Visually Feeling Texture

Posted by Gunnar on Jul 24, 2014 in Behind the Lens | 4 comments

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.

In each step of my quest to visually enhance texture, I deepened my search for the answer. Then one day in the dark room I became aware of inadvertently blurred portions of my images. I was mesmerized. The blur, or shading, enhanced the texture.

From this early awareness, I tried intentionally shooting a moving object, capturing a fixed scene from a moving car or train, using slower shutter speeds, but none of them offered me the ability to control the direction, speed and duration of the motion.

What eventually occurred to me was that if I consciously imposed motion upon fixed subjects, I could develop the control I was seeking. And since my objective was to emphasize texture, landscape would provide an unlimited ‘still’ canvas where I could select individual subjects and choose how and where the light would optimally affect various parts of the landscape’s surface.

This breakthrough, thirty plus years ago, enabled me to concentrate on developing a language of camera strokes that most visually convey the feeling of a landscape’s myriad of textures, and then by overlaying those textures with a sense of the passage of time, emphasize its unique feel.