Sunday afternoon I was trying to shoot through the surface of water in the drainage ditch, with a strong bright sky throwing down a foiling reflection. I dug out a polarizing filter I bought years ago to try to cut the light glint that comes off the textured brush strokes of Jeanne’s oil paintings. The filter was the wrong diameter for my macro lens, but nestled beside it was a blue filter–don’t know where that came from–maybe my sister-in-law Gail, who gave me a stash of very cool old lenses last summer. On my way to trying the blue filter on the drainage ditch, I passed by our blue spruce. Hmmm. A blue filter makes blue subjects almost white.
These images are straight-out-of-camera, but I always quiver a little when I say that. You can manipulate images infinitely in the camera–in fact your making of photos is nothing but manipulation of images. Choice of focus, depth of field, exposure level, and motion blur are all manipulations, as are framing and perspective. Any digital camera can emphasize one part of the color spectrum over another, as did film before that. The act of walking out the door with the camera is motivated by intent to move, arrange, operate, or control one’s environment, one’s audience, or one’s own inquiet mind.
So I wouldn’t get all uppity about refraining from manipulation “after the fact.” There is no point at which there is a fact, in fact.
The blue filter didn’t help with the water surface. So here I am claiming it as a virtue. If only you had a really bright screen, you’d see a lovely blue overwash in the upper left, then a purple blaze below that, then the blooming ditch scum lit as if from heavens below. That’s what I thought when I was editing it in the Mac lab, anyway. On my laptop, it looks like a drainage ditch with an obscuring reflection–the sort of photo the processing lab used to throw away to spare you embarrassment.
More blue filter effect. Jeanne’s been going on lately about the divinity of the creative process in itself, apart from any product. Her creative process is long–days or weeks. Her product is commensurately long, too–years or decades, for a painting framed, purchased, and hung. My process is over in a flash, if all it is is the aiming of the camera, setting of the dials, and release of the shutter. And my product lasts as long as you look at it here. But I think she’s right. So I include in my process the morning walk to work through deep leaves and slanted light, with no camera in hand……wax eloquent here, you get the point.
One of that pantheon of leaves I have admired and framed while entreed, here entombed–yet still a leaf.
Blue berries turned silver.
“I hear pig found your conscience…resist not…” (Funny pages in the drainage ditch, becoming nourishment.)
And a last strangely decolored stalk of grass, in the wind, “unmanipulated,” for what it’s worth.
