For this week’s Lens-Artists Photography Challenge, Patti invites us to explore empty spaces in our photography. Empty spaces can draw more attention to our subject, as it does in this wildflower photo.
In wildlife photography, leaving a lot of empty space in front of your subject gives them room to move.
Or empty spaces can be used in landscape photography to evoke a mood or illustrate the vastness or wildness of a place. Possibly my favorite place to capture emptiness in landscape photography is Death Valley National Park.
Empty spaces can accentuate the vastness of a landscape.
Including a lonely road can evoke a mood of solitude and remoteness.
Since many of the most exciting nameless canyons in Death Valley are reached by hiking up an open wash, these wide open spaces create a sense of adventure and exploration in me.
But by far my favorite empty spaces to photograph in Death Valley are the sand dunes.
With five major dune fields contained within the park, there are a lot to choose from.
Emptiness can not only emphasize distance, it can also highlight the sheer massiveness of certain landforms.
Empty spaces don’t need to bring attention to a particular subject. They can also be used to bring attention to something more ephemeral, like color, as shown in the sunset colors of the feature image, captured in White Sands National Park. Empty spaces also make great palettes for abstract photography. Here is my favorite meditation image, a celebration of emptiness.
Death Valley has been on my mind a lot lately. A huge storm in late August dropped over a year’s worth of precipitation in one day. When the park finally reopened 2 months later, the basin was still filled with water,
If there are enough little rain events in the upcoming weeks to keep seedlings moist, that big storm could lead to great things for 2024. It IS an El Nino year. Dare I hope? Could we actually have a superbloom? It’s possible. Stay tuned. I’ll be watching the weather closely. I’m keeping my dance card open, not committing to any housesits for 2024 yet. I’m hoping that instead, maybe this year, I can once again follow the flowers.
It’s tricky. Sometimes you can see them and sometimes you can’t. But once you do, you can’t unsee them. I’m talking faces. Faces and other features, mimicked in rock outcroppings or trees.
I’m on the road this week. Since I am visiting Face Rock State Scenic Viewpoint in Bandon, Oregon today, I thought it might be fun to share a few of my images with “spirit people’ in them with you.
Face Rock even has a Native American legend attached to it, so a lot of people have given this sea stack human attributes over the ages. Even so, I had a real hard time seeing the face at first. It’s a nasty, stormy day with gray, flat light that doesn’t bring out the shadows that usually make this rock so distinctive. If you are also having trouble seeing a resemblance to a face, too, the profile is on the right side and she’s looking up towards the sky.
Sometimes these faces are very well known. The Old Man of the Mountain in Franconia, New Hampshire was even a state symbol, printed on the license plates, until erosion did it in about 20 years ago.
That’s the thing about these features. Like the humans they resemble, they are ephemeral, although their life spans are generally much longer than ours!
Occasionally, I take a photo and find the “spirit face” in it after I process the image, having never noticed it when I took the original photograph. Has that ever happened to you? My feature photo is one like that. If you can’t see the face, it’s in the lower middle of the image and looks like a gremlin.
I spent a winter in Hawaii many, many years ago, back in my film photography days. I found spirit faces everywhere in those images when I had them developed! By secret waterfalls, in sacred caves…..it was spooky! There’s more going on out there in the world than our mere human senses will ever fully discern or understand. (Twilight Zone theme)
I find this last image quite remarkable. I hope it doesn’t offend any of you. The tree grew like this naturally, a mother Madrone in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon. I have not changed it in any way. This tree could make you believe in the old Greek myths where young girls pursued by lecherous gods were transformed into nymphs and dryads by jealous goddesses.
I hope you have fun with the resemblances in my post this week. Thank you, Donna of Wind Kisses, for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, “It’s Tricky.”
Some folks have wondered what my life is like out here on Orcas Island this winter, so I’ll share a day in the life. The Lens-Artists Photo Challenge this week is “A One Lens Walk”. We’re supposed to take a lens for a walk. I took my Panasonic Lumix DC FZ-80, a high-end point-and-shoot, and walked the beach that fronts the property here, so that you can see my everyday view.
There’s a reason why I landed a winter-long housesit here. It’s the same reason that what seems like half the population of western Washington comes down to Death Valley in the winter. The weather isn’t really bad. It’s actually pretty good compared to most of the country in January. But it isn’t very good, either. It doesn’t rain all that much, but it always looks like rain. It’s somewhat drizzly and… gray. It’s a Maritime climate and it’s fairly far north. So it’s dark. And gray. Almost always.
The light is flat. It’s not very inspiring, photographically speaking. I often go for walks and feel disappointed because I find so little I want to shoot. It’s kind of pretty. But it’s also pretty bland.
Sometimes, though, there are surprises. I started this walk and at the edge of the property, where it borders the teeny tiny public beach, I found a flower! In January. In northern Washington, where everything is dead and dormant this time of year! Gives me hope!
By the way, I’m real good at wildflowers but don’t know garden flowers at all, and this one is a garden flower gone feral. If you can identify it for me, let me know in the comments!
Flat light’s not all bad. As any flower photographer could tell you, it can be amazing for bringing out color and detail in closeups. So I have to look a little closer, for the details, like the hues and textures in a piece of driftwood.
Today I riffed on this awesome piece of driftwood, making abstract images. I’ve been getting into abstracts a lot on Orcas, because I’m usually not inspired by the view. (Spoiled, I know.)
Although Orcas hasn’t really inspired me, in other ways this stay has been very good for my photography. Because it’s gray I spend most of a day in the life sitting in front of the computer. I don’t really care that I’m not out and about. I’m enjoying the occasional look out at that gray view, and sometimes I see my neighbors. I have fellow snowbirds living in the Sound off my beach. The ones I see daily are about a half dozen harlequin ducks. Since harlequins are my favorite ducks, I think that’s pretty cool. Sometimes I see a few buffleheads, or a pair of Goldeneyes, or a pair of loons, or a flock of geese.
But most of the time I’m focused on the screen. I’m taking a Lightroom course and my processing skills are growing exponentially. I spend a lot of time processing and organizing my huge backlog of images. I’m also working on my book, a history of Kennecott, Alaska, illustrated with my photography. These are all projects that are making me a better photographer. Projects I wouldn’t get to if it was a sunny day in a drop-dead gorgeous locale.
I’m trying to get my work out in front of more people, too. I’m in three exhibitions for the month of February, with pieces in the Anza-Borrego Institute’s Desert Photography exhibition in Borrego Springs, California, the New Horizons Exhibition here on Orcas Island and Gallerium’s Shapes and Colors online abstract exhibition.
A day in the life for me on Orcas is chill, a little lonely, low-key but productive. Quiet, still, but subtly beautiful, kind of like the driftwood on the beach.
For this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, we’ve been invited to share our favorite images of 2022. I’ve been sharing this year’s favorite images in my last two posts, so I won’t be revisiting those images here. You can go back and look at those posts if you missed them!
But I would love to share some other favorites. A few of them I’ve published in earlier posts, but most are brand new. It seems my favorite images change weekly! Because of the scarcity of electricity and internet access during my summer months in Alaska, I have still not caught up with my image processing for the past year, and I discover new favorites every day.
There are so many photos I haven’t even really looked at yet, including winter in Arches and most of my fall shots from Alaska and Washington State. It’s like Christmas every day for me as I continually find new favorite images.
I saw some amazing places in 2022. One that has been on my mind continually this week is the California Coast. Most winters I spend either January or February on the California Coast. I’m not there this year, which may be a blessing. My heart goes out to all the folks struggling with too much of a good thing, with the atmospheric river and torrential flooding.
I spent the month of February 2022 housesitting in Pacific Grove on Monterey Bay. I was 4 blocks from the coast and made a point of doing photography nearly every day while I was there. That is also the batch of work I am currently processing, so a lot of my favorite images in this post are from that visit.
Another fantastic roadtrip was driving the Cottonwood Canyon Road in Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument. It was on my bucket list for years, but usually this is a road that requires 4-wheel drive. I called the ranger station to see if it would be safe to drive in just a couple of miles to do some dispersed camping and the ranger told me the road was in great shape and my little Toyota truck would make it end-to-end just fine! Quick change of plans for me, I could not miss that opportunity. The highlight was visiting Grosvenor Arch, and it was every bit as beautiful as I had imagined it would be.
I’ve also spent a lot of time in Olympic National Park this year. I haven’t processed the fall images yet, but I’ve included a spring sunset in this collection.
My last post included a lot of my favorites from the time I spent at home in Alaska, but I am revisiting my favorite flower photo from this summer.
My best sunset/sunrise of the year was traveling south down Canada’s Cassiar Highway. Every image in the series is so rich and so different. That sunset went through every shade a sunset could possibly have. Intense. I did a series on Instagram last week with a few of these images, 7 Shades of Sunset.
This image looks like I tweaked the color in LightRoom, but honest, it was really that red. I did not saturate the color, I even used Adobe Neutral as my color profile. I published a different swatch from that evening’s palette of hues in last week’s post, ‘cuz this one looked too over the top to me. But now I think it is my favorite.
I traveled the Mt. Baker Highway for the first time this fall. Although the conditions were less than ideal due to wildfire smoke, I was amazed at the astounding views and the easy access to hiking in the alpine. I can only imagine how stunning it must be when there’s no smoke. A new favorite place, I will definitely be checking that road out again!
And of course now, I’m on Orcas Island for the winter, where there are some lovely waterfalls. This image is a favorite.
I look forward to seeing what favorite images 2023 will bring. If you have been following my travels on Facebook, though, it seems that Facebook has not been circulating my posts much lately. I urge you to subscribe to my blog instead, so that you won’t miss a post.
To understand is to perceive patterns. – Isaiah Berlin
I love photographing patterns. When you practice the Art of Seeing, perceiving patterns is an important skill to have.
Life is a great tapestry. The individual is only an insignificant thread in an immense and miraculous pattern. – Albert Einstein
My all-time favorite pattern image I’ve ever captured are the flowers in the feature shot of this blog, each flower smaller than my little finger. I’ve probably published it in a blog before, but when I think of patterns in photography, this is the image that comes to my mind. We’ve all heard the phrase, “a carpet of wildflowers”. This was such a carpet. Carpets are all about patterns.
The immense and miraculous pattern of life is all around us. Just take a look.
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern. – Alfred North Whitehead
Sometimes it’s fun when the pattern transcends the subject. I think this abstract image of a bare-branched tree looks like it could be not a tree, but the pattern in a marble slab.
Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and dark which that thing provides. –Junichiro Tanizaki
Photography is, of course, all about capturing light in all its variations, and the juxtaposition of light and shadow is one way to perceive and capture patterns. I found a delightful play between my subject and the shadows reflected from it in the water in this image of Bog Bean flowers growing in a pond along the McCarthy Road this summer. Bog Bean looks pretty inconsequential when viewed from a distance, but up close the fringed flowers are exquisite.
Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry. – Richard Feynman
Repetition is the only constant that all patterns share, and a major component in why patterns can be so aesthetically pleasing.
Though at first glance the natural world may appear overwhelming in its diversity and complexity, there are regularities running through it, from the hexagons of a honeycomb to the spirals of a seashell and the branching veins of a leaf. … -Philip Ball
Patterns are universal. Even in the most literal sense of that word. Think of the spirals of galaxies, or the patterns of stars in the sky. Those same patterns can be found in the tiniest things, too, such as the spirals of a snail’s shell or the patterns of wee flowers in a springtime meadow.
“The natural world is built upon common motifs and patterns. Recognizing patterns in nature creates a map for locating yourself in change, and anticipation what is yet to come.” – Sharon Weil
There are patterns in our lives, too, from everyday habits to the grander cycles of the seasons or the progression from birth to death.
Finding patterns is the essence of wisdom. – Dennis Prager
The better we are at recognizing and understanding patterns, the more resilient we will be, able to withstand the unexpected changes in our lives.
“There are patterns which emerge in one’s life, circling and returning anew, an endless variation of a theme”. ― Jacqueline Carey
People like patterns. They give a sense of order to what otherwise might seem to be chaos.
“Pay attention to the intricate patterns of your existence that you take for granted.” ― Doug Dillon
One of the patterns in my life is seasonal transience, like our hunter/gatherer forbears. I have been living that lifestyle for over 40 years. It is the pattern of life that makes me happy, but it is definitely not for everyone. What are the patterns of your life? Do they still make you happy?
When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge. – Tuli Kupferberg
When our patterns no longer serve us, it’s time to break free and discover new ones. If you answered “No” to that last question, you might want to consider letting go of some of the old patterns in your life.