New Stuff

It's been awhile. Finally, I decided I just needed to sit down and discipline myself to write. I was out for a year, needing surgery to repair a hole in the retina of my left eye; as a photographer friend pointed out, "It's bad juju to mess with a photographer's retina!" Then that surgery was followed in a few months with a lens replacement to repair the cataract that inevitably follows retinal surgery. All is well with only a small loss of visual acuity in my left eye.

Water under the bridge. Now, I feel like I am just starting to get back in stride and because I had not been out much to do some shooting, I was revisiting a few of my old images to see what I saw then and to see if I had new vision. Pun intended 😉 I will share some of these going forward along with my newer activities in future posts.

One subject, intriguing for me, is looking for simplicity in composition; different from my usual landscape photography. Canola Field Fantasy is such an experiment. It started as a cropped RAW file captured during a PhotoZone Tour of the Palouse region of eastern Washington state in 2014. It was the first such tour of which I had taken advantage; and I loved it. Driving up from Salt Lake City to join the tour, I  discovered the brilliant yellow canola fields, which was very exciting. Startling almost. However, in this shot, I had only the soft green of newly sprouted summer wheat against a clear blue sky. Thinking back to the tour and trying to remember why I had pressed the shutter, I remembered that Photoshop could do many wonderful things, including the changing of one color into another! With that, I changed the green into yellow against the complementary blue sky, at least in the RGB color model. While the image has the same colors as a canola field under a clear blue sky, it's not real and thus I deemed it a fantasy. I also call it artistic license.

Canola Field Fantasy  Nikon D800E, Nikkor 24-120 at 120 mm, 1/2000 sec, f/8, ISO 800

So the answer to the question, "Did you Photoshop this?" is always yes, because digital photographic technology requires rendering into a human-compatible interpretation, also nearly always subjective. This is even true for film photography in which engineers that designed different emulsions kept a certain outcome (aka interpretation) in mind. Very inflexible considering modern technologies such as Photoshop et cetera. But I digress.

So I knew blue and yellow were complementary colors in an RGB color space, but I discovered something new today. Blue and orange are complementary colors in the traditional RYB color model. So this morning, I made a new capture with a different experiment in mind the result of which is  Mogollon Rim pre-Sunrise. Shooting off the Sedona Veranda (my back porch 😉), the sky had a lovely orange cast to it about five minutes before the sun crested the horizon formed by the mountains about 20 miles distant. Shadows are often bluish especially at long telephoto lengths. Keeping with the simplicity theme, I composed a very simple shot having discovered (see above) that the complementarity of color could adequately serve as an ample subject.

Mogollon Rim pre-Sunrise Nikon D7100, Nikkor 28-300 at 450 mm, 1/750 sec, f/5.6, ISO 200

Complementary colors create tension and for some reason we are drawn to them. Minimalist artists (painters) often exploit the emotional undertones of pure color, as do others, of course. Complementarity is visually interesting and I was experimenting with simplifying the thing  photographed while emphasizing some of the complexity of color interactions that occurs in our minds. For what it's worth, I also placed the horizons at the midpoint, which heightens tension and violates the "rule of thirds." This is a fundamental law of composition that divides an image into three equal horizontal and vertical sectors; placing subject elements at the intersections of the lines demarking these sectors often provides a stronger composition. Rules are made to be broken, certainly in art, and doing so can often enhance visual interest. Besides, it's fun to break rules, sometimes that is!

These and other photographs can be viewed on my website, DavidEckelsPhotography.com.