successfully overlay my images with a sense of the passage of time, I must align my felt-sense of motion with one or more aspects of the image I am capturing. I gain the visual harmony I seek by aligning my camera motion stroke with the flow I feel in the land.
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I seem to be particularly sensitive to coincidences these days. After posting my 08/24/14 Behind the Lens piece, REIMAGINING THE FLOW LINE, several people responded with a reference to Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmuhalyi’s national bestseller, FLOW (1990) when he introduced The Psychology of Optimal Experience… for illuminating the way to happiness.
Since I first utilized the term Flow Line more than thirty years ago to identify the central compositional energy within my landscape photographs, I’d like to think I had the original thought. My Flow Line is the dominant directional axis within a landscape from which my own gesture emanates, and therefore highlights the optimal energy in my composition. And when I nail it – I too feel as though I have found that optimal experience, since I do experience ‘enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life’, enabling me to express my way to happiness.
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Identifying a flow line within any particular landscape is the critical first step for me in choosing a composition, since it becomes the axis for imposing a sense of motion to the image. I think of it as a foil against which to move the camera. As my motion strokes have evolved into more complex curves, I have been able to use less obvious flow lines, while simultaneously varying my motion stroke and employing more dramatic cross strokes.
The horizon or a shoreline, a pronounced light or shadow or a tree trunk, are obvious choices as flow lines, but they can be very limiting since ninety degree +/- opposing landscape elements tend to over-exaggerate, and thus overwhelm the effects of the stroke.
Another way of thinking about the contrasting effect of the motion-stroke is to express it in terms of the degree to which I can move the camera against the grain of the flow line without completely losing the viewer and still add to the image’s texture.
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While editing my Kauai landscape series’, I thought about how the island has its own particular texture. In fact every landscape has a unique texture, which if emphasized, offers up its very own character embodying its color, its perspective, its shape, and its scale.
An early photographic objective of mine was to overcome the shiny, smooth feel of the photographic print by expressing depth through the visual emphasis of texture. At first, I chose subjects having textured surfaces, and then captured them from a direction so the light source was projected or reflected across their surface.
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Photographing big landscape raises the issue of how to effectively portray vastness. Whether seascape or landscape, great empty spaces limited mostly by the horizon, distant mountains, shoreline, clouds or sky, require dealing with a whole lot of empty space. I try to solve this by invoking color and light differentiation, texture, and pattern – no matter how subtle – to provide some perspective and reduce the portions of the colossal landscape into elemental blocks. During thirty years focusing on landscape, I have primarily explored how motion strokes can meld these elements to explore the depth of space.
A month ago, a friend sent me a link to the 100 best pictures from the Hubble Telescope’s 16-year journey. What first struck me about these images was the incredible vastness of outer space. The dimensions of the Sombrero Galaxy – 28 million light years from Earth, 50,000 light years across, and its 800 billion suns, are staggering. How do you get your mind around the eternity of the cosmos? (more…)
Read MoreAntarctica’s 5,000 foot average elevation is the highest of all the continents, and consisting almost entirely of ice, it accounts for 80% of the earth’s fresh water. So the recent discovery that one vast ice sheet, in Western Antarctica has not only begun melting, but has already reached a point of no return, is beyond scary. (more…)
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Walking down the extended pier, I passed the eerie 91-passenger ship whose windows were being replaced after the recent storm blew them out and forced her back to port. Just past her, I saw our Ocean Diamond, which comfortingly was a much larger vessel – higher, taller and longer. As I stood with the other 180 passengers boarding this 300’ long ship, I exhaled, feeling more comfortable about crossing the 500-mile wide Drake Passage considered among the roughest oceans in the world.
Greeted by the Captain, first officers, and our Expedition Crew, I was further reassured that all was in order, and our personal gear was waiting for us in our appointed cabins. Within an hour, we assembled for safety instructions, and by 6 PM the Ocean Diamond was cast loose to begin our journey out the 50 mile Beagle Channel to Drake’s Passage with the beautiful setting sun highlighting the steep Andies backdrop. (more…)
Antarctica has this mythic weight. It resides in the collective unconscious of so many people, and it makes this huge impact, just like outer space. It’s like going to the moon.
—Jon Krakauer, Mountaineer and Author of Into Thin Air
A year and a half ago while visiting Alaska for the first time, I was taken by the monolithic glaciers. So extreme and so beautiful, I decided then that I had to visit Antarctica, home of the greatest mass of ice in the world!
Antarctica, the fifth largest continent, is a very long way down there. It’s a fourteen-hour flight from Miami to the very tip of Argentina via Buenos Aires, and another two days by cruise ship providing the seas are relatively calm – so you need a pretty compelling reason to make the trek. Mine was seeing blue ice through the lens of my camera. On February 22, 2014, I boarded a plane in Albuquerque, NM, and began my three-week odyssey to the base of the earth. (more…)
For the last four years, I have been shooting exclusively with a 21 mega-pixel Canon 5D with a 70-300mm zoom. It’s a terrific camera, and a terrific lens, and the only equipment I have used for last four years. Using a single piece of equipment has been my pattern for years, for it allows me to become ‘one with my camera’, which is absolutely critical for me. (more…)
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One week from today I depart Santa Fe for Miami, Buenos Aries and then Ushuaia at the very southern tip of Argentina to board a cruise ship for two weeks to the South Shetland Islands and on to the Antarctic Peninsula. (more…)
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For me, landscape reflects the ultimate passage of time. Although Earth is thought to be 4.5 billion years old, almost no portion of it is visible in the landscape today. (more…)
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My first attempts at infusing the feeling of motion into my photographic images originated with my shooting moving objects – cars, trains, people walking or running. (more…)
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Looking at a book on Alaskan Totem Poles a few years ago got me thinking that totems were panoramics turned on their end. (more…)
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I must confess that my bird images started out, and continue even now, mostly to be a by-product of my landscape photography, which invariably involves a lot of waiting for the light. And waiting is not one of my strong suits. (more…)
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Whenever I’m in ‘landscape country’, I’m looking for interesting combinations of color, scale, perspective, contrast of its one or more planes, patterns which add or detract from the composition, and, of course, the landscape’s orientation to the sun. (more…)
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At last, four years ago, I transferred completely over to Digital Capture. For 6 years prior to that I lived in both camps. (more…)
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