The Daily Photograph™

An experiment in light and motion

I Did That On Purpose

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To see what I could see. A recent phenomenon in photography has accomplished experts using several thousand dollars worth of equipment to produce blurry photographs. On purpose. On Flickr is a group centered around “deliberate blur” and landscape masters William Neill and Alain Briot have done a lot with the technique.

Me, I’m not so sure. I sort of like what I’ve done here, but it surely seems to me to be a waste of the exquisite machinery of Messrs. Hasselblad and Zeiss.

I can tell you this; like still life, deliberate blur is a lot harder than it looks.

This was not what I had hoped for

Looking For the Sunset

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And finding not much. At least in this direction. This is facing East, toward Omaha. You can see why I chose this spot: A nicely delineated skyline, comprised of ancient white stones deposited when this was all seabottom, full of quirky trees and a deep but unobtrusive foreground. And the sky is quite nice.

A few minutes afterward, these clouds were dark and thoroughly uninteresting. The culprit was the thunderstorms building behind me, that blocked the sunlight as evening fell. I showed you those the last two days,

I also made a photograph facing West, just to complete the sweep of the four winds, but it is so lacking it will never see the light of day.

That mountain is 3000 feet higher

Looking the Other Way

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Is something any photographer needs to do. You see a good photograph in front of you, but something even better may wait behind. I made this just a few minutes before the photograph I posted yesterday, by pointing my camera south, toward Casper Mountain. Yesterday’s photograph was made by pointing the camera just about 180 degrees the other way, toward Montana. My tripod never budged.

Funny thing is, I originally went to this spot to point the camera Eastward, toward Omaha. I had planned to get a fine portrait of an August sunset, above a slab of primordial seabottom. That never happened. I’ll show you what did, tomorrow.

Amid the clouds, a light

The moon has a dark side

And it will never be known, no matter how often we walk its surface. The moon keeps its secrets, even in the light. Gaze not so long.

¤ ¤ ¤

Sadly, this photograph is not technically good enough to work into full artfulness. I forgot the need to lock the camera viewing mirror in place. You can’t see it here, but the resulting shake at a slow shutter speed caused a slight blurring that won’t take much enlargement.

Even messes have beauty

It’s a scientific fact that chaos is symmetrical

And a lot of people were surprised when Felix Mandelbrot showed that many forms in nature repeat recursively down to the submicroscopic level.

Here we have the chaos of a small construction project — a picnic shelter in a park — and the beauty of its design. Nobody planned for symmetry and order, but still it shows its face. The fine sunset light was a bonus I didn’t expect. The light has been harsh during the last few days, but tonight, the Western horizon had just enough mist (and maybe dust) to give us the ‘golden hour,’ which lasts perhaps 15-20 minutes most days.

Breath Deep Amid the Pine and the Sage.

Gloom means the time of twilight

Just as the sun departs, night arrives and the Gloom is that time between. Sometimes metaphors get in the way of a really good word. The word has come to mean an indrawn mood of sadness and loss, and yet, as the Moody Blues declared, At Twilight Time “…fantasy strides, over colourfull skies/ Of form disappearing from view.”

I found a good place to watch that happen.

Sometimes the rain surprises

It was supposed to be a whole different thing

“Downtown Casper in the Westering Sun” was what I had in mind. As I drove downtown, a thunderstorm began to build, with lightning flashes. But, I could see the sky was just partly cloudy over my target location.

I got my gear out and was just about to step forth into the middle of the street (one must be quick, sometimes, in this business) when rain began. My camera is not weather proof, so I found a doorway. Then the torrents began. I waited. The rain eventually cleared, as quickly as it arrived, and this is the result.

Technical note: I metered the light off the clouds, (EV13), never thinking the traffic lights might be brighter. They were. If I decide to work this up, I’ll need to bring in some properly exposed lights from another time.

We're back at the Mogollon Ruins

Some Places Exude Power

Others calmly go about their business. The Mogollon (muggy-yown) ruins in the Gila Wilderness are the second sort. The steep-walled canyon is a hard climb, but once inside the caves, the soul slows. Even exuberant kids get curious, and explore, but are not noisy here.

And the rhythm surrounds us

Between Them, They Make the World

and all that dwell on it. And the dance is never the same. Each round is similar to one before, so there is continuity, but changed, so each moment is unique.

I wish you could see, on the internet, the enormous subtlety and rugged fragility that makes this photograph so delightful and strong. I plan to print it big.

A new view from the same place

I was not too happy

With the earlier work on Red Butte. When I got back to the studio that day, I experienced the awful moment that every artist knows, when all the work seems drab and void. As the images came up on my monitor, they seemed nothing at all like I had envisioned.

Still, the work I post here is supposed to be unfinished; rough drafts, and I had committed myself to posting one of the photographs I made that morning, and so I did, despite my misgivings. I was surprised that some people thought it was worthy.

When today I looked again at that morning’s work, I was intrigued to find it was suddenly better! Every artist has that moment, too, when the work that seemed so awful and trite suddenly emerges with new and stronger meaning. I’m still not too happy with #63. Its gesture is restricted; it’s not — how to say this? — bouncy enough.

So, I offer this piece. I think it’s better.