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.
