Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Just a few shot’s from a demolition site.  I took some other photo’s for painting references.

While it doesn’t actual replace the need for a wide angle lens, stitching images together can help in a pinch.  I wanted to get a reference image of this old bulldozer but I was too close with the lens that I had (that’s a whole other story as to why I only had a 28mm prime lens with me).  My solution was to meter the scene for all aspects and then shoot a series of images in manual mode.  It’s necessary to control the exposure to ensure a good match, if you let the camera control the exposure then as you frame each image it will want to make changes to the shutter speed and aperture.  So once I have all my images back home I use a piece of software that is actually free, not spam spam spam and pay us a fee, Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor.  It does such a good job I would hate to be a commercial company trying to make a similar product.

And after the magic I have an image that would have required a much wider lens to create.

Well simplify, more than clarity.  Photography can be so descriptive and we expect a to see a certain level of detail that we consider real.  To paintings we apply a different standard of what is real, but what if we made photographs using the rules of painted reality?  I would love to claim the idea as my own but I’m about 125 years too late.  Pictorialism was a photographic movement that attempted to create images that were considered more artistic than the cold rendering photography provided.  A lot has occurred in photography since this time but it can be a fun diversion to create images along these lines.  All of these images where created by simply manipulating focus.  I’ve taken things further as far as blur and of course these images are in colour.  If you don’t have a camera that you can manually focus you may be able to fool the auto focus system by focusing on a close object and then re-framing to include distant objects that will now be blurred.

So there you have it, my photographic paintings.

I was barely able to take pictures under these conditions even though I had a 3stop neutral density filter.  I processed them in Lightroom and accentuated the ethereal quality of the bright infrared coming off all the foliage.

Four exposures on one Polaroid Spectra film.  Playing on the trampoline

Not quite what I had in mind.  I wanted to make the background completely black and have the signs glowing.  The flash fired even though I believe I had it overridden, so I will need to figure that out as the idea that’s starting to develop in my mind won’t work with flash.  And yes this is a double exposure that isn’t one of those ghost signs.

Taken with the Sony DSC-V3, the top image was shot at f4.0 again showing that you can get interesting bokeh under the right conditions with a small sensor.

Just a couple of images, one of which was the last on a roll of film as I walked to Lens and Shutter to drop it off for processing.  In the second image I love how the shrubs appear to be recoiling from the lone one on the other side of the line.  Sometimes to see possible images like this you need to envision the world as it might look in a photograph.  This is made easier when the subject is simple and appears to be in a single plane like this one, but really a photograph is ultimately shapes on paper.  Looking out in our three dimensional world and assessing it in two is hard work but the camera does not choose for you, it’s just the tool you use to do the conversion you can share.

“I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” – Garry Winogrand

The circle in a square of the laundromat dryer came to mind when I saw this hub on an old loader.  It’s obviously been painted several different colours as well as the dark staining of dirt encrusted grease.  Up close there is actually a lot of interesting textures and I took a few digital images for a possible  future painting.  The filmwas a fresh pack from the fridge and you can see that it didn’t develop evenly on the bottom, I’ll have to wait until next week to find out if that is how all of them will now be.