Sean Duggan Blog

The Nature of Your Own Lens

The Lens  [pinhole photograph]
January, 2011 
(click in the image to see a larger version)

This is one of the new images I have been working on for my Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin series. I photographed it last January in the Florida Keys, but only began to work with the negative a few days ago. It will be included in the Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin 2012 calendar, which should be ready to order in a couple of days. This and one other one from the Florida Keys, are the most recent images I have photographed for this long running series. After an 11-month hiatus, it feels really good to be working with it again. I have several ideas for new images and am eager to follow those paths to see where they lead.

I am often asked what this series is about, which is not an easy question to answer, since there is more than one answer. Each image is different and can lead in a a variety of directions, just as different doors will open into different rooms and passages. These photographs are a bit like doorways. What you find once you enter them depends on who you are and what you see. Apropos that thought, and the concept of seeing, here are some musings on The Lens...

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As photographers, lenses are important to us. We see the world through the lenses of our eyes and we create our images with the lens on our camera (the irony in this photograph is that it was made with a wooden pinhole camera that does not have a lens!).

But the idea of a lens is significant beyond the purely photographic associations. A lens focuses light, bringing our attention to specific areas, magnifying some parts while blurring others. Lenses help us see better, farther, and more clearly. A lens can reveal to us that which is hidden beyond the horizon of natural vision, showing us things we cannot see with our own eyes. Our perception of the world and our journey through it is shaped by the lens of our past experiences, deeply held beliefs, future hopes, dreams, and the river of emotions that courses through us.

One of the most significant concepts that influences my experience with photography, both in creating and viewing images, was expressed perfectly by the photographer and philosopher MInor White when he wrote that "One should not only photograph things for what they are, but for what else they are".

At the most basic level, this image is both a still life and a landscape, a photograph of a lens at the edge of the sea. But beyond that there are other levels. What you see, in this photograph or in any photograph, will depend upon who you are and the nature of your own lens.

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See more of the Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin

 

The Call of the Black & White Landscape

Afternoon Thunder Shower  •  [Canon 5D]
August 29, 2010  •  Mono Lake, California
(click in the image for a larger version)

This image was made about 15 months ago during a drive down Highway 395 along the eastern Sierras. It was actually made on the same afternoon as the previous image of the Sawtooth Ridge. There is so much to see along that drive! The vistas of the mountains, Mono Lake, the Owens Valley, and the Alabama Hills are a visual playground for landscape photographers. It's one of my favorite California drives and I'm hoping to return that way for more photo exploration in the near future.

Exploring the landscape doesn't end when the physical journey ends. Revisiting your images in the digital darkroom is an entirely different part of the photographic journey that can be just as creative as the time you spent on the road or trail in search of photographs to make.  One of the most fundamental questions that arises with any photograph is whether to treat it as a color or a black and white image. You may know how you will interpret the scene based on your own style and whether or not the photo is part of an existing series, but some images present tantilizing creative directions in both color or monochrome. With certain scenes, the answer is clear, but with others, you could go either way. This image of the thunder shower over Mono Lake works well as a color shot, but there is something about it that is more powerful when it is presented in black and white. Perhaps it is the visual association with the long and venerable tradition of black and white landscape photography. That was not on my mind when I took the photo, but it became an obvious connection once I began working with it in Lightroom. There was just something more to the scene when it was rendered in the stark, grayscale tonal values of a black and white image.

I'm looking forward to exploring the landscapes of Iceland next August during my "True North: Photographing the Interpretive Landscape" workshop with Focus on Nature. We'll be spending the week of August 12 – 18 chasing the sweet light all across that beautiful arctic island, focusing 100% on creative photography in a way that is only possible when you set aside time to escape from the regular routine of your life. It is shaping up to be a fantastic trip. I hope that you'll consider joining me for what is certain to be a once in a lifetime photographic experience.

Mountains on my Mind

Matterhorn Peak and the Sawtooth Ridge  [Canon 5D]
August 29, 2010  •  Eastern Sierras, California
(click in the image for a larger version)

Lately I've had mountains on my mind, and my thoughts have been drawn to a location that is less than a four hour drive from where I live: the jagged peaks of the Sawtooth Ridge on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. I took this photo a little over a year ago, as I was driving down to Death Valley, another of my favorite photo destinations .  It shows the Sawtooth Ridge as seen from Highway 395 near Bridgeport, California. The ridge line is the northeast border of Yosemite National Park. The peak on the far left is Matterhorn Peak, which at 12,279 feet (3,743m) is the tallest peak in that ridge and the most northerly 12,000' peak in the Sierras. Jack Kerouac incorporated a fictionalized account of his attempted ascent of the peak in his 1958 novel, "The Dharma Bums". Some of the other peaks in the ridge are Dragtooth, Doodad, the Three Teeth, and Blacksmith Peak. Below Blacksmith is the ominously named Avalanche Lake.

Sawtooth Ridge from the Northeast, from A Climber's Guide to the High Sierra, edited by Hervey H. Voge (click in the image for a larger version).

The reason this particular group of peaks has been on my mind is that I've been thinking of a photograph I'd like to make that requires high, jagged mountain peaks and this area would be perfect. Actually, there are several images I can see making in this location, but one in particular has been driving this train of thought; a new addition to my Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin series of pinhole photographs.

Since the wooden camera I use for that series has no lens, just a tiny pinhole (the approximate  aperture is f/235) with a wide-angle field of view, things that are far away tend to look even farther away in the photographs it makes. So if I want to have a jagged mountain peak in the shot and have it look good, it means getting up close and personal with the peak. The mountain I'm thinking of focusing on (pun intended) is Matterhorn Peak, the one on the far left. I'm not really interested in summiting this peak as I am in having it figure prominently in the background of the photograph (though apparently you can reach the summit without special equipment).

 

Photographing with the ZeroImage pinhole camera on the western side of the Sierras in April of 2010. (click in the image for a larger version). You can see the image I made at this location here.

This excursion will likely last several days, to accommodate backpacking the roughly five miles up to the ridge and having plenty of time for scouting the best locations, waiting for good weather and light and also just enjoying being in such an amazing place. I feel very fortunate to live in a place where such locations are only a short drive away, and sInce the area is relatively close, I may even make more than one trip. In the image I am planning, I would like to have a fair amount of snow on the peaks and good cloud action is a must. In terms of summer or fall, I'm still pondering the best time to go and more research will help answer that question, but it's definitely on my photo destination list for next year.

Finding the time for such creative projects can sometimes be challenging and it's easy to get distracted and caught up in all of the other aspects of our busy lives. I am continually battling those forces of distraction! But planning ahead and visualizing making certain images, or traveling to specific places,  make it much more likely to realize those visions. Writing about it (as I have done here), is another way to make something seem more real and attainable. To that end I also made a print of this image this morning and am hanging it in my studio so I can see it every day and be inspired by the idea of that future trip. 

Speaking of inspiration, I was reminded of this location by an excellent photo of Matterhorn Peak that Gary Crabbe posted to his Google+ stream a few days ago. Seeing his image prompted me to look in my Lightroom archive where I found the photo you see above. Thanks Gary!
  

Interpreting the Scene

Circular Contemplation  [iPhone 4]
November 3, 2011
(click in the image for a larger version)

When I took my daughter to school yesterday I accompanied her inside to say hello to her teacher who I had not seen for several weeks due to my busy schedule. This is the first year for her school in a new location, an elementary school site that dates from the 1940s. While the location does not have all of the wonderful tall trees and open space of their previous site, this place does have a very agreeable and nostalgic small town school feeling. I had only been there a few times since the school year started and had not yet been out into the playground area. On this morning, I followed my daughter out to the play yard as she grabbed a volleyball for some practice before class started.

Out in the playground there are slanted walls at one end since the yard is built into the side of a hill. In one place there were two large circles painted on these walls, presumably as "targets" for where to aim a ball. The early morning light was shining full on this wall and I was intrigued by the scene and how it appeared when it was visually isolated from all of the other details in the yard and the autumn colors in the trees above it. At first I was disappointed that I could not get close enough to isolate the circles without my own shadow appearing in the frame, but then I saw the possibilities for other layers of meaning with my shadow included.

This is one of those photographs that is a simple and understated view of an ordinary scene, but that can be so much more depending on how you see it and the interpretations you bring to it. Minor White said this best when he observed that "One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are." Another thought in a similar vein is from Henry David Thoreau…"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see".

This is one of the things that I treasure most about photography. It gives us the opportunity to see differently, to find hidden and personally significant meaning in otherwise ordinary scenes, to interpret them in our own, unique way and to create an image of these scenes so that they may be shared with others, who can then find their own interpretations.

Join Me in Iceland Next August for
True North: Photographing the Interpretive Landscape

I'm really looking forward to teaching True North: Photographing the Interpretive Landscape, in Iceland next August 12 - 18. During this workshop, hosted by the excellent team at Focus on Nature, we will spend a week chasing the sweet light in that beautiful country, at a time when the sweet light lasts much longer than in more southerly latitudes. The photographic terrain we will cover will be varied, ranging from the city of Rekyjavik, the hot springs of the blue lagoon, and small harbor towns, to icebergs drifting in a glacial lagoon, rugged seacoasts, majestic waterfalls, vast glaciers on the slopes of active volcanos, and spectacular scenery in one of the world's last great unspoiled landscapes.  I hope you'll consider joining me for what is sure to be an excellent travel and photographic experience. Click here for more details.

Immediate Gratification vs. A Slow Simmer

Encounters with Shadows  [iPhone 4]
October 2, 2011
(click in the image for a larger version)

Some images just speak to you in black & white, and this is one of them. High contrast, backlit scenes with hard shadows and silhouettes are a natural for a monochromatic approach. I have several more from this day, but have been too busy recently to spend quality time with them. My goal is to try and work with a couple each day....small creativity coffee breaks in between wrangling with deadlines. 

One of the joys of iPhone photography (or any camera phone that allows processing with apps) is that it allows for a very quick and direct engagement with your photo creativity that requires virtually no gear and no time in front of the computer. This immediacy and the ability to process photos right on the phone makes it easy to share images not long after you have made them. But I find that some photos require contemplation and pondering, and rather than share them right away, I take time considering what visual treatment (if any) would work best for them, and also how they work within the context of similar images taken that day. By waiting and allowing this time for contemplation, I can "see" the images better. Immediate gratification is good for creativity, but so is taking your time and letting an idea or an image simmer slowly until it's just right.

FotoClave

I'll be giving two 1-hour presentations on HDR & Beyond this weekend at FotoClave in Concord, California. Both sessions are on Saturday, Oct 29 and start at 11:00am and 1:30pm.

Stonington

Stonington, Maine  •  [Canon 5D]
September 3, 2011
(click in the image for a larger, sharper version)

A weeklong workshop goes by fast sometimes. On Sunday night when the class meets for the first time to go over the week ahead, it seems like you have all the time in the world. Then the days rush by, in a blur of visiting cool locations, making photos and working on them in the digital lab, learning new methods and techniques for interpreting and perfecting your images (not to mention enjoying the great food and interesting conversations under the dining tent at the Maine Media Workshops).

The first of my two back-to-back workshps ended yesterday morning and this evening a new one, "HDR & Beyond" begins. It's a good process that benefits not only the students but also myself. I always learn something from each workshop I teach. From the questions that get asked to the way someone might choose to create an image or interpret it in a unique way. The back and forth exchange of ideas between photographers is an important component of growing as an artist.

The image above is a 3-exposure HDR blend that was taken last Saturday before my first workshop began. The weather last week was gray and rainy much of the time due to Hurricaine Katia passing by far out in the Atlantic. The forecast looks better for the week ahead for 5 days of exploring and pushing the boundaries of what is possible with HDR, both techically and aesthetically.

 

Paying Homage to Eartha

The Largest Globe  [Canon 5D]
Yarmouth, Maine  • September 2, 2011
(click in the image for a larger, sharper version)

I arrived in Maine on Friday evening and my first stop on the drive north to Rockport was at the headquarters of the DeLorme Company and their map store to photograph the huge globe there. Dubbed "Eartha" by the designer, David DeLorme, it measures 41.5 feet in diameter and has been certifed by the Guiness Book of world records as the "World's Largest Revolving/Rotating Globe".

This is my seventh year teaching at the Maine Media Workshops and on several occasions I had glimpsed the glass-walled atrium containing the giant globe from the highway while driving by but had never stopped to photograph it. This time, since I was driving north by myself, and since it would be evening, I decided that it was a perfect opportunity to check it out. In terms of what the light was doing, my flight arrived a bit later than I would have liked. Earlier in the evening just after sunset would be have resulted in a deep blue color in the sky, which would have worked well with the blue color on the globe itself. Since that wasn't happening for this visit, I framed the scene to focus on just the building with very little of the dark sky showing. Next time I'll try for an earlier arrival and hang around until the sky transitions to that perfect, irresistable blue.

To control the wide range of contrast in the scene I made seven exposures for HDR and blended them together in Photomatix. Further work in Photoshop and many adjustment layers later yielded the result you see above. I actually ended up making the image much darker than the initial HDR result. The reason is that I wanted most of the attention to be on the globe, with the atrium structure playing a secondary, supporting role. And the bushes in front? I really didn't need to see any detail in them, even though in the brightest of the seven exposures, you could see some detail there. Just because you can record detail throughout all regions of the tonal range in HDR, does not mean it's a good idea to keep all of that detail in the final image. The process or techniques that you use should always serve the image, not the other way around.

More from my workshops in Maine in the days ahead. Stay tuned!

The seven source shots for the DeLorme Globe HDR image.
(click in the image to see it larger)

 

 

Revisiting Locations

Coastal Rocks and Evening Fog  [Canon 5D]
Acadia National Park, Maine  • October 2, 2007
(click in the image to see a larger version)

In keeping with my recent theme of revisiting photos from Maine as I prepare for my upcoming September workshops there, here's another shot from a past trip, this one from just about four years ago. After my workshop was over I took a drive up the coast from Rockport and spent three days exploring Acadia National Park. This photograph was used as the lower half of the cover for The Creative Digital Darkroom, which I co-authored with Katrin Eismann (you can see an image of the cover of that book in the left column).

This was taken right by Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse (you can see a photo of the lighthouse in the HDR workshop image in the right column.) It is a 20 second exposure and was taken as the evening fog was about to completely oscure the island that is just off the coast. I used a solid neutral density filter and stopped the lens down to f/22 in order to force the slowest possible shutter speed so that the motion of the water was totally blurred.

Revisiting places where you've already photographed is an important part of the creative journey. Often you see them differently and with more clarity. The obvious photographs were most likely made on your first visit and a return trip can lead to new visual interpretations, as well as fresh insights into the location and your relationship to it. This is one of the reasons why I always try to find time to review my past images of a place when I know I will be returning there. Not only does it help me immerse myself in the visual feel of a location before I return, but it starts a subconscious process that helps to fine tune my eye and awareness of the possibilities that await at a particualr location. Since I will be in Maine for two weeks, I'm hoping to find time between my classes (or maybe even as a class trip) to revisit Acadia National Park. It's a wonderful place for appreciating a beautiful landscape, both with and without a camera.

Here are a few more photographs from Acadia. All were taken on the same day (click in the images to see a larger version):

 

 

 

 

Sunset at the Cemetery

Fairview Cemetery  [Canon 5D]
April 26, 2009  •  Santa Fe, New Mexico
(click in the image for a larger version)

 

This image was made almost two and a half years  ago when I was teaching a class at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. I was driving out to a store on Cerrillos Road to pick up some supplies for a last minute hiking boot repair job when I saw this great scene with the bare trees and the setting sun shining through the windows of the tombs. I made one of those sudden (but still safe!) "must stop to take a photo" driving maneuvers, grabbed the camera and started looking for a good view. Unfortuantely, I had left the tripod back at my apartment, but I managed to find a stone wall to use for steadying the camera. This is an HDR of the three shots you see below.

 

The initial HDR blending was done using Photomatix...

That version of the image was then polished some more with additional work in Photoshop CS5 to further enhance the shot, as well as deal with the annoying halo around the tree. You can see the final Layers panel for this image below.

 

Getting Ready for Maine

I'm spending the next few days getting ready for my two back-to-back classes at the Maine Media Workshops. As I write this, that part of New England is recovering from tropical storm Irene. I'm glad that I missed that event and I hope that no more major storms brew up while I am out there (though under the right conditions — and safety is always factored into this — photographing in inclement weather can often lead to really interesting images).

My Advanced Digital Photography class (Sept 4 — 11) is both a digital photography workshop as well as an advanced Photoshop class, and we'll be working with many examples like the one above to show you how to get the most from your images, both through solid in-camera technique and post processing in Photoshop CS5. Click the class title to learn more.

Following that I'll be teaching HDR & Beyond (Sept 11 — 17), where the week will be spent exploring mid-coast Maine and a variety of lighting conditions as we dive deep into the world of High Dynamic Range imaging and creating photographs using multiple exposures of a scene. We'll be taking a look at the usual suspects of HDR (Photomatix, Nik HDR Efex Pro, Photoshop CS5) as well as investigating when a more manual exposure blending approach may work better for a certain scene. And, as the title of the class suggests, we'll venture beyond the basic HDR to use a variety of advanced Photoshop techniques for furthering enhancing the image and fixing issues that often result with HDR.

 

 

Take Me to the River

Bridgeport Reflections  [iPhone]
August 26, 2011  •  Bridgeport, California
(click in the image to see a larger version)

 

"It is not what you look at that maters, it's what you see."
– Henry David Thoreau

Yesterday afternoon was all about cooling off at the river, family time, swimming, watching fish under the water, receiving an invigorating river rapid massage while braced in a narrow channel, and a chance encounter that made me appreciate seeing the world with a photographer's eye. But more on that epiphany in a bit. 

With a picnic lunch in the cooler, my wife and I picked up our daughter from school at midday and headed straight for our usual swimming spot at Bridgeport (the one in Nevada County, not the one in Mono County). It's a great place to go swimming in the summer, with beautiful clear water, deep rock-lined pools, gentle "rapids", and quiet shallow areas for the little ones. It’s also a great place to go because when I am there in the water, I find it nearly impossible to be distracted by thoughts of work and deadlines. They just can’t get a grip on my mind in that environment, so it’s a wonderful place to unplug for a while and just drift along. Normally we can start swimming there by July 4th, but the record snow levels in the Sierras this winter meant extra high, cold, and fast waters well into July and our first day at the river this year was not until August 1st.

There is no town at Bridgeport, just this bridge and a small visitor center, which is part of the South Yuba River State park (its status is still uncertain with possible closure looming due to state budget cuts). It was built in 1862 and at 251 feet in length along its ridge top it is the longest single span wooden covered bridge in the United States. It is beautifully made with a graceful arch that is visible on both the inside and outside of the structure.

I left my DSLR at home because I just didn't feel like lugging it. The only camera I had was my iPhone 4. But, I was photographically prepared in other ways and I brought along my river tripod, a small aluminum model that I frequently set up in the water. It’s a bit lightweight for my big camera, but it works great for my wooden pinhole camera and the iPhone. For this shot I used a wooden tripod mount for the iPhone that I cobbled together myself using materials that cost me about two dollars. It's a prototype and total quickie hack job that’s a bit funky looking, but it works great, which is all I care about. With it the phone can be mounted both vertically and horizontally. The tripod was necessary for this scene because I was making iPhone HDR images. The image above was one part of a two-exposure HDR sequence but for this photo I ended up using only one shot. In terms of post-capture processing there’s not much; just some minor lightening of the lower half in Filterstorm 3 and the addition of the frame in Nik Snapseed.

 

The tripod was set up in the shallows of a still area near the shore and was down quite low near the surface of the water, so I could get a nice reflection of the bridge (TIP: When you're shooting reflections, the lower you get, the closer the reflection will be to the object that is casting the reflection; this approach allows for tighter compositions and less empty space between the object and its reflection). I suppose that the sight of someone crouching in the water with an iPhone on a tripod might look a bit curious to some and after a while a man slowly approached me, obviously quite interested in my activities.

"Hi there", he greeted me. " Whatcha doing?"

"Making a photograph of the bridge", I replied, but I could tell that this did not entirely satisfy him.

"Is that a phone camera?"

 I nodded.

He studied my setup for a few seconds. "Why do you have it on that tripod?"

“Well, for the type of picture that I am making it works best if the camera is not moving".

"But why are you down so low?"

If you were standing up, as he was, you would not see any reflection of the bridge in the water that was immediately in front of us. I explained that by getting down very low, almost to the surface of the water, I could get a composition of the bridge and also a really nice reflection of the bridge. He crouched down low so he could see what I meant. That's when he had his epiphany.

"Wow! That's really cool!" His face lit up and he smiled. Then he bent down to look again, gazing intently at it like it was a magic pool that only revealed its secrets to a chosen few.

"Thanks for showing me!" he said. Then he called over to his wife and a few friends, "Hey guys, you should come check this out! There's a reflection of the bridge in the water!"

I finished taking my shots and moved farther out to photograph the moving water. It was as I was watching him and his companions checking out the newfound visual discovery of the bridge reflection that I had my epiphany. Well, not really an epiphany, in the true sense of the word, because I already knew this, but it was a reminder.

It made me think of the quote by Henry David Thoreau that I referenced at the beginning of this post: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see”. How very true this is! The man and I were both looking at the same thing, but we were seeing them differently. As a photographer, I know to look for reflections because they can make for very interesting images, and this was a reflection I had seen many times before. But for him it was something new and exciting and it only took a slight adjustment of his angle of view for him to see so much more. That’s a good thing to remember, because I think we can all benefit now and then from adjusting our angle of view to see what else there is to be seen, or how a different view can change our perception of what we see. It works for photography and pretty much everything else, too.

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I'm off to Maine in a week to teach two back-to-back classes at the Maine Media Workshops. There's still some room in each one, so it you or anyone you know might be interested, see the image links above in the right column.

 

A view of the bridge in late winter. The swimming area is just on the other side of the bridge (click in the image to see it larger).