I’m not sure what to say about this one. Sometimes everything seems to go right, even when it is the middle of the night and one is sick as a dog and on a crazy drug regimen and dealing with work and family stress. Well, maybe the drugs helped after all. Just kidding!
Two views of a gazania (a flower also called an African daisy) unfurling. Can you tell which photogram is closer to the true colors of the flower? Or which one is closer to the colors the flower would have chosen if it could picked its own colors? (Perhaps it did…)
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The poet Milton contrasts subtlety and fineness on the one hand, and simplicity and sensuosity on the other in these lines from Comus:
Ornate rhetoric taught out of the rule of Plato.
…To which poetry would be made subsequent,
or indeed rather precedent, as being less subtle and fine,
but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.
Au contraire, less can be more. The simplest of images, stripped down to the essence of the “that thing” the image contains, can also be the most subtle and fine. Subtle and fine can also be as sensous and passionate as fire and ice. As the true passionate love that comes from actually “knowing” someone at the level of the soul can be more sensuous than a casual fling. As the subtle pleasure of watching fine water drops form on flowers in an early morning rain can contain a measure of passion. As a single poppy on white can stand for the all pent emotions we complex humans possess.
P.S.: I’m on a complex regimen of drugs right now to treat a terrible sinus infection and asthma attack, so perhaps I ramble…
Are images like the butterfly above or below, or this clematis, photography?
Good question. In one sense, they certainly start out as digital captures, so are at least technically digital photographs in origin. And I’m not Photoshop artsy-filter-slap-happy, at least I hope not. Let it be clearly understood that nothing other than the Sharpen > Unsharp Mask Filter was used from the Photoshop Filter menu.
In another sense, a viewer could quite reasonably look at the imagery and would be right in assuming that non-photographic techniques are involved. The clematis in particular looks more like painting than photography to me.
Here’s where I come out. A good question, but ultimately it may not matter much what an image is, provided the image works visually. But if I had to say, I’d say these images are a new media, part photography part something new, and part of the evolution of digital photography into a new art form. (Drum roll, please!)
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On the subject of oregano, and not simplicity, here are some photogrammed and heavily cross-processed leaves of origanum rotundifolium. Note, these are oregano leaves, not flower petals (which are more transparent) as in the other images.
If one petal of an oregano flower is nice, are three petals of the origanum rotundifolium flower thrice as nice?
This is a photogram of a petal of the flower of an oregano plant, origanum rotundifolium.
Usually, when I capture this kind of image my post-processing involves all sorts of channel operations and complexities. I also bracket like crazy in exposing the capture in first place, because I find some of the out-lying exposures work better than those suggested by the light meter. My brackets are well beyond the range you’ll find in programmatic exposure bracketing in a digital SLR. Mostly, I am interested in over-exposure rather than under-exposure (over-exposure helps with the translucency) but sometimes I need under-exposure as well to layer mask in some dark bits using one blending mode or another.
Well, this time the fancy stuff just didn’t do it. I kept coming back to this way over-exposed version of the capture. No particular adjustments from the automatic suggestions in RAW conversion worked either. (This is unheard of for me!) Just worked as it was. Somehow the over-exposure had blotted out extraneous details and left a nice delicate color. Simple. Sometimes simple is best.
This photogram of a hibiscus flower is a good companion to the Mallow image I created recently. Both flowers grew together in a sunny spot in my garden, so its fitting that they should be paired as imagery!
This is a mallow flower from a minature bush mallow that I planted in our garden. Here are other mallow images, and my mallow set on Flickr.
When I first started cross-processing this photogram in Photoshop, I was mainly attempting to get a transparent effect with the flower petals. But as I went along, I became more interested in the colors themselves, with the issue of transparency strictly secondary.
…so if you know your flowers, you’ll realize the original was quite small. Shown above after inversion and cross-processing, and below in the original capture.
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Here’s a clematis captured using my digital photogram technique and cross-processed, on a black background (above) and inverted on a white background (below). I like both effects very much and think that these images look almost like paintings rather than photographs!
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Dreamweaver is a nice name for a rose, and I think this transparent, dreamy image lives up to the rose it depicts…
Here’s a nice photogram of a Fourth of July rose from my garden.
This is a fairly straightforward digital photogram of an Iris, lightly post-processed to remove defects (such as dust) and to clarify colors.
This image shows a Bangui butterfly from the Central African Republic. I captured it for reflectivity rather than transparency, and then cross-processed the resulting image.
The fire power required to cross process is considerable. I’m running Photoshop CS2 on a Mac Pro with dual core Intel Xeon processers. In other words, four CPUs. The system runs at a top-of-the line 3GHz.
I’m now up to 5 Gigabytes of DDR2 RAM, which is danged fast memory, and a heck of a lot of it. The memory modules have their own heat sinks and look like minature nuclear reactors.
Even so, when I have a large-sized image open with multiple layers and masks, my system starts to crawl. Probably performance will improve once Adobe releases a version of their Creative Suite designed to run natively (rather than via a simulation layer) on the Intel Xeon processors.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my system, particularly the 30″ monitor. The whole thing is beautifully engineered. And, I can see my photographs to edit them in a way I never could on my Windows system.
That said, I am also surprised to get fairly frequent application crashes. Both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Bridge hang on me at least once a day, and I’m forced to rely on Apple’s Forced Quit, the analog to the Windows “three-fingered salute.”
When this happens, I often get a window on the screen asking whether I want to file a report on my problem with Apple. I hadn’t been bothering with this until I was told recently by “someone who should know” that Apple does actually follow-up on these problem reports.
I remain a little skeptical (I KNOW that Microsoft ignores problems reported to them), but on the off chance that someone at Apple is listening and passing the reports on to Adobe, I have taken to writing a haiku each time I have an Adobe application crash on my wonderful Apple box. For example:
My Photoshop crash:
Lost post-processing indeed.
Please Adobe help me!
Or, somewhat more poetically:
RAW photo opens
Stormy landscape will not budge:
Silence in the rain.
