08-17-12 What Do You See?

I don't know about you, but I have never looked closely at a human eye before I edited this photo. The eye you're looking at belongs to Tiffany, one of my Photo/Media students at Lake Area Technical Institute, and she was a good sport when I spontaneously told her I wanted to photograph her eyes. We went up to an area in our school that has great northern light and I took several photos.I'm not sure if a viewer would find this photo fascinating or a bit unsettling. If it's unsettling, I can tell you that it shouldn't be because Tiffany wouldn't unsettle you: she is a beautiful person, with a beautiful personality. And she has beautiful eyes.Sorry for the deep thoughts here but I think close-ups of body parts, like a single human eye, are striking because we don't tend to look so closely at them. In fact, if someone stares at us too long, we often look away. Further, an eye is in the realm of people like optometrists, not teachers, friends and acquaintances. And beyond that, it is only part of a whole that we call our bodies. I believe we are less our bodies than we are our experiences. Our bodies are like suitcases (Samsonite? Luis Vuitton?) in to which we pack our true selves.That aside, today I am showing you Tiffany's eye and asking you "What do you see?" In my case, to quote the famous discoverer Howard Carter, I see "wonderful things". . . .Canon 5DII 1/60s f/4.0 ISO200 100mm

08-16-12 Allison

So I was looking for a connector for my iPad yesterday, which I hadn't seen since May. And though I didn't find the connector, I did find a collection of DVDs of senior portraits I had taken in the summer of 2004. And when I saw "Allison R" on one of the labels, I immediately remembered this particular outfit and pose.Allison was a beautiful subject who came to the session with many props and ideas. I am always worried when a portrait subject says he or she wants to bring a prop. I usually ask two questions: 1)Is it living? 2)Is it bigger than your face?The first question is because living things (boy friends, snakes, cats, dogs, parrots, etc) can be challenging, though I'll takes snakes over the other animals listed.The second question is because, if you ask me (who is admittedly old fashioned), I think a portrait is about the face.In Allison's case, she brought her cello (bigger than her face but OK by me) and a huge, hot pink prom dress. The prom dress begged for a high-key treatment and that's what we ended up doing. Allison liked this photo and so did I, largely because she is very comfortable in the shot and she has a wonderful, relaxed smile. Allison ordered this photo in color and when I did some basic re-editing today, I decided to convert it to black and white, maybe because I am even more old fashioned than I used to be - I don't want you to be distracted by the bright color of her dress.I have been writing a bit about what is "real" in the last few posts and I think that this is the "real" Allison. And that's what portrait photographers should always strive to capture.

08-14-12 Hand County, South Dakota

This is another HDR (high dynamic range) photo that is actually a combination of two photos. I'm not sure I like the dramatic "rays" that seem to be streaming to the ground from the clouds because I didn't see them when I took the photo. And they look a little unreal.But they are real. The HDR process only enhances and demonstrates what the camera "sees." As I was looking at this photo, wondering whether I should post it, it occurred to me that light is to a good camera what the high pitched dog whistle is to a dog: the camera and the dog perceive things much differently than humans do. And though cameras are tuned by humans to show us what humans normally see in terms of color, brightness and contrast, software processes allow us to see an alternate reality. In this case it is an HDR photo that shows us what shadows under clouds look like.On a side note, I took this photo where I did to pay homage to my mother- and father-in-law. Years ago they had a painting hanging over their couch that was a winter scene showing a prairie that was table flat and that stretched out to infinity. My mother-in-law said the picture reminded her of home, which was Hand County, South Dakota.Though it isn't winter yet in this scene, the landscape is certainly table flat.

08-13-12 A Return To the Painted Trees

This is not the first post of these trees. But this photo offers a slightly different view and treatment. "Do they really look like that?" you ask. Well, I studied and taught philosophy just long enough to be confused by that question. So I'm not answering. . . .

08-12-12 Wonderful Web

08-11-12 The Fisherman

08-10-12 Quiet Anchorage

08-09-12 Native Grass

08-08-12 Ten Trees

08-06-12 The Painted Church

The Painted Church, aka St. Benedict's Roman Catholic Church, is officially in the town of Captain Cook, though I remember it as being somewhere on the side of a hill away from any kind of urban features. From the outside it is fairly nondescript. But on the inside it is beautifully painted, thus, the name "Painted Church."Rather than talk about the church I want to talk about photography. First, this is a hand-held exposure at 1/15 of a second. I don't travel with a tripod and for interior photography in dimly lit spaces, you have to be lucky to get something acceptable with that shutter speed. Thank you, Image Stabilization!I took this photo in 2008 and at the time, I don't think I knew what HDR was. But but this scene begs for HDR treatment - not to make it seem someone surreal but instead to do a better job of exposing the who scene, including the windows, which are clealy blown out. "Blown highlights" is photographer talk for bright parts of a photo that have no detail because they are severely overexposed. If I had had a tripod, I would have taken one photo that properly exposed for the windows and one photo that exposed for the interior. And then in software, I would have combined the two into one well exposed photo.Like so many other places I have travelled to, I need to go back to the Painted Church and do it right (or at least better). . . .

08-05-12 Window Peeking

In my quest for something other than landscape and macro photos for this blog, I have gone "dumpster diving," which is my term for going back to old photos that people more organized than I would have gotten rid of a long time ago.This picture, taken in Delft, Netherlands, is certainly not art. But it is a narrative. Because of that, I converted it to black and white, in part because it was the two dogs that caught my eye in this scene and they were both black and white to begin with.And why is it a "narrative." Well, I think it tells a story, though, like so many other photos, it has many different stories to tell if you give it a chance. Is it about how life in Delft in different than life in your home town? Is is about the couple? What is the young man saying that is causing the woman to look the way she looks? What about the man in the background with his hand to his head?And, of course, what about the dog looking my way?What I like about candid photography is that though I am really "in" the photo because of how I frame the scene, I am also a kind of a voyeur. And so are you. As a photographer, I am saying "Look into this window and feast your eyes."

08-04-12 Reflections

I have photographed clouds reflected in this same water before. But I am a sucker for redundancy. This photo started out as a 5DIII picture but I imported it into Instagram and published it as the square, over filtered photo you see here. Some would say it's cheating to do Instagram photos with a camera not built in to a phone. And so I guess I cheat from time to time. :-(