Wallace Koopmans Artlog

It’s nice when things turn out like you planned even when your pushing the boundaries of your experience.  I needed to take public transit to get downtown Vancouver so I ended up on what is called the “Skytrain” which was originally built for Expo 86.  I brought along my Olympus XA2 because it fits in a pocket and I like the images it produces.  During the commute I considered taking a few exposures inside the train but didn’t really see anything that was all that compelling.  However as I was standing up the entire time I was near the ceiling and observed that the people where smeared into a diffuse reflection above.  So I turned the camera upside down and pressed it against the ceiling.  This did two things, it eliminated any camera shake and recorded the reflections.  Really only one person paid any attention to me and even that was for only a brief moment.

I wonder if these structures grew over time or some engineer somewhere planned this from the beginning?   I have tinted the image as can be seen by the sky colour which helps to bring together all the elements

Your eye lids are getting very heavy, that’s right, now repeat after me I will not take pictures of faces in places.

I needed to wait around for a few hours so I took my Pentax K-7 and only one lens, the DA35 ltd.  These pictures are directly from the camera but re sized.

As I was sorting through some resent shots,  I started to think about what made one similar shot better than another.  Both images present the viewer with a single point of interest on a blank background, in fact they are the same subject.  So what are the defining differences?  If we ignore for the moment the difference of shading of the background, I accredit the main difference to be the size of the subject relative to the ground.  The first image gives a greater sense of  scale while the second is a more direct representation, here is a lady bird beetle no more no less.

Just another odd find.  I’m not sure what this means and to whom.

In this image I have used several visual tools to draw the viewers attention to one specific area of the frame.  To begin with the manner that the lines of the wire converge at the point of interest leads the eye inward.  This is reinforced by the contrast of focus at the center verses at the edges.  This differential in sharpness was achieved by selecting a large aperture which provides a shallow depth of field.  This visual cue mimics one way in which we perceive depth in the real world.  The last thing I have done was during processing I increased the brightness contrast between the center of the image and the area surrounding it.  Whether this is a good image or not isn’t crucial, but it does achieve the intended outcome.

Sometimes something just grabs your eye as you are walking by.  So as I was getting a coffee the other day and was walking back to my vehical I noticed how the space between the trees mimicked the shape of the arrow on the ground.  Fortunately no one ran me over as I crouched down to get this shot.  The great thing about cameras is the ability to share your vision of the world with others.  It would be easy to assume that we all see things the same but pictures can be as much about the viewer as the creator.

One aspect of photography is nostalgia for the past.  We capture a moment so that it is preserved for the future and we manipulate the present to re-capture the past.  A contact sheet is an instance of what was once important but no longer has the same relevance.  I can quickly sort through thousands of digital photo’s nearly at a glance.  In a moment of sentimentality I created a pseudo contact sheet with my scanner.  While no longer a viable tool when compared to image database software it is useful when paired with it’s negative.

What is this?  If you said a canvas or a blank canvas you are partially correct.  If you said a blank canvas with a wide aspect ratio then we’re on the same page, so to speak.  I bought several canvas’ with 2:1 aspect rations and need to get myself thinking outside the 4:3’ish box.  So what better way than to do a little photography exercise.   Fortunately I seem to have a camera for any occasion and so from my shelf I pulled what can only be described as a photographic anachronism, the Minolta Vectis S-1.  What is it? It is an APS (advanced photo system) SLR camera with interchangeable lenses.  If you recall APS  is the small negative format film that digital has made effectively obsolete.  What is unique about this camera and film though is that it provides for panoramic pictures.  While not a true panoramic in the sense that the panoramic image is just the central area of  the larger image it does mask the viewfinder giving you a 3:1 view.  Now for the narrower thinking, you can’t walk around looking through a camera viewfinder, unless you want to fall and hurt yourself,  so it becomes necessary to  try and envision how the world around you looks in this “narrow” view.  Here is where the expanded vision begins, as you look around you will see new compositions and inter relations between objects that don’t work in the normal smaller box we are accustomed to.  Lines that enter the frame in unfamiliar ways, new points of interest, it is an opportunity to explore and see things in a different way.

If you want to see the images in their original aspect ratio, you will need to click on them individually. An interesting side effect of the square thumbnails is that it’s apparent that several of these images work well as squares, possibly even better.  But I will let you be the judge of that.