How do you concisely explain the evolution from witness to artist? I spent 35 years as a photographer, faithfully trying to replicate reality through the medium of a camera. Now I strive to create images that evoke an emotional response primarily using color and movement, painting without a canvas or brush. Inspiring subject matter is everywhere and I often do my best work in my own back yard.
So, having featured a number of photos of Jaxson, I feel it’s only fair to give some equal time to his big sister Sedona. She is also gorgeous, just a lot more difficult to photograph, especially as she’s gotten older. I have good photos from her first three birthdays, but none from her fourth. This is my all time favorite photo of her, it’s from her third birthday. She looks better pouting than smiling.
Yesterday I wrote about my experience photographing Jaxson with a macro lens. There are a few more photos from that shoot that I really love. One was taken in very dim light at a very high ISO. The color was terrible and there was some digital noise in the image. Instead of trying to “fix” the image, I converted it to black and white and played up the “grainy” look, giving it the feel of a very old film photograph. The other is a detail shot of his perfect little hand on his chubby little knee that would not have been possible without the macro capability.
I’ve mentioned a few times how much I love my new 100mm macro lens. One of the many great uses I’ve found for it is photographing babies. 100mm is a great length for portraits in general, but the close focusing capability allows you to really zoom in on the details in a baby’s face. Now, of course I don’t go around taking photos of random babies, as that would be incredibly creepy. So the only subject I’ve tested this out on is our goddaughter Sedona’s little brother, Jaxson. Jaxson is the rarest of all creatures, an exceptionally beautiful baby who also has an exceptionally good natured disposition. So he is literally a joy to photograph. Unlike his sister, aka the spawn of Satan.
I took a number of photos of him soon after he was born and again when he was about a month old. They were good, but I didn’t think they were exceptional. So I tried again when he was about three months old with my (then) brand new 100mm lens. I was wowed with the results.
As I mentioned previously, my car photos started getting more abstract. Maybe it’s because I can only take so many photos of hubcaps, headlights and hood ornaments before I start feeling like the most boring photographer on the planet. Here are two of the better abstract ones. And if you are scratching your head over the one on the left, don’t feel bad. It’s actually a vintage biplane.
I loved the hood ornaments on many of the cars. So I took photos of a lot of different types. Unfortunately, I wasn’t really happy with how any of them turned out. I’m not sure if it was the shallow depth of field or the low light level, but none of them really worked for me. One of the many tricky aspects of photographing cars is that they are shiny. Really, really shiny. Which means I got lots of photos with an unflattering reflection of me squatting down and holding a camera in front of my face. I tried to pick angles where the reflections were minimized or of something more interesting than me, but since I couldn’t move the cars around (they really frown on that) my options were limited.
I started out with a wide angle zoom (16-35mm) at the Barrett-Jackson auction and took about four photos before realizing that I wasn’t going to get anything usable with it. So I switched to a 100mm macro. This is rapidly becoming one of my favorite lenses. Even if you aren’t trying to get a true macro effect, it’s a great focal length to get close without physically getting close and with the image stabilization, I can get pretty sharp photos at 1/30 second shutter speed. I took a number of photos that are recognizable as details on a car. Then I started getting even closer and the images became more abstract, some to the point where you would be hard pressed to recognize it as part of a car. Here are two that fall into the former category. I love the big tail fins, they look like rockets.
Our next photo op came during a visit to the Barrett-Jackson Auction in Scottsdale. For those of you who are not gear heads, Barrett-Jackson is an auction company that specializes in collector vehicles. Mostly cars, but occasionally other unusual vehicles like vintage airplanes. If you like to ogle beautifully restored vintage cars, the Barrett-Jackson auction is the place to go. Prices are not for the fainthearted. Including the cost of admission, which was $30/person last Thursday (it goes up on Friday and Saturday). We had lunch at the Tommy Bahama restaurant in Kierland beforehand, just to prep us for the impending sticker shock.
I have seen coverage of the Barrett-Jackson auction on TV, but that doesn’t prepare you for the real thing. It’s huge. Really, really huge. We walked around for two and a half hours and probably saw less than half the cars. The other big surprise was the bizarre collection of merchandise being offered for sale. Oh sure, there was the obvious stuff like model cars, car related art work, vintage gas pumps and neon garage signs. But there was also a bewildering array of completely unrelated merchandise like jewelry, clothing, patio furniture, massage chairs and mattresses. I guess when you get a large group of people with money in a confined space, you just try and sell them anything you can.
I didn’t photograph any whole cars, because that would be boring. But I did take a lot of shots of bits and pieces of cars. The cars become like abstract sculpture when you look at them that way. This is new territory for me and I can’t say I was entirely successful, but I did get a few interesting images.
Just before we left the Botanical Garden, I found a patch of little yellow flowers. Amazingly, one had this insect collecting pollen and I was actually able to get an image with it in focus.
When I was working on the image in Photoshop, I noticed that when I zoomed in on the insect I could see an iridescence effect in its wing. So I tried a tighter crop. Click on the image below to see it.
While there weren’t many flowers at the Desert Botanical Garden, there were some colorful cactus. I did try these images in black and white, but the color versions were clearly better.
The Desert Botanical Garden is right next to the Phoenix Zoo. And while we don’t have a membership there, we have the next best thing – a membership card for the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, courtesy of my mom. Which happens to have a reciprocal arrangement that gives us free admission. I love free stuff. So, since we were in the neighborhood, we decided to stop for a visit after we left the zoo. Unfortunately, they were offering free admission that afternoon. Which means there were a ton of people there. What there wasn’t a ton of was flowers. It was about as stark and bare as I’ve ever seen it. So I took lots and lots of cactus photos. These two worked best in black and white.
As for the mineral? We’ll get to that when we visit the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show in February.
