Sunday, January 31, 2010

No Trespassing

I don't particularly like it, but I put myself in their shoes, the owners of property along Mt. Pleasant Road, or for that matter, any roadside attraction, fenced or not. I mean no harm, but I don't know such when visitors to the drug house use our back ten acres as a short-cut to the main road. No, I don't.

Nothing about me says I am harmless, except for maybe my camera. Yet a photographic quest is not license. So, even though fifty feet further in is the image I really want, I stop at the fence.

Having attempted to complete phase two of this week's photo assignment, and failing to capture the right lighting from the computer screen and the meager light from outside that shown in my dungeon, I opted to derail from my friends playing in the blogger Main Event and hit the open road. Enough with people and their bodies! After all, there was sunshine after a rain and the temperate forest moss would be glowing.

There is little special in the below images. They are at best reminders of a nice drive along a road I have been on only once before. A reminder that unless I look, I do not see. And a note to return, lean in a little further and look a lot closer. A note that I bring home an complete the assignment.
This stump is five feet tall. The fence is old and beaten down...

4 comments:

KenP said...

I know you are the artist and like to make the viewer work a bit to get the enjoyment that is there. Performance and thought pieces can work that to great effect.

That is hard to translate to pictures. Without focal points, pictures are snapshots. Multiple focal points seldom work in camera shots and when they do the picture is very uncluttered in other ways.

One of the things that has struck me in using the new cameras is the movement of intelligence. It has gone from the photographer to the camera. In the old days, you had to consciously select every relationship of f-stop and film to work depth of field.

You were out on a soft day. Those can be interesting with intense color saturation. Few distance shots work because things go flat.

You can really select great subjects but you seem to be stopping too soon without a clear objective.

Take all this with a grain of salt. I'm fairly lame at all this and most of what I played at was a black and white perspectives.

bastinptc said...

Ken - You are correct on all counts and is the point of the post. With that said, my favorite of the lot is the pink house behind the briers. Why? Because it is all so damn ugly.

KenP said...

I don't think there is a photo there that doesn't have a subject deserving attention. As subject matter goes, they are outstanding.

There are so many textures there to massage one might work days on the sites with differing lighting and perspectives.

If you can move that bent metal siding, that make a great horizontal with the old hay rake showing it uniform pattern against the background with the tree's disordered moss and bark. Moving in on the trees and highlighting what appears to be ferns and making them a strong foreground should make something. And you could do a series based on that house.

It'd be interesting with most to play Ansel Adams and do b&w studies in contrasty lighting.

bastinptc said...

Well, Ken, I woke up this morning and the sun was shining again, this time with a bit of fog about. That road was the first thing on my mind (even before coffee!).I may just have to climb a fence today.