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The
dualism of reality and appearance – “Your knowledge of things is
the way of your direct experience of appearance”. Correspondingly,
the experience of reality and the medium are a 'dual experience':
feeling into nature and feeling into the nature of the medium. - a
work should be a world in itself.
Hans
Hofmann*
*Color
creates Light – studied with Hans Hofmann. By Tina Dickey
(In
our Saltspring Island library)
The
other day I walked along the shoreline at Indian Point at Fulford
Harbour. A foggy day, these were perfect conditions for photographing
in the filtered light that laid an even, if grey, cast on everything.
On a sunny day, the direct sunlight would have created strong
contrasts, bright highlights and dark shadows that the camera, unlike
the human eye, would have had difficulty coping with: burnt out
highlights and impenetrable shadows. Now though, the highlights were
dulled and shadows lightened. Even in the deep shadow areas the light
seeped in. I took some super images ( no false modesty please) and
later loaded them onto my 'Lightroom' program. It was here that I was
able to analyze them more objectively. To move from capture, to final
image. These are not at all the same thing and it is here on the
screen that I made some important changes that took my photographs
from 'as recorded' to finished image.
Yes,
it was a foggy day, and that gave the basic theme to my
images, but a flat, grey, dulled final image was not what I wanted
either, so I set to work to make the minimal adjustments possible and
yet still be true to my subject. Now, it would have been possible to
go wild, to move the control sliders far to the left or right but I
worked carefully, making changes only where I felt it necessary.
Necessary? Somewhere I had an ideal conception of the day and the
place and was taking the image to meet that. The final image was my
creation, my communication of 'foggy day', not an exact replica.
Garry
oaks.
It
took some trouble to find a point of view that created the repeating
rhythm of the trunks, showed the beach and point and the receding of
the shoreline into the fog. “Think, line everything up just right,
click.” In the computer though, as I thought it would, the camera
'saw' this much more flatly than my eyes had. I must compensate to
bring it back to my original view. I sharpened, brightened slightly
and increased the contrast of the closest trunk, and a bit of the
second but left the rest to fade into the fog. A minimal change, but
such a difference to how the image presented itself.
The
snag.
Shooting
from under the alders, towards the fallen maple trunk at the edge of
the water, was a lighting challenge, ( from dark to light) but the
repetition of forms between the sticks in the foreground and the snag
was too good to miss. Only in this filtered light would this have
worked, would the detail in the shadow area have been visible. Later
though, I could see that the water detail had been lost, thereby
loosing some important visual information, so I 'brushed' in just
enough detail to show ripples in the water. On impulse I brightened
the fringe of alder leaves at the top of the picture and decided to
leave it that way, at least for now.
The
cobweb.
On
a day like this, cobwebs were picked out from their surroundings by
water droplets. Almost too easy and too commonplace unless I could
find something reasonably original to 'say', and when I saw the
curled tree root among the driftwood there was a 'resonance' between
the forms; - like some restatement of a musical theme in another
key. Later I had to work on the web to bring it up so it would be
more visible and work with the wood in some kind of balance.
Besides
showing myself photographing with filtered light and making
adjustments for the final image I hope you can see that I do not work
with 'rules' when making pictures. Rather it is a familiarity with my
subjects and with the medium, and participating by, as Hofmann writes
in the above quote, “feeling into nature and into the nature of the
medium”.
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