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.
Empty spaces draw attention to your subject.
In wildlife photography, leaving a lot of empty space in front of your subject gives them room to move.
Empty space gives this meadowlark plenty of room to strut his stuff.
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.
There’s a lot of empty in Death Valley’s landscapes.
Empty spaces can accentuate the vastness of a landscape.
The empty space in this image highlights the vastness of the landscape
Including a lonely road can evoke a mood of solitude and remoteness.
A lonely road can evoke a feeling of solitude and adventure.
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.
A canyon in the Grapevine Mountains
But by far my favorite empty spaces to photograph in Death Valley are the sand dunes.
Mesquite Sand Dunes
With five major dune fields contained within the park, there are a lot to choose from.
Panamint Dunes
Emptiness can not only emphasize distance, it can also highlight the sheer massiveness of certain landforms.
Shock and awe – Empty landscapes can take your breath away.
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.
All is Illusion
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,
There’s water still in the Badwater Salt Flats.
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.
Can you imagine this wide open empty space filled with flowers? I can.
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.
Can you see a fish face in these rocks?
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.
I know I’ve published this one before, but it’s such a perfect “tree spirit”.
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.
This is Face Rock. If you can’t see the face, it’s a profile on the right, looking up at 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!
I saw this one very clearly when I shot it, but it didn’t translate so well. If you can’t see the face, here’s a hint – the black spot is an eye and the sawed off branch is a medallion on his headdress. That’s how I first saw it, though in this picture it looks like the sawed-off branch could be his eye, too.
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.
Peek-A-Boo!
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)
Fiona’s (Shrek) legs
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.
A dryad turned into a tree
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.
This is the view from my living room window.
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 weather’s not bad, it’s just… gray.
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 there are surprises.
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!
A bit of seaweed in the wrack line
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.
Flat light can be excellent for bringing out hues and textures.
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.)
Riffin’ on the driftwood
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.
Checking out my neighbors and fellow snowbirds
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.
Driftwood sculpture
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.
The gray days on Orcas have been good for me.
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.
Well, I couldn’t do it. This week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge is Last Chance, when we’re invited to show off some of our favorite 2022 images that have not been published in a post yet this year. Since I took such a long hiatus from my blog this year, I have plenty! Too many, in fact. I can’t narrow my unpublished favorites down to one post.
Oregon beach sunset
I’ve been trying, but I have lots of sweet images I’d love to share. Because I have too many, and since the Lens-Artists are taking a week off for the holidays and won’t be putting out a prompt next week, I’ve decided to divide my favorites into 2 parts. This week will be my favorites from below the 49th parallel, and next week will be my Northland favorites.
Tallest trees in the world
Last Winter’s Travels
One suggestion was to include images that would probably never be included in one of our typical posts. I pet sit in the winter but I very, very seldom include photos of my charges in my posts. Here is a favorite shot of a kitty I took care of last January.
This kitty used to chew holes in my clothes!
I spent the month of February on a housesit in Pacific Grove, California. I envisioned this shot and was so excited, especially in post-processing when I realized I’d captured exactly what I’d envisioned!
I love the layers in this sunset silhouette.
I love visiting the redwood forest, and I love capturing abstracts. This is my favorite abstract shot for 2022. Charred bark from a previous fire and living green moss and lichens contributed to hues as bright as a peacock’s tail when looked at closely in this image.
Rainbow Redwood
Check out this cool tree. It’s in Olympic National Park’s coastal forest, and with a burly head, fungus features, and a crown of fern leaves, it’s a people tree! I stop by and say Hello! and give it a hug every time I pass that way.
Tree Person
(Yawn) Another sublime Olympic sunset… The Feature is one, too. I captured this image on Rialto Beach. I love the dreamy feel of this image. The Feature shot is from First Beach. I had so many great shots from First Beach it was hard to pick just one.
Rialto Beach
This Winter’s Travels
My final image from Olympic is fall colors, maples along the Sol Duc Hot Springs Road. Olympic had by far the best fall colors I found in Washington this year.
Maples on the Sol Duc Hot Springs Road
Now I’m on Orcas Island, and I have especially enjoyed the waterfalls here. This one is called Rustic Falls.
Rustic Falls
For my final image, while hiking a local trail I saw this Big Leaf Maple leaf standing, still attached, on a tree branch – perfectly upright and all by itself, beautifully backlit. It’s getting a bit ragged, but mostly green, even though it’s December. It hasn’t let go, just keeps hanging on. This is a great inspiration for those times when I’m feeling a little raggedy! I underexposed the background because it was a bit busy and distracting. Doing this helped me to capture the way this leaf looked to me and made me feel.
Getting a little raggedy, but still hanging in there!
Hope you, too, are still hanging in there and I wish you all a Happy Holiday season!
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.
This one would have also worked well in last week’s Diagonals post.
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.
Everything we see is just a thread in the pattern of nature’s tapestry.
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.
Is it a tree or just a pattern in stone?
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.
I love the pattern displayed by the flowers and their shadows in this image
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.
Patterns are aesthetically pleasing, repetition with small variances.
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.
Patterns in nature can be lines, circles, fractals, spirals…. The possibilities are endless!
“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.
The cycle of life, death and rebirth is a pattern.
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.
Understanding patterns helps us go with the flow.
“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.
Patterns help us organize our lives.
“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?
A seasonally transient lifestyle is one of my patterns, shifting like these sands.
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.
Abstract! I love looking for abstracts in nature! Thank you, Patti, for making abstract our Lens-Artists Photo Challenge this week. Patti Moed invites us to break the rules and go beyond the traditional realistic image of an object, scene, or element.
Look close enough and you can find abstract elements in all aspects of the natural world – be it animal
Is it a psychedelic palm tree? Or just… peacock feathers?
mineral
Is this just a rock formation – or is it really the Earth Mother giving birth?
or vegetable
Whoa! This one makes me dizzy!
Sometimes it’s hard to tell if it’s animal, mineral, or vegetable. When I looked through some of my files, I was struck by the similarities in these 2 images, taken 1,000 miles apart of 2 completely different substances. Can you tell which one is wood and which one is stone?
Stone or wood?Wood or stone?
I especially like looking for the abstract in land forms. Sometimes it’s all about the angular with severe sharp lines –
Desolation Canyon
And sometimes it’s all soft, sensuous curves –
Ibex Sand Dunes
Water is a great medium for abstract photography, too.
Is it just a rainbow in a waterfall? Or is it one of those Hubble spacecraft images of a strange nebula in some far distant galaxy?
The next time you go out to play, try some abstract photography. You never know what worlds you may see if you look past the surface of an object’s everyday appearance!
