We recently spent two days at Douglas Headwaters Dam in Tennessee. I took several great photos, but the highlight of the visit was Walker getting to spend hours upon hours playing in the mud.
Douglas Lake is part of the Tennessee Valley Authority flood control network. Nestled among the western fringes of the Great Smokey Mountains, the lake sits in a region which was once very geologically active, but has now settled. Layer upon layer are piled up on the bottom of the lake and the shore are scattered with quartz geodes.
The high iron content of the soil and water give the lake an eerie, almost Martian aspect. The broaden area at the edge of a mountain range results in some of the most stunning vistas on the east coast.
Your kids can take classes with me at OutSchool, and I will have courses for adults up and running soon. Interact and see more of my art on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, or sit back and watch some of my Maker and travel videos over on YouTube. I also write novels and an ongoing family drama series called In Such Times. If you really like my work you can support me on Patreon.
Along the same road where I photographed the power lines and spiderwebs, Walker pointed out a spot where a large limb (or small tree) has been cut down after growing around a line.
The tree lay in a ditch, surrounded by poison ivy, so photographing it was a challenge. I ended up aligning the camera by taking several blind photos and picking the angle which worked best. After that, I set the D3100 stock lens to manual focus and took a series of some dozen photos with an f/5.6 aperature, manuals adjusting the zoom of each photo without looking.
I’m not especially enamored of the colors in this photo. There are too many browns and the particular shade of green is not one I like very much, so I am not holding this up as a fantastic photo.
But the subject begged to documented and the potentially hazardous location resulted in some fun adjustments to my usual methods, so it was absolutely worth sharing.
Your kids can take classes with me at OutSchool, and I will have courses for adults up and running soon. Interact and see more of my art on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, or sit back and watch some of my Maker and travel videos over on YouTube. I also write novels and an ongoing family drama series called In Such Times. If you really like my work you can support me on Patreon.
There’s nothing like a blank and white photo to really how off the shape and texture of a subject. Sure, color can be beautiful, but when you’re looking to really focus on shape, it’s black and white that forces you to really focus.
And sometimes you take a color photo and the universe decrees that it must be rendered in black and white.
All of today’s photos were captured in color, but as I was processing them I realized that they were so close to black and white that maybe I should just desaturate them. The black wires against the gray sky were captivating in their starkness. The rough wooden pole was nearly black from the paleness of the light and decades of salt air weathering it. The waterlogged cobwebs softened the joining of these elements, but in a way that was undeniably creepy.
I captured these photos using my Nikon D3100. They sat on the SD card, un explored, for three weeks, until I finally had the time to unload them last night.
These photos provide the perfect opportunity to study form and composition. The dominant lines MUST run neatly parallel to the gridlines of the photo, or drastically violate them, else the photo will appear lopsided and sloppy.
Like I said, you can violate the horizontal and vertical lines and everything will be fine, if you deviate radically.
Until the day I can arrange to get into a decrepit power plant, these are likely going to be some of my best photos of electrical equipment.
But just wait until you see what I have to show off tomorrow…
Your kids can take classes with me at OutSchool, and I will have courses for adults up and running soon. Interact and see more of my art on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, or sit back and watch some of my Maker and travel videos over on YouTube. I also write novels and an ongoing family drama series called In Such Times. If you really like my work you can support me on Patreon.
Three weeks ago I left Maryland on a family vacation which would take us to West Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. I spent half an hour before we left Maryland wandering the street, taking photos of spider webs and trees weighed down by a heavy mist that verged on rain.
That photo expedition is probably the reason why I forgot to get my laptop from the office before we left, which meant that I spent the next three weeks doing all my work on my iPhone (which has a bad battery), Alli’s laptop (which is quite old), and the iPad my dad gave me for Christmas… at least five years ago.
It was quite the experiment in using tools that aren’t quite right to do the job. I got work done, but it was a struggle. Now that I have my MacBook back I’m trying to catch up on the backlog of photography, video editing, and writing that accumulated in those weeks.
Last night I downloaded the contents of my Nikon’s SD card and was honestly taken aback by the brilliance of my own work. And yes, that’s the first time I have ever said those words.
As usual I threw away almost half of the photos, but the survivors of this batch are among my favorite phots that I have ever taken. The spider webs hang in the air, seemingly unsupported. In many of the photos, the tight aperture I used resulted in photos which seem to depict spheres of water hanging unsupported in the gray sky.
I had a lot of fun rotating and cropping these photos. It quickly became apparent that the best option was to either remove the wood post which the web hung from or… turn it into a landscape.
A simple crop and rotate takes this from a photo of a spider web on a mailbox in Maryland and turns it into a fleet of alien vessels overing over the Martian landscape.
I’m absolutely thrilled with these photos and, as much as I enjoy iPhone photography, am definitely committing to set aside a bit of money each month with the goal of buying myself a modern SLR and a few different lenses within the next year.
If you have any suggestions on the best cameras or want to share your own transformational photographs, send me a message or post a non-spammy link in the comments below.
Your kids can take classes with me at OutSchool, and I will have courses for adults up and running soon. Interact and see more of my art on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, or sit back and watch some of my Maker and travel videos over on YouTube. I also write novels and an ongoing family drama series called In Such Times. If you really like my work you can support me on Patreon.
Last weekend we took the kids into the woods to spend time with their great-grandparents and get away from technology for a little while. You can read more about that adventure over at In Such Times. While playing in the river, Walker found a rock which, when thrown in the way of eleven year olds given reign over a stretch of stony beach, split in half to reveal gorgeous striations of color.
Colors, in parallel
I’m no geologist, but the colors in this rock suggests a high copper and iron content, oxidized by millennia of exposure to the air and water of West Virginia. A geologist buddy also suggested that they might be a form of oil shale.
I captured these photos using my iPhone X and natural light with no flash. Tap-to-focus and tap-exposure gave me a dramatic light balance. There are no filters on the image. The stunning swirls of liquid color are brought to life by getting the rocks wet in the river before placing them on a large flat stone to be photographed.
Colors at 45
For the second photo I wanted to break away from the strict parallel lines and show off the complex topography of the break. The reflectivity of the wet stone was almost to much, creating highlights which are a little stronger than I would like, but as an unedited photo it is still stunning. I will likely adjust this a little before printing to tone down the highlights and boost the shadows, but the overall effect of the photo is what I had hoped for.
Time for a dip
After capturing several photos on a dry surface, I thought it would be fun to partially submerge the rocks in the stream from whence they came. Here you can see part of the struggles which comes with taking photos that include water. The refraction of light in the deeper water combines with the glossiness of the wet surface to create an environment which is a significant challenge for computational photography. I didn’t have to resort to activating the AF/AE Lock on my camera and physically moving my iPhone in and out to achieve the desired focus, but it was a close call. After taking about a dozen photos I managed to capture this one.
Plenty more photos to come from the river expedition, but for now tell me what you think of this set and how you overcome the challenges of excessive brilliance when photographing wet surfaces with a phone camera.
A few weeks ago, Alli’s mother requested that I try making some small vases which she could use for making small flower arrangements. Always happy to accept a pottery challenge, I sat down and threw a dozen little vases. For the most part, it went well. There were a few little vases that got all timey-wimey and I accidentally smashed the rim on one of them while trimming, but overall they turned out really well.
After bisque firing, I packed up the pieces and brought them north. Alli, her mother, and the kids helped me paint them with a variety of Mayco Elements glazes, then I fired them in her kiln at Cone 06.
The results are lovely. Good, rich earthy tones and delicate translucent colors. I need to get some brighter colors before springtime, but these are great for the fall.
I’m especially entertained by the green vase. The drips are actually a blue paint, but the interaction of the chemicals in the dark blue glaze (applied first in two layers) and the green glaze (which I did as two layers of overcoat) is quite stunning. I had intended the base of each drip to be more jagged, but the glaze ran a little, creating this more gentle effect.
The next generation of microvases will have narrower necks. These are nice, but I’m told that the usual aesthetic of these “grandma pots” leans towards narrower necks. I’m hoping to find the time to throw a few pieces in that style tonight or tomorrow morning, so I’ll update the YouTube or Facebook livestream with a video when that happens.
You can find my pottery, including these vases, over at my Etsy store.
The other night I stepped out to the dock to put away some paddles that the boys had forgotten in their enthusiasm to go to dinner with Walker’s dad… and thirty seconds later came running back into the house because I had to try and get a shot of the moon rising over the bay.
It turned out better than I expected, but isn’t quite what I had hoped for:
Moon Rise Over Chesapeake Bay, 2020/10/2
The difficulty of capturing a moon photo comes down to glass size. The moon already looks large to us because of an interaction between the curve of the atmosphere, density of the atmosphere affecting how light bends, and our own eyes being quite nearly spherical. It’s all a stack of lenses piled up one upon the other, giving you the effect of a giant moon.
That’s why when you try to take a moon shot with your phone, you’ll almost always be utterly disappointed. Even multi-lens fancy phones are still using an array of barely curved lenses. To shoot the moon properly you need a nice, large, curved glass lens. The basic stock lens on my Nikon (AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G) is just barely adequate.
I like this shot, but I do think I should have put the foreground water into focus, rather than trying to focus on the moon and the island, and obviously it would have been better with a larger lens that would show off how large the moon looked over the island, about three miles away.
