"A Stranger in a Strange Land" Thoughts...

Blogpost 1

I’d like to use this blog to discuss what inspires me to capture an image and my thoughts on post processing and naming the images. Every image has a story behind it, some more intriguing than others. 

When an image grabs me it is usually a combination of factors; light, composition, colors and textures. I feel that there needs to be a balance among these factors.  I love Autumn. Yes the reds and yellows are nice but it’s the burnt oranges that really resonate with me. I also realize that I have a strong affinity for the color orange. This fact hit me squarely when I first laid eyes upon Nicholas Roerich’s  “The Commands of Heaven”. The canvas is dominated by a dramatic sky of intense orange clouds that is breathtaking. Unfortunately that particular image is not available as a print to purchase, yet. In general I feel that if the colors in a composition do nothing to enhance the image then perhaps it will not be a successful image. 

 I’ve always tried to compose the final image in camera but usually fine-tune it afterwards. When I started shooting the abstract imagery in my “A Stranger in a Strange Land” series it became more difficult to crop the final image in camera. The final image comes to me in post processing. So now I tend to shoot multi-frame images such as panoramas or mosaics and fine-tune the cropping later in post operations. That way I have a fair amount of digital real estate to work with.

“Portal to the Infinite”

I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of infinity. How do you wrap your head around it? Imagine an ant on the surface of a sphere of a very large diameter. If it’s large enough the ant would see his world as a very large flat surface that no matter how long he walks in a “straight” line it would seem to be an infinite plane. He would have no concept of existing on a very large sphere and imagine the ant’s confusion when eventually he ends up at his original starting point?  Our concept of infinity is equally puzzling. How big is our universe? Any magnitude conceived is still finite.  Is it infinitely large? Let us say that we left the earth in a spaceship on a straight line trajectory. In actuality a straight line trajectory is impossible to achieve, only precise to within some small tolerance. Therefore any almost perfect straight trajectory is but an arc of an extremely large circle, which means we would end up where we started from just like the ant.  Whereas from our perspective we can understand the ant’s dilemma, maybe our puzzled concept of infinity might only be understandable from a higher dimensional perspective and that’s as far as my 3-dimensional mind can make any sense of it. So can we perceive space as small as it is large? Maybe as in the macrocosm, the microcosm is also infinite. Perhaps imagination is a portal to discovering worlds within worlds.

“Solitude”  

I was captivated by the textures, color and compositional elements of this image. I admit that I have a tendency to view abstract imagery as landscapes, perhaps of some alien world never before seen. Here there are elements of sky and water with reflections that are not accurate reflections of other elements. In such cases I just try to make a composition which “feels” right, palpable in some hard to describe way such as when I saw the Nicholas Roerich image. At this point I’m now being driven by my right brain and my gut feeling rather than my left brain. A curious element is the small waif-like bird perched on what could be interpreted as a boulder in the extreme right. This appears to be a fiber-like element stuck to the rusting metal. I added the beak to insure it would be interpreted as a bird albeit a rather strange one at that. But then if it is a landscape of an alien world then it works fine. Thus that serendipitous element became the inspiration for the title.

“Land Under the Wave”

The story behind the title of this image is perhaps the most intriguing of all. Again, I was captivated by the compositional elements but in particular the textures.  As I was working on this image in post processing I loved the rich greens emanating from this image. Immediately I thought of Ireland. From there I recollected a myth about an island roughly 200 mi off the West coast of Ireland called Hy-Brasil. There were stories about a high civilization that existed in this mist shrouded island. It appeared on maps from the early 1300’s until about 1865. It was later removed as it seemed to….well, not actually exist. Another ancient Celtic name for this island was 

Tir fo Thuin  or “Land Under the Wave”. 

The image looks like it could be under water and there does seem to be a wave in the picture as well. But here is where it gets really strange. In 1980 in Rendlesham Forest, Britain, outside a US Military base there was a UFO sighting that is perhaps one of the most important sightings in modern times. A military MP had a close encounter one night with a craft floating closely above the forest floor. He recorded his impressions in a notebook which he carried with him at the time. Weeks later after sleepless nights he felt compelled to record a series of ones and zeroes in the notebook which he had carried with him during the event. Forwarding to decades later when he was being interviewed for a documentary on the event he pulled out his notebook and showed the pages of ones and zeroes to his interviewer. She informed him that it resembled binary code. He was unaware of the significance especially considering that in 1980 how many people would even know what that meant. They then gave out the code to several independent experts in computer programming and received similar translations. It references coordinates relating to several important megalithic structures such as the Great Pyramid in Egypt. One of the coordinates seem to coincide with what may have been the location of Hy-Brasil. How interesting is that! For further reading about this event several books have been written. I would recommend “The Rendlesham Enigma” by Jim Penniston the one who had this experience.

“Autumn’s End”

The title of this didn’t come to me till I was well into the post development stage.I was attracted to the composition mainly. As I was processing this image it appeared to me that there were two components to this image separated by the “what-ever-is-happening in the middle”.  I interpreted the middle portion to be an energy anomaly, a visual metaphor for the transition of Autumn (left portion) to Winter (right portion).

“Cheshire Night”

This capture had the feel of an evening image with perhaps some orange tinted clouds perhaps backlit by a moon. It wasn’t till later on that I saw the image of the cat in that orange area and not till after I finalized the image that I noticed the female character below which could be interpreted as either the  Queen of Hearts or maybe Alice. Serendipitous synchronicity perhaps?

“Sapphiric Realm”

I thought that I was done shooting on this particular day when I came upon this. What initially captured my attention was the bright star-like feature in the middle left of the image. I was struck by the nebula like elements laced through out the whole composition. This began to take on an astronomical theme. I experimented with the white-balance till I achieved the look I wanted. The spatters of white paint became far away stars in the cosmos. My sister-in-law Dani came up with the “sapphire” theme. I named it “Realm” to give it just a bit of ambiguity.