A few days ago, two things came together that seemed to demand of me a thoughtful response.

First, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City opened an exhibit, “Faking It: Life Before Photoshop.”  It is a fascinating exploration of the many ‘manipulations’ that photographers have explored since the advent of photography – yes, there was HDR before Photomatix, dodging and burning, composite photographs.  The website is well worth a visit or even better, take in the exhibit should you find yourself in New York.

The second event was a conversation with a friend about my excitement over some techniques I am learning to use and master, how it is opening up a whole world of possibilities that I can only imagine right now.  As you might guess, she could not share my excitement – in fact, she had some very strong objections, related primarily to the ethics of manipulating a photograph.  I found myself explaining then justifying, stopping just short of apologizing.  I mentioned the exhibit at the Met, how there is a long, historical tradition of photographers, great photographers, well respected, who made similar changes to their images, if in a wet darkroom rather than on a computer.  She remained unconvinced – photographs should not be manipulated in this way.  Paintings, sure – photographs should be a faithful representation of what is ‘real.’

Neither of us changed the mind of the other.  Not until later did I realize why this question persists, why the argument is never settled – it is a bogus issue, a red herring if you will.  And appeals to historical precedents only obscure the issue even more.  Remember there was a time when folks believed the world was flat.

The question, as old as photography itself, is – can photography be both an artistic and documentary medium?  The answer to that, to my mind, is obvious – yes.  And would the methods used be different depending on the final goal?  Again, yes; not necessarily, but certainly possible.

Is this image manipulated?  You bet – I wouldn’t be doing my work as an artist if it wasn’t.  My goal as an artist is to produce photographs that are evocative and expressive, beautiful in their way, that hopefully generate some response in the viewer.  And the next time this discussion comes up – and you know it will – I will remember to make the question explicit, art or documentary.  You certainly are not required to like or even understand my art – and I am not required to apologize or justify it.

ISO 100 | 1/400s | f/6.3 | 35mm | EOS

This photo of one of the most historic part of Dumaguete City, Philippines, was taken during a recent photowalk together with the photography club were I’m a member of, last weekend. A 2-day photowalk around the city were very tiring, challenging, but FUN  A good timing, because, that weekend (24-25 Nov.) the city (Dumaguete), was celebrating their Charter Day. Food and fun was everywhere

The trip from Bacolod to Dumaguete City is approximately 5-6 hours. Sounds tiring, but, worth the trip. The photo above is the sculpture of the Sisters of St. Paul de Chartres located along the famous boulevard.

*for more info. about the city, you can check it here: http://www.godumaguete.com/dumaguete-city-negros-oriental.html

                      maybe it was the tinted glasses
                      walking uproad to town

                                the
                                wide
                                low
                                grey
                                cloud
                                hung

                      then there was space
                      between the buildings

                      a woman walked handsome out
                      of the House of offices uphill
                                for lunch

                      the bus bsssh’d and waved
                      some suits across the road
                                downhill

                      then there was silence
                      and we all waited for

                                the end

                      under the green steeple

Sometimes you just know there is a photograph in front of you – if you could only figure out what it is.  I loved the design of this building, the colors of the building materials, the sweep of that curve – there is a green curve as well.  I wanted a shot that isolated the design elements of the building.  I couldn’t find an angle that eliminated the trees and landscaping in front of the building – I tried everything.  And then, I decided to try working with the trees instead.  I rather like how this turned out, perhaps better than the shot I imagined and worked so hard for.

Sometimes you think you know what you’re doing – and if you keep at it long enough, you have one of those ‘happy accidents’ that prove you actually knew much less than you thought.

The Great Blue Hole in Belize

Elephant Rock formation in Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada

Pinky Lake Hiller in Western Australia

Death Valley in California

Balls Pyramid in South Wales, Australia

Champagne Pool in New Zealand

Mono Lake in Sierra Nevada

Beauty Stone of Yellowstone National Park

All photos are from flickr.

I’m a fan of landscape, seascape, cityscape, and any -scape photographs so I feel delight whenever I see beautiful photographs like these

More: http://ph.news.yahoo.com/photos/extraordinary-world-phenomenons-slideshow/extraordinary-world-phenomenons-photo-512279196.html

These lovely little fellows were given to me by a local farmer, otherwise known as The Pumpkin Lady.  If you’ve never seen them before, they are the green shoot from garlic, kind of like a green onion.  I ended up making several pints of pickles scapes, and they were a hit at the market.

They joined things like strawberry margarita jam, cranberry orange marmalade, chipotle ketchup and cranberry mustard on my shelves.  I also steeped some in some white balsamic vinegar, which was amazing.  It smelled so good, and looked pretty in the little jars I put it in.  

Another one of my new adventures was beekeeping.  I’m really new to it and have a lot to learn, but my friend Brett, who brought me the hive, was terrific in helping me out.

Because it’s the first year for the hive, we wanted to leave the bees lots of honey to help them get through the winter.  So after we inspected the hive and made sure the queen was well and laying her eggs, we took out one frame for honey collection and left the rest.

But without any equipment, like an extractor, how to get the honey off the frame?  Eventually, we suspended the frame over a foil pan to catch it as it dripped out after uncapping the wax with a hot serrated knife.

It took awhile, but eventually we got as much honey as we could from the frame and then put the frame outside on top of the hive to allow the bees to clean off the rest.  One frame gave us three beautiful pints of honey.  Really, the best agricultural bang for your buck and your time.  I’m looking at making a top bar hive over the winter and trying to establish a new colony using natural (no chemicals or antibiotic) techniques next spring.  And looking forward to a lot more honey next summer.

So much more to do and plan for.  Today looks like a great day to fill the woodbox, wash some floors, make some yogurt and have a hot supper waiting for my husband and the kids.  Maybe make some cheddar cheese scones for supper?  

parking lot making like the bay

rena

ingredient landscape

I have never had much success with HDR images.  I know what to do in theory – it just never seems to work in practice.  So, I’ll be honest – I avoid shooting HDR as much as I can and often well past anything you would consider wise.  In situations that clearly call for some allowance for high dynamic range, I’m pushing my exposures to the limits of what I might be able to work with in a single image.  So you might imagine my surprise, and delight, when I processed this image.  I’m not certain what I did correctly this time – I need to figure that out so I can learn from it because this is one HDR that works perfectly for me.

Death Valley is, in many ways, an out of this world environment, harsh, unforgiving if you take it too lightly, achingly beautiful – and mysterious.  Racetrack Playa is one such place, famous for these ‘sailing rocks’ that move along the lake bed, leaving trails behind them as they advance a few inches or so each year.  There is a warning as you enter the lake bed – to stay off if it should happen to be wet.  Any footprints you might leave could last for 100 years.

I have seen other, more dramatic photographs of these rocks and the Racetrack.  This, however, is one of my favorites – if you know my work, you know I like simple, occasionally minimal compositions.

Home again, after having spent an amazing week at Death Valley National Park in California.  The environment there is so unlike anything I am used to so shooting there challenged me; much of the time, initially, I simply took everything in, saying to myself – oh my god.

The last thing I did was grab a big bag and harvest whatever would fit.  I tucked it on top of the piles of our life in the back of the car and off we went.  Open windows led to the children being showered in kale…

It has been difficult to not have a garden in Maine.  I cringe to have to buy kale, something we had 9 months of the year from the garden and that is so much happier the less time it spends being cut.  I miss not having the option of walking into the backyard to see what could be turned into lunch or dinner.

I shouldn’t say we haven’t had ANY garden since leaving New Hampshire.  We were determined that even if we didn’t put in a garden, we were going to find somewhere, somehow, to plant our seed garlic.  I love many things about kale, but if I had to pick one thing to make sure we grow, garlic it is.  I love the rhythm of it…  The garlic planting is the last thing that happens in the garden in the fall, and it is one of the first things to make an appearance in the spring.  It gives doubly, with garlic scapes first (mmm, garlic scape pesto) and cloves at harvest time to use in Josh’s marinara sauce, sauteed into greens, simmered into soups, used raw as an antibiotic curative (very effective, albeit very smelly)…  And it’s the one thing we know how to save seeds for at this point, so we can keep the cycle going over and over all on our own.

Shortly after our move last year, neighbors of my mother-in-law were kind enough to offer their old horse pasture for our garlic planting.  It was rocky, shallow soil, but at least it was something that we could dig in, plant into.   That 2011 Columbus Day weekend, the weekend we always marked for garlic, we were planting garlic seed into Maine.

It was so warming and reassuring to see those first green shoots come out of the earth this past spring.  It was somewhat bittersweet, as this time it would not herald the start of the rest of the garden.  But at least we had those garlic scapes, churning them into pesto.  And then at the height of this past summer the garlic was ready to pull.  It was not our best harvest, they were not our biggest cloves, but we’d had a chance to dig our hands into the dirt and to keep our garlic going.

Columbus Day came around again this year.  Only this time we were planting OURSELVES onto the land.  That was the weekend we moved into the yurt, followed by a flurry of getting ourselves rooted in here.  The garlic seed was hanging in a basket in the kitchen area, just waiting and reminding, maybe even nagging.  Meanwhile, THIS is what our planned garden area on our land looked like:

Not exactly planting ready.  Friends offered some of their garden space and soon we were off to nearby Castine with a bag of 100 or so cloves that Josh had separated out, digging into the earth and starting on the next garlic cycle, side by side as they planted their 600 (!) cloves.

This time it was Veterans Day weekend instead of Columbus Day weekend.  And there was another very notable difference for me.  My six-year-old Caden has helped me plant the garlic the past three years.  This year the four adults did the planting while he was off with our friends’ sons, building forts in the woods, army crawling by now and then in their blaze orange hats looking like little rolling pumpkins.  I miss my garden sidekick, but realize this is just part of another kind of cycle.

This year I didn’t help you plant garlic.  I was too busy spying on you guys.

Next year?  I don’t know where, I don’t know when, I don’t know who with, but I do know there should be garlic.

 
… and out of touch for a while.  I’m off to Death Valley tomorrow for a week of photography.  Can you say ‘heaven?’

                                1969

                slippy ruts
                sky puddles
                but mud-spatter
                up to the thighs

part of >>> years

I needed to get back to the beach, especially after the horrific news and images coming out of the coastal areas.  Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, incredibly, was largely spared.  And after finding the town intact, I was treated to this glorious morning – Mother Nature really outdid herself today.  You might recall that two months ago I was surprised, and soaked, by clouds that came from behind me.  This morning, I saw this line of clouds and noticed they were moving eastward.  I thought, maybe, if I was lucky, and waited long enough, they might be over the water before the sun rose.  And so it happened …

For perhaps 60 seconds, no more, this marvelous pink light illuminated everything – the clouds, which reflected the light back down onto the water and beach.  This morning’s sunrise was the best evidence I have seen for the value of patience and that the world does go on.  (It didn’t hurt that the clouds, mercifully, did not produce any rain today.)

The backyard of mind,
dumped with stuff
he shall never sell
and doesn’t pay any well.

The heart that goes on
with no mentors,
prompts him to move on,
to run a worthy course.

He cried just now,
wasted some time on it.
But he had to;
until again, on an imminent weekend.