Posts in Category: painterly
Wild Harvest
Wild grapes and crabapples along the boardwalk at Magee Marsh on the Lake Erie shore in OH, waiting for migrating birds to harvest them.
As an image it is all about form, color, and light. The apples and the gapes at the rule of thirds power-points anchor the otherwise somewhat chaotic composition. And I like the way the light wraps the round shape of the grapes and apples.
Samsung Smart Camera WB800F in macro mode. Processed in Snapseed on the Google Nexus 7.
Tide combed grass
I find the patterns that a flood tide leaves in the marsh grasses fascinating. Add the intense sky if a passing front, and you have the ingredients of an image. Then shoot it as an in-camera HDR and process it creatively and you get something Turner might have enjoyed painting. Well, at least a hint of Turner’s heightened vision (version?) of reality. 🙂
This is a stretch of the Mousam River valley near its mouth in Kennebunk Maine.
Samsung Smart Camera WB250F in Rich Tone mode. Processed using the filters and enhancements in the Google+ app on the Nexus 7 FHD.
A Bit Of England
Not exactly England in its native state as this is the very managed landscape of a golf resort, but the sky at least is all England. 🙂 And who can resist an upturned boat in such a display?
This is a vertical sweep panorama from the Samsung Smart Camera WB250F. A normal 24mm shot would end about halfway up the tree at the right on the skyline. I certainly do enjoy the options sweep panorama brings!
Processed in PicSay Pro and Photo Editor on the 2013 Nexus 7.
Silky Water: Happy Sunday!
Back in the day of slow film emulsions, taking a photo of a waterfall, or water falling over ledges as in this image, especially in deeply shaded glens where waterfalls are likely to be found, resulted in the “silky water effect.” During the long exposure required to capture the image, the moving water painted itself on the emulsion as blur, with all detail submerged in a smooth flow like a cascade of silk. As it happened, the result was very like how some painters rendered falling water, attempting to capture a feeling of motion in the blur. As film speeds and quality increased, it became possible to “freeze” the flowing water, even catching ripples in their run and splashes in mid-air. However, the “silky water effect” never lost its appeal. Photographer’s today go to great lengths, internationally undermining the strengths of their equipment with neutral density filters and the like, to recreate the painterly, traditional, silky water effect.
The engineers at Samsung, when designing the software for their Smart Camera family, included a “waterfall” mode among the Smart Camera Modes. If you have the camera mounted on a tripod, it will take a very long (90 seconds or more) exposure of moving water…resulting in what I would call a “super silky water effect.” I find that the longer I am away from the actual scene…as the sound of the rushing water and the play of the play of the light in the ripples and falls recedes into memory…the more I like the effect. I have to break away from memory and look at the image for what it is, not what was there. For sure, this is not the way I see rushing water…but I can understand the attraction of the image, as an image. I can understand that that rush and tumble and joyful confusion of water in constant motion can be reduced to the calm rendering of silk, and that it captures a different, and equally valid, emotional response to the falling water than I might otherwise feel. I get it. I am still uncertain as to whether I totally approve. 🙂
And that leads to the Sunday Thought. Silky water is not real. It is a photographic artifact, or the imaginative impression created by a painter’s mind and brush. And yet it captures a real emotion…or at least one among many emotional responses to reality. It speaks to a calm in the center of confusion that appeals to us all. In a way, it is, from a traditional point of view, the more spiritual response…a seeing through to the assumed essence of what is behind the rush of our daily reality.
However, I can’t help but feel that it is, at least a bit, a cheat. I think there is as much spirit in the rush and tumble and churn of detail that is our immediate response to falling water (and to life). I appreciate the peace of the long view, but I am not willing to give up the excitement of the moment. My instinct is that they are both elements of the spiritual view. Joy in the confusion. Joy in the underlying calm.
Interestingly enough, by happy accident (if you believe in such things), Google+ assembled two images of the same tumble of water into an animated gif…one taken in waterfall mode, and one taken in Rich Tone / HDR. Hopefully your browser will display it properly. Joy in the confusion. Joy in the underlying calm. Happy Sunday!
Falls on the Baston. HDR
The falls on the Baston in Emmon’s Preserve in Kennebunkport are, like the Redwood Forest, another subject that has always proved difficult to capture. The falls lack the scale of the Redwoods, but they are well shaded by trees, and present the added difficulty of bright white highlights from sun on the foaming water. Once more, a subject that demands deeper HDR than my in-camera HDR can provide.
Which is why my last Sunday photo-prowl found me down by the Baston with my Fat Gecko, carbon fiber, shock-corded tripod. As I had suspected, 3 exposure HDR also gives a nice understated silky look to the rapids, without the need to resort to long shutter speeds.
This is not the falls at their most difficult. The leafless state of the mostly maples that combine with the pines to shade this stretch of stream let more light in than there will be later in the season. I will go back in 6 weeks and try that challenge.
Canon SX50HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. -2 1/3, -2/3, and +1/3 EV exposures. Blended and tone mapped in Dynamic Photo HDR. Final processing in Lightroom. This is one of those HDRs that challenges the eye, or at least my eye. The range of light is so natural that the image looks a bit painted. We just do not expect this effect in a photograph.
Peace is a Great Egret
For some reason I find this image immensely restful…peaceful…calming. It is an almost classic composition for one thing, and the great white bird above the silver-blue water…the solid sculpted mass of the fallen palms, and the strong verticals and diagonals of the standing trunks…it all just seems to hang in balance. My eye caresses it.
Or maybe it is just me. 
Taken at Viera Wetlands in Viera Florida.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent filed of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 320. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
The Phoebe and the Bokeh
I am still learning the virtues (and limitations) of my new Canon SX50HS. It is not that much different than the SX40HS it is replacing, but there are some added features that are worth exploring. Like framing lock. There is a button on the left side of the lens near the body which, when pressed, turns on optimized image stabilization while you are framing the image. At extreme telephoto, where even the steadiest hand can have difficulty holding the camera still enough for effective framing, it is a really a helpful feature.
Last week I went out to look for some cooperative birds to try it on. As it happens all I found were a few Eastern Phoebes along the Kennebunk Bridle path, and, wouldn’t you know it, they were between me and the low fall sun.
Still, I really like the way the bird is framed here, against the sunlit marsh grasses, and what the longer focal length is doing to the grasses behind.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1800mm equivalent field of view (1200mm optical plus 1.5x digital tel-converter function). f6.5 @ 1/200th @ ISO 100. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Form and Light (otherwise Flower)
Sometimes it really is about form and light and how they interact more than about the subject itself. Abstract is too angular a word, too, well, abstract, to describe the pure play of light we occasionally see and catch in nature, but I can not, off hand, come up with a better.
What I like here are the big bold colors obviously, orange on green with spikes of red…but it is more about the range of the orange, the shadings and shadowings, the texture of the orange surface, the burning translucency, contrasted with the solid points of the furled petals. And running through it, the single filament of spider web, catching the sun. (If you look closely you can see the author of that thread on the third spike from the left 🙂
This is, I believe, some sort of giant exotic iris from the demonstration gardens at the Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle Washington. It is part of at least 3 blooms, stacked by the telephoto perspective.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view, taken from about 15 feet. f6.5 @ 1/640th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
the Netherlands: the Oostvaardersplassen. Happy Sunday!
This is the accidental prairie/marsh formed when they built out the last section of the coast of the Netherlands in the 70s. Today it is home to an ancient breed of horse, recreated ancient cattle, Red Deer, foxes, and a few hundred species of birds…as well as being a major stop-over site on the European migration for many more. It is essential Holland, reclaimed from the sea-bed, cut by canals, backed up against a large inland lake, right on the edge of the sea. A beautiful place.
The weather while I was there was typical Dutch summer weather, with fronts coming through continuously: bouts of rain, sometimes heavy, and then periods of sun under skies straight out of a painting by Jacob van Ruisdael.
I felt blessed to be there, even when caught in a sudden downpour, even when the umbrella turned inside out.
These shots are with, of course, the Canon SX40HS. The top one was taken through the very dirty glass of an observation tower on the refuge, and I learned just how good the spot-removal tool is in Lightroom. It is very good!
1) 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 125. 1) 2 frame panorama, stitched in PhotoShop Elements. 24mm equivalent shots. f5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought…well, it is going on 10PM here in Holland after a full day of work, workshops, and some birding and photography, and slightly too much good Chinese food. I am feeling decidedly spiritual in the sense of blessed and grateful, but my mind is too tired to make much more of it than that. I have an early train ride to the airport and then the long trans-Atlantic flight home, so I am thinking mostly of packing and getting some sleep. It has been, however, a great Sunday, and I hope yours was too!
3/10/2012: Bougainvillea Photopaints
Over on Google+ where I am active ( +Stephen Ingraham) there is quite a large group of photographer/artists who are expressing their visions of the world by creating painterly renderings of photographs. Quite a few of them use Pixelbender within PhotoShop. I use Dynamic Auto Painter 64x Pro, which is a program that attempts to mimic the effects of different classic painters by analyzing your photograph down to basic shapes and colors and applying the master’s brush methods to recreate it as a painting. It is a fascinating program to watch work, as it builds your image from a bare canvas, one brush stroke at a time.
I also do some finger-painting on my Xoom’s touch screen, using PicsArt Studio to selectively apply various effects with my finger tip, and then PS Touch to add a texture layer or to do final processing.
My offering today is a gallery of examples based on the same photograph…a sprig of bougainvillea against a terra-cotta brick wall at Mission Bay in San Diego. This is a shot that I actually took with painterly processing in mind. I liked the color and texture contrast as a photograph…but I was definitely thinking of it as a painting when I pressed the shutter release. The original looks like this.
The first image (at the top) is done in the style of Van Gogh. Following, we have the same same photograph rendered after a Matisse’s Lily Pond, followed by the same pic again, this time rendered after a work of Cezanne.
Finally we have the same pic again, finger-painted on the Xoom using various effects in PicsArt Studio, with a photo-texture layer (macro of a pocket handkerchief) overlaid in PS Touch.
Clearly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so what do you think? I will chime back in if comments warrant it 🙂