Prop Wash – Staten Island Ferry

Prop Wash – Staten Island Ferry

Originally uploaded by chris_rutkowski

1.2 sec at f/3.5

No photography for quite a while. Life’s other duties called and call still. But perhaps I’ll have a few efforts to share.

This was taken from the fantail of the ferry while riding across with my other daughter, Laurie and her fiancé, Eric. Eric proposed to Laurie on the ferry. Not this night; one like this, a few months back. They’re going to be married on a boat sailing in the harbor. Very romantic!

Laurie, on seeing this shot on the camera’s LCD said “Weird…” Sigh. I try to accept such unvarnished filial candor with more aplomb than I did in years past. So yeah, she has a point.

I hadn’t been across the ferry in fifty years as near as I could recall, and I was oddly moved by it. This shot is divisible into quite a few sub-compositions which are successful in their own right. Is this the opposite of the classic photographer’s admonition to get closer? I find myself stepping back to take in more to make a close up of the whole. The pieces comprise the experience -  combined they tell a story, a riddle, like a kanji for eye and mind.

Making the shot

Look closely and you’ll see this photo is not sharp. Look more closely still and you’ll discover that the out-of-sharpness is mostly some residual jitter – motion – of the camera.

If I’d had my druthers everything would have been locked down solid, and at least some things – especially that foreground green deck – would be sharp. That’s what I wanted. But so often happens, this was just a whimsical ferry ride after dinner at a little place in the Village with my daughter; lugging much in the way of equipment or a tripod was not part of the equation. So the shot was handheld for over a second, braced against the ship’s railing, and I think the jitter is as much an artifact of the anti-shake mechanism being left on – or so I suspect – as it is of slippage. Regardless, that sharp foreground was not to be.

After maybe 5 seconds looking at the photo in front of me, I realized I just didn’t care. Truth be known, the little buzz in the visual is actually true to the scene – the shear mechanical power of the ferry pulsed through everything, a constant shimmering background energy. Tht buzz was there and the camera recorded it and we are on friendly terms now. 

Processing was straightforward: Adobe Camera Raw into Photoshop, then noise reduction, sharpening, and Topaz Adjust for contrast enhancement in the prop-wash area.

Adventures in Paradise

Adventures in Paradise

Originally uploaded by chris_rutkowski

Adventures in Paradise is something of a visual departure for me; especially for a “beach shot” during a storm. It is very high key – blown out highlights all over the place; barely a dark dark to be seen. But I processed the look in what felt like 60 seconds flat – luminosity, saturation, vibrance- zip, zip, zip. I just did it and knew right away the result was what I wanted; done. So I asked myself the next logical question: “Why?” and had no immediate answer.

Well, next day I was talking with my sister Carol who lives back east, describing the picture to her, going on about how much I love driving on the beach when she said “You remember Uncle Alex’s dune buggy, don’t you?”

My Uncle Alex owned a bait and tackle shop down on Long Beach Island (better known to most folks as a part of The Jersey Shore). I’d long ago recognized the coincidence that I’d spent a lot of time on Long Beach Island in New Jersey when I was a kid, and now spent a lot of time on the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington. But; “A dune buggy?”

“Sure, they used to let dune buggies on the beach when we were kids. Then that hurricane came along and destroyed all those houses and they built jetties and buggies weren’t allowed on the beach anymore. Don’t you remember?”

“Uh… No.”

“Maybe you were too little… Uncle Alex had this bright pink dune buggy called Adventures in Paradise. The name was on the side.”

Then I remembered.

I remember a flamingo-pink jeep-turned-dune buggy with its name in Floridian-sky-blue-script on both sides with rod holders and a half dozen 10 or 12 foot poles rigged up, ready to go. I remember spinners, jigs and spoons with feathery tails hanging from an overhead tackle-board, and the whir and crunch of gears from the buggy’s mechanicals as we wheeled down the beach. And I remember surfing my arms in the rushing-by wind pretending to fly like a seagull that paced us.

Adventures in Paradise. Yup.

Of course, a big piece of why I love this place fell into place somewhere along in here. There are some amazing similarities – or points of congruency – even visual similarities – between this place and what were perhaps the best experiences and times I had as a child. Say 1955-60; pre-Kennedy, pre Nam. Pre the shit-storm of every dimension that was headed the world’s way. This place is like a cultural preserve – they aren’t trying to be fifties, they are fifties.

Places like this will be extinct soon. Portland and Seattle population predicted to double by 2038 or something like that? What if? Somewhere along in there, little pockets of a simpler time like this will cease to exist, gone like cultural passenger pigeons.

Enjoy it while ya got it.

Holiday Beach Crowds

Holiday Beach Crowds

Originally uploaded by chris_rutkowski

The beach was elemental. That’s what I told Judy – it was elemental out there. Earth, water, fire and air, thrown in a blender, shaken and stirred. There is nothing like a storm in the face – a bit of the old Ride of the Valkries – to get me in touch with senses dulled by too much time in front of a computer. I am drawn to it. Always have been.

In complete truth I was not properly prepared for what I encountered. To cut to the chase about what technical issues came up, I offer the following:

1. Bring a sturdy tripod. No. A bigger one. Make sure it has a hook, and make sure you’ve got LOTS of weight you can pile under it and with cord, cinched down against the tripod’s hook to effectively preload the whole thing into a single mass. Make the whole thing sufficiently heavy and sturdy that you can push against it, hard, without knocking it over. I never did successfully manage camera movement and vibration, especially during the worst bits at the beginning. At best I “minimized” camera shake by draping my body around the tripod as a stabilizing mass; I certainly never eliminated it.

2. Keep the lens under cover until the moment of exposure. When there’s this much stuff blowing out there, a clean lens is problematic. I’m going to be doing some net research on this; within 15 minutes of starting the lens and filters were a mess and I didn’t really have a good way to manage it.

3. Bring waterproof covers for your gear. This at least I was able to do out on the beach. I’m glad I did!

Now, for the story:

Round one went to the elements. During the first set up of the outing I was so physically slammed I never got a shot. It reminded me of a favorite Kurt Vonnegut quote:

“I know what Delilah did to Make Sampson as weak as a kitten. She didn’t have to cut his hair. All she had to do was break his concentration.”

Concentration? Biff! Bam! Pow! I ended up back in the car muttering “Looks like I need a bigger boat.”

With each subsequent attempt I got a bit more focused, and aided by the gradually lessening severity of the conditions ended up with a couple of shots with potential. But it would be an exaggeration to say my technique had been nearly solid enough for that first outing. But what does not kill me strengthens me, etc.

Looking back, the shots started working when I stopped fighting the elements, and went with the flow – worked with it – rather than fought it. In Holiday Beach Crowds the defocused glow really became the subject of the shot rather than a problem to solve, and in one to come, Adventures in Paradise, I started picking up on ‘Beeee the motion blur…’. I will be revisiting these themes in the future.

Woman in Red

Woman in Red

Originally uploaded by chris_rutkowski (work-hiatus)

PS: As Tisdale put it, "got a nice sway about her" indeed!

And on that note: a big shout out to Annye: her incredibly creative shots of women (often in Paris) are like a breath of Spring air that make even an old coot like me feel young again, and I thought of her while posting this…. so how tickled am I that she stopped by to comment on this one? :-) Her work strips away external reality to reveal the heart within.

About the Photo: Each maker of digital cameras goes through a lengthy and complex design process producing the image sensor and the software that converts image signals into picture files that can be shown on a screen and/or recorded on a memory card. One consequence of this complexity is that the images produced by a particular maker’s cameras are usually distinctly and qualitatively different from those produced by other makers, and even from other models by the same maker. To me, these differences are as distinct as say, the difference between Kodachrome and Ektachrome color slide films; same subject, same day, same light, even the same camera (with film): different result.

I made this shot with my Sony R1. The R1 was insanely slow to focus, the shutter-lag awful, the between-shot recycle time abysmal, noise above ISO 400 was unacceptable, and it had no anti-shake. Taken together, those lacks caused more than one lost shot, so I migrated to a DSLR – a Nikon D300 – and all those shortcomings were instantly gone.

But the R1’s image quality… gosh, I loved the image quality of the R1; colors tended to be rich and “velvety” (please forgive the lame and non-quantitative description :-), and the R1’s built-in Zeiss lens was first rate. It shows in this shot, Votre gite and the few other R1 shots I’ve posted on Flickr. But Woman in Red illustrates something else I loved about the R1; the shot was made with the camera at waist-level.

Like many of today’s DSLRs, the R1’s viewfinder could be tilted, swiveled and yawed at various angles, but unlike any DSLR I know of, the viewfinder could be folded down flat on top of the camera – image side up, and conveniently left that way. This allowed – perhaps even encouraged – the R1 to be used like an old 2-1/4 by 2-1/4 TLR – with a waist level viewfinder. This “waist-level” view was common long ago; eye-level shots are far more common these days.

Personally I find looking at a waist-level finder (or view camera’s ground glass, or any live-view screen for that matter) very different from looking through a DSLR. With the former I am looking at a “picture” – an image; with a DSLR I am looking through the camera at the scene. To me, DSLRs provide a more direct engagement with the subject while image-based viewfinders encourage more direct engagement with the picture.

I’m sure some folks will think I’m just splitting hairs; or may experience the opposite, who knows? But it occurs to me that if your DSLR offers live-view mode, and you don’t use it often, checking this out for yourself might at the very least be a worthwhile comfort-zone shake-up exercise to spur the creative juices.

Sablet Sunset

Sablet Sunset

Originally uploaded by chris_rutkowski

Sunset over the Rhone Valley as seen from our gite (vacation cottage) overlooking the village of Sablet. Fog spread across the valley, spilling higher into the foothills where we were staying.

The exposure was made 3 years ago during a trip to the South of France. The processing was done today.

What is Art?

NOTE: The photos in this post were taken by my son, Weston, for a photography class as a college freshman back in 2001. The text of this post originated as an e-mail I sent Wes in 2001 after reviewing these and other photos he’d made. He wondered if my favorable comments were just because I was his dad. This is what I told him:

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My comments are heartfelt – I’ve been a lover of photography for most of my life, and actively studied it as a process and as an art. You probably know that I had books about and/or by just about all the major photographers. Of course you know I favored the work of Adams and Weston – but there were many, many others: Stieglitz, Lange, Strand, Cartier-Bresson, Uelsmann, to name a few. But favoring one or the other is a testimony to taste rather than a judgment regarding craft. The works of the great artists share something(s) in common – indeed the work of all artists in all mediums share these same things.

For me it works like this: some art, when first viewed (or heard, tasted, etc.) immediately grabs me at an emotional level; It grabs me by the… heart. It is not an intellectual thing. It is not computed. It is not decided. It is experienced, immediately and with no artifice.

However, not everything that bypasses the filters of intellect is art.

We humans, all of us, whether Mother Teresa or Osama Bin Laden, have built into us certain sensibilities, certain standards, certain reservations, taboos, societal limits. When something violates those standards we react at a gut level. As a philosopher once put it: to a cannibal, not eating a missionary is a sin. Thus, to create a gut reaction in a group, all one must do is present something that violates the standards of that group, and you can be assured of a gut reaction. But is it art? That all depends.

Take a subject such as "eating babies." Whether presented with the highest level of craft and technique, or with the crudest and most simplistic of displays, most people and most cultures (with the possible exception of our aforementioned cannibal) would find the topic itself shocking. You probably felt a bit of a jolt when you read it. Virtually any presentation would evoke a gut reaction. So is it art? That all depends.

If its purpose is to shock for the sake of shock then I would argue that if it is art at all, it is of the most banal sort. If its purpose is to expose a part of ourselves – then perhaps it is art.

Consider a photograph of a jet flying into the World Trade Center. Does it evoke a reaction? You bet. Is it art? Well, some photographs of the event are "better than" others. Does that make them art? They stand as records, captured memories, moments frozen in time. They may make one wince, fight, or rejoice depending on who one is and where one stands in the universe. Is it art? I think not. And here’s why.

It is my belief that art reveals the unseen, the unsuspected, the unknown. Art illuminates the dark region just below the calm (or turbid) surface of reality and takes us where we’ve never been. The images and feelings associated with the World Trade Center attack are not hidden or unknown. Depictions of the event reinforce that which is already known. A photograph of such an event illuminates nothing.

Consider by distinction the photo by Dorothea Lang, taken in the early thirties, depicting a dustbowl family (mother and children) displaced, poor, and hungry. The feelings it instills are deep. Yet that moment could be any family, anywhere, any time. It reveals with startling clarity something about all of us; this is what it means to be human. It is great art. Art transcends the event or place which it depicts.

OK. So which of your photos are my favorites? I agree with your prof. The image of the hallway is stunning. So is that of the woman in the graveyard. Both are very worthy. Both grab me at an emotional level. I would be very proud indeed to have taken either shot. One other, the woman in light and dark is almost there. I recommend further examination of the cropping (I many be wrong here, but that is my reaction).

Here’s a question to ponder: how many photographs did, say, Ansel Adams take in his life. Thousands? Tens of Thousands? And out of them, how many are memorable images; images that still make people gasp, and will continue to make people gasp, say, a hundred years from now? Hundreds? Dozens? The point being: even in the hands of a great artist, not every attempt will succeed, but without the attempt there can be no success.

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Trailhead on beach

Trail head on beach

Originally uploaded by chris_rutkowski

I like this and the others in the set enough that I’ve posted this as a solo item.

I can but marvel at how many of my personal favorite photographs were taken within a couple of hundred yards of this spot. It is varied and beautiful and it seems as though I’ve created a bit of project for myself; to tell the tale of this place in pictures and it would also seem, a few words.

This raises questions about how one actually goes about doing such a project. Clearly, something about this area is very compelling to me. I’m making pictures which I at least enjoy, and so it would seem at least a few others. So each post in the blog is like a page – or part of a page – in an unstructured book. Being a structure kind of guy, I’m sure a pattern will emerge that makes sense. Perhaps geaographic, by sections and regions. But I’ll confess that I find that old things – simple things – like that trail marker and footprints in the sand somehow connect me to the endless flow of life.

In this particular shot, what I wish I had was about 20 different people – actors, models, men, women, and kids… Just coming and going, walking and pointing and looking and photographing… certiainly didn’t have it this day, but some day…

So at some point I’ll figure out what the sections are – ocean and bay and town and cars is good…. It’s interesting how important cars are out here on the Peninsula. From day to day living to the show-car hot-rods “Rod Run to the End of the World” that fills the roads with automotive heirlooms on steroids one weekend every summer, and to that amazing public-street beach out there, automobiles are a part of the landscape here, but it seems in a personal way, as contrasted with the bumper to bumper madness that we survive in urban culture. The ocean and the bay – it’s all about how the ocean and the bay mold land and people, each in their own way.

Ah well, enough thinking for tonight. Thanks for reading. :-)

Runes – aka "Fishes with Weeds"

Trail Marker – Klipsan Beach, WA

20+ Miles of sandy beach – dunes and grass as far as the eye can see. Where’s the trail you came in on? They all look the same… keep you eye out for a trail marker – and remember which one is yours….

 

Runes are characters used in early written Nordic languages. This scene, the bent driftwood and the plant near its base, forming a visual ovoid-triangle, remind me of these symbols. It touches something deep in me. Surely our ancestors made tokens just like this 10,000 years ago… when we were still inventing language.

I imagine seeing this long ago, on a North Sea beach, revealing the trail to a Norseman’s home and hearth. And I imagine this marker coming to be identified with the person who set it, their skills (warrior, fisherman, blacksmith, healer) or the place – its image a proto-signature – a proto-word – standing first for a persons name, then their craft, then even the place itself. Thus we see language evolving from the simplest of actions; a person marking their way home.

Making the shot:

This was actually the last shot of a series made on the beach that morning. Even though our trips to the Long Beach Peninsula are usually short, we always try to get out and walk on the beach a bit, even if it’s only for a few minutes. I’d been hoping for a shot of sea grass: see that clump of grass standing to the right of the driftwood’s base? Notice the fountain-swell of the leaves and shadows, and the fine circles traced in the sand by the leaf tips blowing in the breeze…. I’ve been captivated by this form for a long time. One finds the perfect composition when one finds it; the Zen-garden like tracings in the sand are a beauty that just happens, and I haven’t got it right so far. This is a crop of the grass clump from the full-size version of Runes:

 

So, I’d been walking on the beach stalking that elusive composition (the plant in the picture didn’t make the cut for a single shot) but at that point I sort of looked up and stepped back and took in the rest of the scene when the composition hit me and resulted in this:

In this, the beach area visually dominates, and within the beach area, the bright region of grasses on the right balances the regions of sand and trail on the left. The color balance is warmer than Runes – emphasis on home and hearth… There is enough beach that I see this as looking AT the trail, not ON the trail.

Cropping it somewhat greatly emphasizes the sky and grass area – and de-emphasizes the grasses on the right so that the shot revolves around the trail and the “there” beyond the edge of the grasses. The view is much more ON the trail.

This bit of crop-comparison also reveals a photo op – including more and more of the beach – maybe next time :-)

In any event, the preceding crop was done at home in Photoshop. But out there, looking at the scene the trail marker that became Runes caught my eye and instantly became a subject in its own right. I didn’t move the tripod – just rotated the camera 90 degrees, zoomed and tweaked to frame and made the shot.

Along with the symbolism mentioned earlier, there is a certain whimsical aspect to Runes that I greatly enjoy: the bent driftwood becomes a fishing pole, the clump of grass a fish on the line, the circles in the sand ripples on the sea. And wouldn’t that make a nice “proto signature”… Not “Dances with wolves”… “Fishes with weeds”…

The Wreck of the Jeanie O

The Wreck of the Jeanie O

Originally uploaded by chris_rutkowski

In the Port of Ilwaco, WA.

Barbed wire waves, St. Elmo’s fire glowing electric in the rigging, the stain of neglect on her bow; run aground on reefs of time: there she sits, high and dry.

My son said, half-jokingly, that he’d like to live on her and fix her up. If only :-)

I suggest viewing this in original size.

Making the Photo:

We were visiting the Port on a Sunday morning, strolling down the unusually quiet quay with my wife, son and his girlfriend, when these day-glow orange floats across the street from the docks snuck into my peripheral vision. They were piled up against a fence next to a holding area filled with boats in various stages of repair or decay. I left the group and walked a bit closer, then spotted the Jeanie O and this composition just jumped into the viewfinder. I spot-metered on the boat’s window under the vertical topaz-colored mast and made this single shot.

Because the contrast ratios were high, I really wanted to shoot this as HDR, but opted not to try it hand-held. So I then walked a few hundred yards back to our car, got my tripod, returned to the scene and set up. Problem was, by the time I went to the car and back, the family had caught up with me and we’d started gabbing, and the “moment” was lost; guess I just broke my concentration. What I got was ok, but I knew I hadn’t duplicated this exact composition again (in the bright light of the location, the camera’s LCD screen was pretty much useless for critical viewing).

Back at the computer, after deciding to go with this, I processed the RAW file as a pseudo-HDR in Photomatix.  The purpose was to “process the digital negative” to reduce the contrast, particularly to pull the highlights away from being blown. Next the shot was processed for sharpness and noise reduction. Great noise reduction software is a must when processing most pseudo-HDRs; the darker regions tend to get noisy really fast. Then I used Topaz Adjust for post-processing, and the first result was this:

This is a nice “straight” representation of the scene. But when I shot this, what got me about the composition was the sense that the ship was riding up, over the obstacles in front, like a ship rises over waves in the sea. Sitting there looking at the screen, the title phrase “The Wreck of the Jeanie O” sprang into mind… and the clear-cut desire to present this as a dramatic scene – reminiscent of a wreck at sea – swept over me, well, like a wave. So back into Topaz Adjust for post processing (to match my “post visualization”).  The result was this:

I still have some difficulty with “expressive” photography. I was trained to accomplish, and strived to achieve photo realism; non-interpretive rendering. But just as I’ve learned to let the urge to shoot a subject take over (when the urge to shoot hits, I shoot) so I’m learning to let myself alter a photo to tell a tale. The key word is “let”. The urge to go with a bit of “ghost ship” on this was strong, and came straight out of the right brain; it wasn’t planned or considered; I didn’t stop and think about what to do; “maybe I should try this…” No, the right brain had the thought, knew what to do, and did it. I, the left brain, had to shut up and stay out of the way.  After the processing, part of me wanted to start quibbling; “Oh, what about this? And What about that?” And the right brain had to say “Shush. It’s ok… just relax and enjoy it.”

Subject note:

A wreck the Jeanie O is, but she didn’t run aground on the rocks surrounding Cape Disappointment (I love the names Lewis and Clark gave to places on this coast. “Dismal Notch” may be my favorite…). She’d run aground on reefs of neglect, spurred on by the economics of making and keeping her sea worthy.  But the world of “people who go down to the sea in ships” is not a consumer-driven use-it-and-throw-it-away culture. So it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that someone actually plans to restore the Jeanie O and take her home to the sea. If the hull is sound, the rest can be fixed.

A Cautionary Tale (Chapter 947 of “Don’t do what I do.”)

I ran into yet another in my long list of “Doh!” moments after a shoot at the beach last weekend.

Reviewing the shots later, on the computer, I noticed that a whole series of shots were badly lacking in contrast and saturation. The post-storm light on the beach was very bright and flat to begin with, but these shots were much flatter and colorless than I would have expected. Initially, I just wrote it off to the particular combination of camera, subject, and settings.  Turned out I was wrong.

I’m not at all obsessive about cleaning my equipment – but generally, if I use a filter I clean it before putting it away at the end of the day so it’s ready next time. Now, for part of this shoot I’d pulled out a tele-zoom lens I use infrequently, and to cut through glare, attached its matching circular polarizer (which I use even less often).

Later, when getting ready to clean the filter before putting it away I noticed that one side of the filter was covered edge-to-edge with an even grey film – like fog on the inside of a car window! Just looking through it with the naked eye, I realized that this awful haze was why the particular shots appeared so lifeless – I was shooting through self-inflicted “heavy fog!”

Of course I cleaned the filter thoroughly, but I was also a bit confused – the filter was clean when I put it away…. Well, a bit of investigation showed that the filter’s case had a Styrofoam pad in the bottom to keep the filter from banging around inside and cushion it. Best I can figure is that the Styrofoam out-gassed (released tiny amounts of chemical gasses as part of its aging process) and those gasses had deposited themselves all over one side of the filter!

So, a few points emerge:

• Yeah, I really should have checked the filter before I attached it – assuming it was clean after 6 months in storage turned out to be a bad idea.
• I checked a couple of other filters and one of those had also been hazed-up!

Considering this further; having Styrofoam as a cushion may be a “good idea” on the face of it – certainly cheap and easy for the manufacturers. But it would be better to replace these with a layer or two of microfiber cloth in each filter box. That would:

1. Immobilize and cushion the filter;
2. Reduce or eliminate the risk of outgassing, and;
3. Provide a convenient way to touch up a filter in the field when you need to get or keep it clean.

Sounds like a perfect rainy winter night mini-project…

Tip: bags of nice microfiber cloths are available cheap in Target’s automotive section.

Storm Surf – Ocean Park, WA

Storm Surf – Ocean Park, WA

Originally uploaded by chris_rutkowski

We had breakfast this morning in a little cafe in Ocean Park, down along the beach access road. Anyway, I walked out after a last cup of coffee and spotted the distant suff down the road and in a flash this shot jumped into my head – I even tried to describe it to my wife.

To my wife’s consternation, I drove my Honda Civic out onto the sand (we usually bring our Subaru Outback) and parked it close to the edge beyond which two driven wheels would not be enough. I’d known from the first instant that I wanted – needed – as flat a perspective as I could get, so I threw on my 70-300mm, mounted the camera on a tripod, extended it out to 300mm and started framing.

Making the photo: What I was seeking was a confluence of waves and wind where all the random bits would come together in a dynamic whole. Yeah, right – just like that… I’ve spent lots of time with cameras on tripods all framed up and ready to shoot when the perfect waves roll by, but usually I’m waiting for a line of waves to match the other elements in the overall design. This had an added twist: there was nothing to frame in reference to – other than ocean – it was all waves. I picked a patch based on a bit of watching the overall wave patterns and the sun and clouds and hoped I was pointing at (or at least near) a spot that would give me what I wanted (ok, the camera wasn’t that rigidly fixed; the ball head was set to allow some slight panning to follow wave patterns, but you get what I mean). Basically: wait as sets of rollers comes through then combine “critical moment” timing with occasional high-speed shooting bursts and go for the best.

This is very similar to shooting sporting events where you try to position yourself, plan the shot and then start shooting as the critical moments come and go. Shooting waves is unlike shooting sports in that you can know pretty much where a runner’s feet will fall or where a jumpers shadow will pass. Not so with waves, so they’re harder to get just right. Accordingly, unless you are incredibly patient, lucky, or skilled, you will be cropping the image to a greater or lesser degree. That was certainly the case here.

The hardest part of cropping is knowing what to crop – and when shooting something as chaotic as waves it isn’t always easy – not for me at least – to spot a fragment of order amid the chaos. The “subject” isn’t just sitting there – a duck on a pond so to speak. It is camouflaged by all the surrounding action. Cropping amounts to paring away everything that isn’t “the shot”.

As a consequence, on the beach I didn’t know for sure that I had “the shot” until later, back on the computer, scanning through all the images. This was on the third to last shot out of a couple of dozen exposures; I can only wonder if subconsciously I knew this pattern had flickered in front of my eye during the shoot, causing me to stop. 

A problem shooting material in stormy conditions is that the scene, while begging for drama, tends to be rather flat; the contrasts are mostly of texture and shape, not light and dark. Nature co-operated here, throwing a Flickr of weak sun across a portion of the scene for just a few seconds, giving the white froth a bit of added brightness to capitalize on. Even so, the overall contrast didn’t exceed 4 or 5 stops, if that. Photoshop curves set the white and black points giving the scene contrast it lacked in nature. But the small textures, little micro waves and ripples, while interesting and accurate, seemed like noise, distracting from the design, so I used Topaz adjust on a duplicate base layer to smooth the smaller details, then blended the original and smoothed layers to strike a balance between texture/detail and shapes.  The final step was some judicious burning and dodging, mostly to punch up the highlights.

This “subject” invites repeat attempts; no one version will ever be definitive – a be all, end all. Each attempt will generate moments of crystallized chaos – raw material to mold into finished images. Great fun :-)

Oak Knoll – Study

Oak Knoll – Redux

Originally uploaded by chris_rutkowski

 

I posted the original version of this photograph on Flickr my very first day; about a year and a half ago.

Yup. It’s a repost. “But wait!” the spry of memory among your might say, “I remember something quite different.” And you would be quite right. Though born of the same .NEF file(s), they are very different images. But what really changed was me.

Have I mentioned that I’m still learning how to see? Oh yeah, that’s the name of the blog….  That’s the point: what changed most between the two images is me, the photographer.

What sparked this was a consolidation project; I had photo stuff on two servers, four computers, and two or three virtualized backups of old computers. A couple of weeks back I set out on the unenviable task of collecting the stuff all together and imposing some sort of order upon it; like cleaning the digital garage. Somewhere along the way I happened upon the folder containing these negatives, and scanning through it in Adobe Bridge, I first recognized the jpg I’d posted to Flickr, then it dawned on me that I had made a 5-shot bracket…

Back then, I didn’t make 5-shot brackets intending to do HDR; it was just plain old-fashioned “insurance” shooting. Back in the ol’ days I’d learned to bracket whenever possible. That rule was right up there with getting an “insurance” shot – second exposures “just in case”. These rules harken back to the days of sheet film and plate cameras with dark slides and contraptions to move film about. There were plenty of things to go wrong, so “insurance shots” were a very good idea if you could afford the time and film. These days, with digital cameras and massive image storage capacities, the practical barriers to routinely bracketing – when conditions permit -  grow smaller all the time.

So, I shot a bracket of this; perhaps just to see which exposure was best. Regardless, I chose the middle exposure, did very minimal processing and posted it to share with my daughter who lives in LA.

 

In the note accompanying the post I wrote :”This picture and a few others in the series need a bit of work; they don’t  ‘read’ right – yet.”

This was pretty much the straight jpg. The subject, framing, positioning, exposure, etc. are all decent. And I’d gotten my digital workflow sorted out sufficiently that what was on the monitor was pretty close to what you see on the print. Fine. But I knew this wasn’t the look I wanted – this isn’t what I wanted to show you…

Now, turn the clock forward a year an a half:

 

This is much more what I had in mind when I snapped the shutter that day.

That oak – the pater familias I think – thoroughly dominated the scene; I wanted it just a touch surreal – the clouds too loud, the shimmer of movement in the foreground grasses (about knee high), the clouds throwing winter’s last gasp against the spring…

Right now this is my favorite version; others are possible. I wonder what it will look like if I redo it again another year and a half down the road?

Tools are what we humans use to chip away at the limits of imagination.