Redwood Forest

 

To give you a sense of the scale, that fallen tree across the stream is at least 5 feet in diameter.

There is a story about the these woods. They are in northern California and contain the 5 tallest trees in the world. Naturalists try to keep the location of the tallest trees hidden because people inadvertently destroy the forest around the tree to go see it. In the 1970's the Nixon administration relaxed logging rules ahead of the enactment of laws that were to go into effect protecting these lands. As a result, Timber companies logged Around the clock to get as much of the old growth forest as they could. They stopped at midnight on the last day they could work and were just 300 feet shy of what is now the tallest tree in the world.

When these trees fall over and die they cross each other on the forest floor and eventually rot into the earth. But that takes a long time, and in the mean time, the forest floor becomes very un-flat, with huge holes being formed by the voids in criss-crossed trees. So off trail hiking can be a challenge. You have to be very careful. Also cougars roam these lands. A few months after I visited, a cougar attacked an elderly couple on trail not very far from where I took this photo. The cougar grabbed the man's head and would not let go until the woman bashed it over the head with a log. Both people lived. In our modern insulated age, we often forget that the earth is wild. I always love the moments where I remember that.

Technical notes: This was taken at around 4pm on an overcast summer's day. The cloud cover was quite light and the sky was very bright. On the forest floor the light is almost all completely top down. The shadows on the underside of the roots of that fallen tree were very very dark. So I decided that I would not try to get any detail in the sky at all, just let it go white. And set my exposure to just give me a bit of detail in the shadows. I used color negative film, which has a latitude of over 8 stops, and that helped a lot. Still the film as it came back looked very blah. But after enough nursing of exposure and curve adjustments I started to get something I liked. In fact this image shows more than the human eye could fully realize had you been standing there. ( the human eye will shut down to protect itself from the harsh radiation in the sky, making the shadows go very dark. It's only when you step directly under the canopy of that root ball that you see any real detail.) (This technique is sort of a poor man's HDR. Because my film scanner does not make pixel perfect repeatable scans, I can not do HDR very effectively right now) The inclusion of the texture in this case, in addition to helping the antique atmosphere, brings detail back into the blown out white areas.

Faux & Hoax

 

A fragment of the last letter or word ever received from my great uncle George, found along with the above photograph in Uncle Arthur’s ‘secret chest’ along with the other difficult & awkward items.

“My dearest Abigail, I trust this letter will cross ocean and desert to find you comporting your self in a continued state of bravery and the normal stoic wisdom you draw upon in my times of absence. Today a wondrous thing happened! The Berber guides took us up some difficult terrain to the entrance of a hidden valley that shows amazing signs of Greco Roman Culture further south than anyone ever dared dream finding it! I’m so excited my dear one! Tomorrow we leave camp again at dawn to thoroughly explore this amazing canyon. I am optimistic we will overcome the hesitancy of our guides to enter this place with a little bribe and some inevitable squabbling. They keep insisting on some drivel about a curse—the usual high drama my dear, clearly a ploy to get more money from the mad Englishmen, I'm quite sure of it.. We will progress without them with if need be. I’m sending some undeveloped emulsions along with these notes and letters and please, please take great care in getting them to Professor Higmans at the Royal Museum. He will know what to do. In the mean time I remain your faithful George and hope that this discovery means that soon our over-tired little troop will be able to come home in triumph and then we can move on in our lives, my precious bird, to fulfill all our dreams!”

Signed: George Tomland the III, Somewhere south of Tamanrasset, 1879

Lately I've been more and more enamored of the combination of words and images.  Often Poetry, but in this case a little piece of micro fiction.  Just makes me smile. 

Following Your Dreams

A philosophy of art.

 

Oregon Dune Sonata

Landscapes are special to me because they can represent an expression and a  striving for the ideal--the longing to roam in a a world of beauty and sophisticated balance. The other night I dreamed of a landscape quite different form this. I don't know what it was, some insanely beautiful combination of Scottish Highlands, New Zealand and Norway. Alpine meadows and streams running over the land. You could hike anywhere in this world and see divine vistas. Life in such places is completely free and there are no consequences that last beyond the morning's bleary eyed awakening. Dreams will forever amaze me


So this desire to recreate dreams in art... I've thought a lot about this and for a long time was haunted artistically about the impossibility of being able to do this. Especially in the world of Cinema, my other big passion and beloved art form, it is very expensive and hard to re-create the imagined visions. But two things have helped me: First the magic  of the tools become more affordable even as they become more powerful, and two, I've learned something very important. And that is to follow the dreams without expectation for where I will end up.

Inevitably when we follow a dream we are disappointed by barriers and things that stand in our way. But, if we are willing to be flexible and take an interesting turn at each barrier, looking for what opportunities are there, sometimes we can eventually find a sort of idyllic dream space, though perhaps  not the one we thought we were going for.

This has become one of my big driving philosophies of art. To be willing to give in to the change in plan, the new idea, the alternate direction, and let go of the strict preconceived idea of what I was setting out to do!

Does this make any sense to you?

I guess in a way I try to trade the haunting shroud of desire for the bright light of faith--faith that by always stepping forward I will eventually get the golden moment. And the process of art is  much more interesting and surprising this way

These images of the Oregon Dunes were taken late in the day in the summer of 2007. The one below is has a much more low-con processing scheme and overlayed with the texture from one of my favorite washi papers.

 

Strategies: Getting Separation

 

When ever I set up to make a photograph I always ask my self "How am I making the subject separate from the background" (unless I'm doing abstract work, which is a different ball of wax as far as creative process goes) In this case I had the idea that the blossoms would be the brighter tone relative to the background on the right side of the image and then on the left the blossoms would be darker than the background. I got a Polaroid that worked great but of course my negative, once scanned had lost almost all this effect so I then proceeded to do my normal umpteen adjustment layers. Added some washi paper texture and its cookin' again.

The blossoms here are light and pink and in the color shots stand out great from the white, but in Black and White the pink goes very close to the background color. Later this evening I'm going to use my gray background and see if I can get the branches and leaves to go darker than the b.g. and the blossoms to go lighter, another strategy for the same idea of achieving separation.

This photograph was taken with a 4x5 camera using Polaroid55 film. The film as the unique ability to provide both a positive and a negative. The negative, though a bit fragile, is also quite sharp and of high quality. I'm saddened though that Polaroid is going out of the polaroid business at the end of the year. Its not really clear if anyone else will pick up the torch. 

Found Art; Duchamp's legacy

In 1915 Marcel Duchamp presented objects in galleries that he had not created but rather 'identified' as having artistic merit. Since then, this very modern sensibility of seeing the mundane and taken for granted as unique artistic expression has  had a great legacy in the arts. To me, This spirit of 'seeing'  forms one of the essential pillars in the foundation of photography.  When we focus our lens on the world we are making statements about what we think is important and significant in the world.

 

I saw this wall in a little town of Bagnoregio, Italy about 15 miles southwest of Orvieto. Not far from the place I shot Dark Dream of Umbria  At the time I was amazed by the richness of texture and form on a wall that the owners I'm sure considered very utilitarian and perhaps even an embarrassment. If the light had been not falling so fast I might have lingered for close ups, there is a veritable universe of landscapes nascent in this one wall of accidental frescoes and ready made objects.  Some many facts and stories can be derived from this image. This is an old building with solid stone and plaster walls. To add electricity or plumbing it is usually necessary to run the wiring on either the inner our outer surface, because running it through the stone itself is highly impractical. Here we see electrical wires phone lines and perhaps internet connections lacing from room to room in an abstract pattern that shows an attempt at some order and neatness. I have seen other walls where every wire just sort of shoots on different random vectors from hole to hole, giving another style of abstraction entirely. So we know that some attempt at aesthetics was made here. The light tones of plaster probably demark where new plumbing was added--we can imagine jack hammers carving troughs for pipes that bring hot water to a structure that was built in a time of chamber pots and cisterns. Also the decision was made to protect the inner surfaces of this house at the price of 'violating' the outer surface. So one can assume that the inside of this dwelling might be very nicely decorated and quite the opposite of what we see here. Perhaps all these decisions were made when the wall was nicely covered by the neighbors house which was torn/ fell down, a humorous and embarrassing unveiling of family secrets, rather like having the walls of your garage go suddenly transparent. Here's the original image from the camera. What do you think?  

The nice curtains in the upper window also suggest a pleasant interior space.  And each window here also tells a story. The owners have a nice existence on the upper floors, rent out the lower left to a nice student and  Benzo the village ogre lives in the shadows behind the lower right. We can go on forever making up stories about who lives here and how.

 
I could even see moving this entire wall to MOMA to make a monumental ready-made statement. In the meantime I offer you this photograph. Since it was taken 10 years ago, one can only imagine what new  additions have been added to this utilitarian jambalaya, or perhaps a new building hides this wall or maybe the building is gone all together. Ahah! Sounds like a good adventure to go find out and a great excuse to go back to beautiful Italy!

Abundance of life; Ho River Rainforest

So much of landscape photography has to do with life and it's complex ecological configurations.  Even the desert, which we associate with the absence of life, presents a rarified abundance for those who look closely. In my region we have the temperate Rainforest of the Olympic peninsula which gets over 200 inches of rain a year, sometimes much more. This image is from the Ho River valley in Olympic National Park

 

On lucky days in summer you can see it all aglow in sunlight filtered through the myriad leaves and branches of the canopy.  The magical combination of light and water in abundance, creates an environment where every niche of of the ecosystem is teaming with green life.  Here we can see the plethora of water flora. The black and white tones do not convey the myriad shades of green, emerald to bright chartreuse that fills the eye of visitor. Grasses, trees, ferns, water plants, they all thrive. Every inch of branch and limb is also covered with wispy moss and textured lichens. It is actually quite overwhelming in its complexity to the eye. This image is made up of five wide angle black and white negatives, giving a very wide angle of view; something about the size of the trees and scale of this place requires this ultra wide viewpoint to fully depict the essence of the landscape

Jump in the pool

It's supposed to get hot here this week ( admittedly 'hot' is relative, but if your acclimated to Northwest coastal areas, anything over 90 must be called hot.) So while I clean out the garage, I'll be dreaming of cool pools like this one taken in Yosimite Park.

 

This is  Vernal falls, which normally has about a hundred times as much water crashing down, but sometimes in October, in a dry summer, the waterfalls of Yosimite change character and shrink way back, exposing large expanses of carved and polished granite. In a sense, you get a whole new crop of waterfalls to visit. So where ever you are, make a mental jump into the cool cool waters and enjoy.