I Can See it For You Wholesale

I’ve started trying to take some time on a daily basis to write briefly about what I photographed, and why, and what the results were. The rationale is this: when I’m trying to learn some technique or get fluent with some piece of gear, it’s easy for that to become the point of the work I’m doing, or to subsume the original purpose of it.

I spent an hour or so working with this piece of charred broccoli, two flashes, umbrellas and diffusers, different backgrounds, etc., along with the bits and pieces of Light: Science and Magic that I’ve been absorbing intermittently (and incompletely). And when it was done, I had a couple of images that are a bit interesting, and I had largely forgotten why I had started shooting that subject in the first place.

Almost immediately after I finished, I had filed the whole thing in the drawer of my mind reserved for technical exercises and shut it.

But when I sat down to write my debrief of the day’s photography, stuff started popping back up:

Today I shot some tabletop macro stuff with a charred piece of broccoli I noticed last night while trying to relight a pilot. It was unususal — for a bit of scorched food-stuff — in that it was fully recognizable and indeed had retained its structure down to a rather fine level of detail. The scorching created a fantastic effect — the surface was highly glossy, but color was still faintly visible below the surface. It was like some sort of beautiful, horrible demon broccoli from another dimension.

That moment of minor revelation — of pure seeing — in which I first noticed that burnt bit of vegetation was easily obscured by the clutter of all the thinking and adjusting and reacting that I had done in playing with the lighting. If I hadn’t stopped to write it down, then the thinking — and not the seeing — would have become the whole story of the thing. And within a few days, odds are, that story would fixed in my memory. Stopping that night to write it down gave me an opportunity to change that story.

I suspect that if I can keep this up, it will play an important role in staving off the disaffection that sometimes comes over me when I’m working instensively on black triangles (technical stuff), and keeping my eyes — as it were — on the real task of photography, which is seeing (and allowing others to see), not mastering techniques.

Here in California, we’re finally enjoying (or enduring, depending on our temperament) a little rainfall. We can certainly use it — although it’s not going to be as much as we need, unfortunately.

Some folks are discouraged from taking out sensitive electronic devices when there’s water falling from the sky, but most SLRs, even DSLRs, are pretty robust. And rainy weather can be great for photography. Clouds provide diffusion to soften harsh contrasts. Rain tends to encourage activity among some species. (These two factors make rainy weather great for photographing egrets.)

Water on the ground produces interesting reflections. And clouds that are breaking up can add a great deal of drama to landscapes — especially if you’re experimenting with infrared. And running water has the ability to create landscapes all its own…

So, a couple of days ago, I left my tripod at home on a day which turned out to have some really rockin thick white clouds. Exactly the sort I’ve been wanting to try my R72 on. The R72 was in my bag, so I decided to throw it on the camera and crank the ISO to 1600 and see what I got.

This is pretty much the exact opposite of the workflow I used last with IR — careful long exposure tripod shots using exposure blending to maximize tonal range. This was scale or guesstimate focused, and composed with even less precision, and exposed at or over the limit of what I could handhold safely, and working with the very limited dynamic range at high ISO. The results — while still IR — have a very different feel. Softer (of course), grainer (of course), and overall with a bit of a toy camera feel.

One thing that sort of surprises me about these images is that I find myself cropping them far less than I do most of my images. Usually I crop at least a little to adjust framing or trim off extraneous bits — which only makes sense; none of my cameras has 100% viewfinder coverage, anyway. But some of these shots, framed without the benefit of any kind of finder whatsoever, seem to work compositionally to the point that I don’t feel any urge to crop them at all.

Weird.

Anyway, this definitely makes me want to get into film IR, and/or get a body conversion. This ability IR has to reveal bring something otherworldly to mundane views — or, more accurately, to reveal something otherworldly within mundane views — is getting addictive.