Ghost Trees

Not quite white nights

 

 
In Russia, as the days grow long near the summer solstice, it never quite gets dark at night but stays in a prolonged state of twilight they call the white nights. Here in the Northwest we don't get real white nights but we do get a taste of this manic magic where the daylight can last 20 hours. The Sun sets in the Northwest and rises in the far Northeast. For a few weeks the north side of the house actually gets a healthy dose of sunlight. 

The other morning I was up early for a video shoot and watched the Robins building their nests with intense energy at 4:30 in the morning. They used their beaks to break off twigs and then flew them up to  their construction sites one after another.  Perhaps there is an overlap between the long days, early morning bird energy and that heightened zing that accompanies the inspiration of new art and new projects. The above print kind of captures a bit of this prolonged dusk magic I'm talking about.  This print was made again on washi paper and then merged with a painted maple panel to form the image below.

One interesting quality of washi paper is that in places where there is little or no ink the paper practically disappears as the collage medium saturates the fibers, making it transparent. In this case the clouds in the first image were not reading at all when it was pasted down on the panel. ( I kind of knew this would happen which is why the texture on the panel had a sort of cloud thing going on it.) So in a fit of improvisation I scratched with the back end of a brush and disrupted the wet paper  which promptly dissolved and formed into thick, well, cloud-like shapes. Happy Result. To see a vivid example of the paper pulling apart look in the lower left corner of the piece and see the wavy torn edge of saturated washi paper. The final step on this piece was putting the thick creamy sun/moon paint on and, again, using the back end of a brush to pull a spiral through the paint. voilà.

Bandon Beach: The foreground counts

I had a beautiful mid morning shoot at this beach on the southern coast of Oregon.

 

The rich grasslands with the flowers in the foreground make the picture. Some big panoramas from this shoot coming soon. 

Patrick's Point • Surprise Valley

Two Photographic Landscapes: The Mystery Connection

Two more images from the summer 2006 road trip. There is a connection between them, can any body tell me what it is?

I took this photograph at   the upper end of Surprise Valley in extreame North East California; It is the last image taken on that day. Earlier, I had been driving north on 395 and decided to explore the next valley east and followed 299 across the Warner Mountains to a sort of lost world in the form of Surprise valley. This humble desert basin boasts big alfalfa production  and Cedarville had a sort of budding art colony feeling. I followed a road that headed north along the shore  of Upper Lake and passed  through declining towns and abandoned farms shrouded in vines and trees, the bare wood striped of paint by the wind but preserved in the dry air. I'm still kicking myself for not stopping to take a picture, which is probably why these haunted structures still haunt my imagination. But of course if I had stopped, then my timing for the evening would have been altered and I would not have been able to take the picture you see in this blog, at this precise moment. By the time I would have arrived at this spot,  darkness would have fallen, the rainstorm long since passed on unseen. Fate is a strange mistress.

The Warner mountains provide snow melt and water shed to the lake which, I believe evaporates all its moisture to the desert. By the time I reached the location for this picture the last gasp of day light was playing off this distant rainstorm. As so often happens in the desert, you can see the rain falling but not get any near you. I remember when I took the picture feeling the image was a little flat but knew I would be able to pull out the latent drama in the scene. Very happy with how this one turned out. I'll have to go back some day and get images of those abandoned farmhouses.

 

Next we'll head west  to Patrick's Point on the California Coast. I  took this one while headed south about a week earlier. The pictures that made up this panorama were some of the first taken of the day.  I was driving south on 101 before sunrise and saw a sign for 'Patrick's point', a dull looking road like hundreds of others you see on the interstate. I almost drove right past but decided to check it out. Wow, these coastal headlands form  a beautiful seaside landscape. I grabbed several Panoramas on this rather pristine and peaceful morning.

If you figure out the connection between these two images, post a comment and let me know. 

New Digital Alchemy

I've been working on setting up a Digital Alchemy Gallery on this site. I was going to say that I no longer work in this idiom when I realized that I've actually got several new works that clearly fall into the category. Its strange how our minds can create false ideas about how we define ourselves and our work. As of this post, this piece is now called Diary of a Root Sprite. We'll see if that sticks. It is essentially done, perhaps a few minor tweaks, but nothing that could be noticed on the web will change. (The piece is 25" wide and 75" tall)

This particular piece results from several images acquired on  the summer 2006 road trip. As I motored  north on   US  395 , making the return loop, I got close to the Oregon Border where I spotted this scruffy tree along side the road––a Pinyon pine I think. I always keep my eyes out for trees that have good separation from there environment.

In photography, separation of the subject matter from the background can be very important, especially with trees. Most trees stand near other trees and the fractal complexity of the branches blend the edges of one tree to another and make it very hard to 'see' a clear image of the subject.  In everyday life our 3D binocular vision solves this problem for us and allows us to appreciate a single tree in a forest. But in the 2D world of photography this is not possible. This is why so many images taken in forests are disappointing. You usually need to be thinking about separation when photographing in nature.  A lone tree on top of a hill is the best possible separation of all and this was the case here.

 I combined this image with another image I made under a tight windblown spruce forest along the Oregon coast--an image so tangled with dead branches that it reminded me of roots in an underworld hollow.  The final element is from a scan of a painting I did some years ago, Acrylic on Panel. I scanned it at various stages and this was from the halfway point. I then took half of the face on this painting and flipped it so that a new face appeared, a face strangely inhuman due to the symmetry (most human faces are somewhat unsymmetrical and nothing makes someone look a little odd like doing a mirror flip on their face and making them perfectly symmetrical. Try this out and compare a left side flip with a right side flip. One person can sometimes look like two siblings rather than a single individual. Click here to a get a page that further describes the process behind the Root Sprite. You see, it already has a different title. I'll have to blog on the subject of titles soon.

Balance Rock Art

 

This is my photograph of a balance rock I did last summer during our family vacation at our NookSack river campground near Mt. Baker. (as far as a finished photo print, its a work in progress) I find making rock balance towers a very zen and pleasing chalange.  I also have a theory that any naturally balanced configuration of mass, will generate a pleasing balance of form.  Since almost every balance tower I've made seems to follow this rule I'm inclined to think its true. Any mathmaticians out there want to try and offer a proof? Maybe I'll post a gallery of the balance rock images later.

Ruby Beach Gallery

Since I've been talking about Ruby Beach, I've added a gallery of images I've taken there. You'll find mostly photography in this gallery. In honor of the new gallery I decided to work further on more recent project, which is pictured here, Ruby Beach Creek.

 

This has been a problem print for me and I continue to hammer on it. I'm half satisfied with the version you see here. It is a stitch up of three images taken from the south side of the lagoon behind the beach. Usually I try and stitch up from a standard format lens, because the distortions are not as difficult to match, but in this case I used my 40mm Hasselblad lens which is quite wide, maybe the equivalent of an  18 or 20 in 35mm format. The weather was gray this day and there is a very high dynamic range between the sky and the shadows under the drift wood logs. (click on the image and then click on it again to get a larger view. On this website you can usually go two layers deep with clicks to give you larger images) 

I've found a way to trick my scanner by scanning my negatives as positives. For some reason this enables me to get a histogram where all the tones are represented with out any clipping. I then invert the scanned image in Photoshop. Since I always scan to 16bit files I have a lot of data to play with in resolving the tones. But the initial look is not what you would expect to see in a black and white print. I personally find it difficult to conceptualize my way back to the proper gamma curve for a good print.

my first blog

My friend Jim desrves great thanks for  helping me get this blog going.

Here is a preview of a new image I working on. It started with a normal 2.25 film shot of the Oregon dunes.