Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Polaroid and faux-laroid, posted from my Android phona…… Too much?

I’m sure there is a technical name for sulfur stock piled like this but to me it’s just a big pile of greenish yellow and I’m attracted to yellow like a bee to a flower.  There are two locations in the Vancouver area where sulfur derived from the oil and gas industry in Alberta is hauled by rail.  It’s then loaded onto ships headed for Asia to be used in industries there.  These photographs were taken around Pacific Coast Terminals in Port Moody B.C.  I could only photograph from the perimeter and even then mostly the view was obscured by trees and branches.  It was only on my way back that the train that had been there was gone and a better view was available.  I mostly used my FA 28-70 F4.0 lens because I could shoot through the fence with it’s smaller 49mm filter diameter.

Having done so much cell phone photography ( “cellphography” it could catch on!)  and processing those images on the phone I was inspired to play around a bit with some images I had captured with my Pentax K-7.  All these images were processed and cropped in camera. It’s surprising what you can achieve by combining multiple effects together.  Of course there is a limit and some of what could be good filters are held back because of the lack of user control.  The water colour filter for instance produces one unconvincing result no matter what you try, the toy filter is on the right track but has no option to turn off the blurring of the image. 

It becomes a bit more difficult to find subject matter during that time of year when everything is brown and drab.  But rather than giving up or fruitlessly looking for what isn’t there I think you should embrace the winterlude and look to new subjects.  Your images may not be as pretty but they could be as good.  Where in the spring you might take a grand sweeping landscape shot now maybe you notice that one last leaf hanging on, or maybe you can take a moment longer on a composition.  Some subjects such as industrial and city shots might better suit the winter or evoke a different feeling that you could not get on a bright spring day.   In fact the extra challenge of finding subjects can help to make you a better photographer.  I’m looking forward to taking some photographs in the snow but I’m not waiting for it.  Of course this isn’t the same across the globe and I feel fortunate to have distinct seasons even if it can be cold sometimes.

UPDATE : Sometimes I write something and it gets pushed back for some reason and that’s the case here.  Since I wrote this post it has most definitely snowed and is now melting.

Almost every piece of information that can be digitized is, however there are still a few things where nothing beats an analogue gauge for providing information.  Not only do they convey the immediate value but also the sense of where that value fits within all the other possible amounts.  What does this have to do with an art blog? Nothing I just like the way they look.

So I’ve managed to post 1000 cell phone pictures to Mytubo in the last 4 months.  It’s been an interesting exercise made all the more fun through some friendly ribbing back in forth with Duncan Turner of DLT photographic.  I’m slightly disillusioned at the same time I’ve been enlightened.  In general people like pretty pictures and don’t like to be challenged.  You need to visually slap people upside the head with a kitten to get attention. I’m not just lamenting the fact that some of my better images go unnoticed while formulaic pleasant ones get lots of likes and often become hot pics it’s the same for everyone. I have a better understanding of how my images are viewed and understood or misunderstood. 

 I think as a painter I create a lot of images that are really about the masses of colour and division of the image plane but most people there expect photographs to be about something making these images appeal to a much smaller audience.  I do now have a large library of cell phone pictures all composed for the square which will fit together nicely in a mosaic.  I’m not done either I may even pick up the pace.

I wanted to show a simple example of how powerful a point of high contrast can be in a composition.  Despite the small size of the light coloured branch it’s contrast against the darker tree pulls the eye to it.  In this case it is not the intended center of interest and it therefore detracts from the image.  While it is no longer strictly a photograph but also a manipulated image it is a better and simpler composition.  So would we say the same thing if I had done the pruning then and there as opposed to digitally?  That I will leave to you to decide.

The B.C. sugar refinery warehouse building is very photogenic and I couldn’t pass it up when I was at the Vancouver waterfront recently.  There is little point to me writing about it’s history as there  is an excellent article in the Vancouver Sun that covers it all.  Sugar Coated History