The Ottoman

When you hit it right, winter in the Northwest is like a candy bar: dark, rainy, and misty on the outside and bright, focused, and yummy on the inside. Which makes it a great time to sit around and poke and edit and sequence and refine.

"Next I'm going to write a little piece showing the original capture and the finished abstract for an image out of Just Energy," I announced to my photo editor (and photoshop teacher) while we sat together in her office poking around in my image catalog.  

"Why are you going to do that?" she said, gazing first into her monitor. And then onto my laptop monitor, which was at that moment beginning to fill with a collection of images you might see some of here soon.

"Why?"  I felt slightly befuddled.  What did she mean why? I am highly experienced in explaining stuff.  Before I started to spend most of my time making images and figuring out how to make more images, and make more of the images I had already made, I spent most of my time explaining complicated, often magical sorts stuff in a simpler and more fun way.  So it wasn't going to be so hard to make that bridge here.

Nonetheless, I hadn't actually done so yet. I just couldn't get myself to open up my catalog and sequence a pair of appropriate images.

"Because someone wants to connect into the work that way," I said simply. "And then the question can be answered on paper.  And if that's the way they connect, then why not?"

"Nah." She wrinkled her nose.

"Nah?  Nah what?"

"Nah, don't do that. It's magic. The process is magic."

"Well. Yeah." There was this little tiny sinking pit in my stomach.  But at the same time, I maybe felt relief.  "You don't explain magic. But I could show the foundation of the technique."

Now she shook her whole head. "That's science. This is art. There are always the students in my classes who get excited about a shot and then ask what lens you used." She paused and looked at me. "But It isn't really about the lens."

"No," I said sighing. "It never is." Recently, I have been getting that question, too. And really, what lens I used is never the answer.  It might be a piece of the puzzle. But the reason the perspective looks like that, whatever that is, is never because of the lens only.  There are other things going on. And at least seventy five percent of them have nothing to do with anything technical. And half the time I never know what those things are, (or were), until I look at the captures. I only know it was time to try the next thing based on where my experience of the last thing left me, and I did it.

Which is all by way of saying that I was sighing  because I knew exactly what she meant by, "it's magic" and I wasn't going to enjoy saying no.

Last year I watched a cool online class on natural portrait lighting. Not that I do portraits particularly. But I do know natural light. The instructor had put together this beautiful shot with a model sitting on a low ottoman under a big picture window  and used the studio set up and her shoot to demonstrate her technique. Part of the gist was, you could make any window or exposure work, you just played around with the variables: like where you put yourself and the model, and how you directed the light with flats. But when it was time for questions, she reported a great deal of them turned out to have been about, all things, that ottoman: exactly how long it was, exactly how wide it was, even how many inches it was above the floor.  

Smiling, the instructor looked straight at the camera and remarked that she had no idea. Not how long the ottoman was.  Not how high it was.  And not how many inches off the floor it was.  She wasn't even particular about which ottoman it was.  

Which," I added, having related all this to my friend while we sat in her office, "I appreciated. Because it obviously wasn't about the ottoman at all. It was about almost anything but the ottoman."

My editor nodded. "Let it just be magic."

Just then, the dog at her feet sighed in her sleep. And once again we turned our backs on the night and our eyes toward the shiny raw images on the screen.

Just Energy

Here's a Q and A on my ongoing Just Energy series. If you have any more questions (or for that matter answers), feel free to drop me a line.

What am I looking at?

Every image in this series begins with a DSLR capture of one specific waterfall in the Columbia River Gorge. 

How do you go from the original image to the finished color abstract?

Standard digital processing tools: Adobe Photoshop and plug-ins. Art lovers who don't know digital processing (a specialized skill) ask me what that means. Based on my modest experience, here is how it works: digital photography techniques were specifically developed to duplicate classic camera and darkroom techniques, like making things lighter and darker (dodging and burning).

As Ansel Adams once (and now rather famously) said, “the negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print the performance.” From there, it kept going: classic film types and discoveries were translated digitally and today the digital revolution continues to unroll, including the advent of many tools that are purely digital without filmic antecedent and also those that were and are specifically innovated for color.

Using a few of them, I play with and "research" an image to see what may lie below the surface. If something catches my attention, I follow it and "draft" versions. In many cases, it's actually not easy to duplicate or standardize a specific style or color spectrum on a curated set of images.  They may all start more or less in the same place, but, typically, the intangible mixture of light, flow, shape, and power make exploring every image a qualitatively different experience both technically and creatively.

How does software do that?

It all begins with the pixels. From there, digital algorithms are applied to perform specific processes on the information that is present.  As a result, colors and contours and visible details often change. That's how it works generally (not just here).  Next, I usually use very standard tools like layer blending (how the pixels of different layers interact with each other; the exact technical term is blending modes) and opacities. Forms and shapes show up, and I pursue them.  And sometimes there is a beautiful and (often) surprising result. So really, each image is also embedded with a little journey.

How does the software map turbulent, swirling areas in color and render them? Aren't those actually white and opaque when you look at them?

Via the pixel information. A process just applies its equations to the existing pixels if I ask it to. It has no opinion, or retina, or optic nerve. It's pretty neutral.

Do you change any of the colors specifically yourself?

No. I choose and experiment with the techniques and effects, which create combinable layers which generate a sandbox of colors and forms and contours and detail. I create and (hopefully) select a few final images from them. I tend to be overly critical and exacting of and surprised by my own work, so I often get someone else to look at them too. Otherwise, you would probably only ever seen one or two of these. 

Whether or not I like them, I don't manually change any of the resulting colors or densities. Regardless of the specifics of algorithms and techniques, the results you see actually convey and illustrate energetic information within that technique's parameters. Part of my reference point here is cosmology. (In the '00s, I was asked to develop and teach an innovative cosmology program, so I spent some time with galactic imagery.)  In an X-ray telescope image, the lighter and cooler areas always indicate higher energy zones. For instance, star nurseries, which are very very hot places, are often light blue—a frequency that lies toward the ultra violet end of the wavelength spectrum.  

In this series, the lighter colors tend towards the more energetically-intense areas...e.g. the place where the water is hitting the earth with maximum intensity. For me part of the magic is not only to offer an interesting image, but one that, in formula and result, also accurately describes an energetic event. The original pixels always determine the final result.

What and Where: "To Expand Let Go"

For those collectors and viewers who appreciate the mechanics behind the abstraction:

These are abstract images of an original turbine of the Bonneville Dam, which spans two man-made islands on each bank of the Columbia River about 45 minutes outside Portland, Oregon.  The dam is located in both Oregon and Washington (the river makes up the border between the two states).  This original (WPA-era) turbine can be found displayed outside the Visitor's Center on the Oregon side, right off of Interstate 84.

The images in this series were captured in three different shoots and seasons and with two different lenses. The circular orb shapes in some of these shots are bokeh, a light effect that occurs at certain apertures on certain lenses and in specific light and weather conditions. In this case, I was shooting (usually) straight up or ahead into the turbine blades when rain started to fall late morning at the very tail end of June (that's something that happens fairly often in the Pacific Northwest, of course) and I just kept shooting up into the rain. Given the technical settings and the angle and direction of the sun (more or less overhead), the raindrops falling and dripping from the edges of the turbine blades registered as clusters of orbs.  

Of course, when I mention this to some, they say, "well, I think there is a little more going on than that." But technically, in these shots--that's what's going on. I just happened to keep shooting when the rain started. In a few images, you can actually find tiny droplets of rain falling in mid-air, or streaking past the steel turbine blades in fine little lines. I like that.

The photo above, courtesy of the Bonneville Dam Authority, is an historic 1930s image of the original turbine and the team that built it. (The original turbines have more recently been replaced by the more contemporary revision that can also be found on many major hydroelectric and water retention dams if you visit them, which I do.)

You will find images of the actual turbine in situ in parts two and three of this series, Connect The Dots and Sister Turbine.

Need more info?  Drop me a line, and if I can provide it--I will.