Looking At Things

To see differently, BE differently.  See the flower, sit on its petals, wander its satin length, sip its nectar. How else will you know what it is, how it holds the light, and what it means to you? Let your eyes caress its length, penetrate its densities, and reveals untold worlds to you. You lucky traveler.

Seeing It's Not Ordinary

If I learned anything today, it's that there is complex beauty in the ordinary things around me. It sure is easy to overlook them, though, if I take the same route, walk at the same pace and believe that other places far away are more interesting.

On my walk today, I paused and looked at a little scuff of blue paint on the weathered wood, a wrinkle in the glass of the old house on the corner that reflects light in such a curious way. I had to ask:  What am I really seeing? The more persistent question became:  What have I been overlooking?

I had to walk backwards, bend over, crouch down, squint my eyes. I looked from different angles than I usually do. I found it created a sort of visual warp through which I could enter, a way to exist differently, if only through my eyes.

It's funny I think that leaves are green or that flowers are soft and delicate, that glass is flat or that the the sky is blue. Seems like the natural world has all kinds of ways of showing me that it's anything but ordinary.

iPhone 4G Shots: Trying It

I don't have much time to write and create a written piece as I had planned, so I'll post a few photos taken with my new iPhone 4G.  I'm getting used to it, remembering I have a few options I didn't have before.

A few tips:  Stay away from contrasty images where there is a lot of intense bright and dark shadowy areas.  Keeping the camera focused on an entirely shaded subject gives somewhat more accurate color.

You probably won't be able to focus in any closer than about 18".  I've tried to get closer, but no matter how still I am the lens itself is the limiting factor.

Hold very still when touching the phone's shutter icon on the center bottom of the screen.  Of course, if you want to blur on purpose, it can create a good blurring of color.  Play with it.

Look all around you.  You never know what's going to grab you and seem like a great shot.

I was out at Asilomar State Beach last night as the sun was setting behind some storm clouds.  Earlier, I found a quiet spot at the shore and noticed a little sea anemone shell with some pebbles.  iPhoto helps balance warm and cool shades and refines focus and then I'm ready to post.

Shooting Winter Scenes: iPhone Photography

Photographically speaking, it's party time!

This season of the year in the northern hemisphere - you readers down under have the same effect in June and July - is when the sun is at its lowest angle for most of the day.  Golden leaves that remain on the trees are backlit and have extra punch.  Winter seas are higher and storms bring in dramatic surf.  Shadows in the sand and on cliff faces are thrown into much higher relief and colors are naturally more intense and saturated.  It's all eye candy now.

Go for it! Grab your camera and see what's out there and enjoy the lengthened "golden hours" of the day.

In comparison, summertime presents photographers with similar opportunities but only if you get up before dawn - let's say 5 a.m. or so - and get out to a visually exciting place before the sun begins to light it up.  Then, two hours later, that's it.  You have to wait until sunset and later to regain prime photography conditions.  Here on the Monterey Peninsula, fog and wind make for really variable sunlight conditions, throwing mist onto your lens and further flattening light in the middle of the day.

I almost always have my iPhone with me.  In Hawaii I also had a small Canon PowerShot with me also, but even then about 85% of the time the iPhone images come out on top, and I tend to use them for this blog.  It's portable like no other, and when I'm taking a photo of people they don't usually feel as camera shy as if I were to point a large digital SLR at them.  The downside of the tiny lens in the version of iPhone that I have is the small pixel number - I think it's only three pixels while the newest model 4G has seven pixels.  Pixel count, up to a point, is good to have more of.  Optimum, I've heard, is somewhere in the 12 pixel area, but seven gives very sharp images if you keep the file size smaller.

What I do struggle with when I use the iPhone is contrast and the blue cast that results from sky reflections on everything.  My most successful images result from overcast conditions or reflected light when I'm in relatively open shade.  I've had to teach myself to be aware of the horizon line when I shoot, too.  Often I think I've gotten a good shot and come home and discover the horizon is listing to starboard.

I've got my eye on another small portable camera that takes the sorts of images I gravitate to.  Macro photography has always been appealing to me, and the Canon D12 can handle it incredibly well as it's able to focus as close as a half inch away from the lens.  The terrific bonus is that it's very small and can fit into the same pocket that my iPhone can.

At home, I download images onto my laptop, file them for the day and edit very minimally using iPhoto and then post whatever works with the post writing I do.  Pretty cool.

Two Exposures: Charles Cramer and Me

There were two times when I encountered a camera for the very first time, and then there was a third.  

I stood looking down at my hands and what was in them, in the middle of a morning, outdoors on our gopher-ruined lawn.  I realized I had a Kodak Brownie camera with film inside of it, loaned from one of my parents.  I looked through the viewfinder and everything changed; the world had become two dimensional and was contained within a small frame.  

The Brownie, essentially a pinhole camera allowing very little control to the photographer, had a button to push to take a picture, a viewfinder screen to look at with one eye and a crank to forward the film.  That was pretty much it.  You don't need much else as a kid, really.  You just need to look at things and see them, and then keep looking and seeing as you decide what to capture - or stop - on film.  

I took a roll, about 12 pictures, and they came back to me in a week or so in an envelope handed to me on another morning.  I scrutinized them one by one and then again, peering at them and seeing what the camera had done with the light, the shapes and the colors.  Most things were fuzzy, as if Vasoline had been smeared on the cheap little lens, and it could have been scratched and abused by the time I got my hands on it.  

We lived in a rural area, and I spent a lot of time outdoors, so the camera that day served as a catalyst for my eye to begin looking around at my surroundings, my home, my cats, my family.  It was as though I came more into focus rather than what I was looking at because I had to examine colors and patterns deliberately for the first time.  I was about 10 years old, perhaps younger, and I only used the camera one or two other times, but I put all the pictures into an album I still have.  

Fast forward about six years, maybe seven.  In high school, a small single-lens reflex camera was put into my hands, again without asking for it.  It felt like it just landed there, and I was told, "There's a roll of film in there.  Go take some pictures."  Pretty simple.  I was given the most rudimentary instructions and was sent away.  I walked again as if I was seeing the places around me for the first time and spent a good hour or more walking around the school and nearby wooded neighborhood looking at things, shooting the roll.  

I came back to the classroom, handed over the camera, went home.  The next day, the roll was developed and hanging by a small clip on a line strung across the classroom, a graphic arts room.  I was taken into the darkroom and, for the first time, saw a contact print being made.  When it was dry, I scrutinized every little 35 mm print meticulously, seeing in two-dimensional black and white what I'd always barely noticed in color.  

In those two encounters, I was triggered, permanently exposed, if you will, to photography.  It was a perfect storm of naive youth, creative mind and access to information all converging in a potent mix in which I was completely and immediately immersed.  This technology called photography was completely mine almost within the blink of an eye.  One minute, it seemed, I was a young schoolgirl minding my own business and the next I was practically inhaling chemicals, caressing cameras, fondling film and going entirely insane about every possible aspect of photography that I could absorb.  I was handed books and read all of them, memorizing every page, consuming them like drugs.  This was love, deep and undeniable.  I found it seriously amusing at times to see myself constantly using my viewfinder to see the world.  But, on the other hand, I was infatuated with creating images, manipulating light, understanding focal planes and exposure times.  

The third camera was my own Canon FTb SLR that I bought with money I'd saved for a few years, a camera I still have now.  There has never been another tool that felt quite so perfect in my hands, and no other implement for creativity has ever been quite as exciting as my Canon was and has been to me.  

I saw and understood light, learned the zone system Ansel Adams had figured out, tried out filters and a new lens.  Then, unfortunately, I began to feel frustrated by the mismatch between what I saw and imagined and what I could produce in the school darkroom.  I cleaned it meticulously, spent hours and hours in its dark confines trying to make great prints but did not progress beyond a certain point.  The enlargers were sturdy and fine for beginners as were the storage and mixing containers for chemicals, but lots of kids were using the space.  Spills, dents and dings took their toll on equipment, so prints were good enough but no better.  

What I didn't know - still being pretty naive really - was the severe lack of funding for the graphic arts classroom and the high cost of the materials I really needed.  The instructor provided as much for interested students as he could, but eventually the material and space limited my progress.  Then I graduated and put my camera aside more and more often until I was without it much more often than I carried it.  

I tried building my own darkroom in a spare closet at our house, probably one of the smallest darkrooms ever used, but it fed my interest for a while.  I eventually lost interest in maintaining the darkroom, moved away and never rebuilt another, and my intense interest gradually dissipated.  

I went to a presentation and exhibition opening for a fine nature photographer named Charles Cramer today.  It so happens that he took up a camera at almost the exact same time that I did, but his interest never waned, and he did not let discouragement hinder his progress and eventually mastered of the art of photography.  His work is a great gift to us all.  His images and talent have matured wonderfully.  They are lyrical, magical and ethereal in character, suffused with a quality his friends call "Charlie light." 

I'm not saying I'd be as good as he is today.  I'm just noticing the way paths wend their way through time and take us here and there, through thick and thin.  I let my discouragement stop me and he did not.  Now his images are so beautiful and pure that they make everyone, including me, feel like it's an easy thing to do, which is always the mark of a fine master craftsman at work.  

I'm still clicking every so often, and I think sometime I'll invest in an exciting digital camera and learn to use Photoshop or Lightroom fluently.  A third exposure may do the trick.  

Recommended:  See Charles Cramer's work now until Jan. 9, 2011 at Sunset Center in Carmel where The Center For Photographic Arts (CFPA) is located.  There are 60 transcendent, beautiful images to admire.