A Walk in the Garden

I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.

Henry D Thoreau

I took a walk with some friends in the Fletcher Garden in the fall of 2022 and came out inspired to paint a gingko tree.

The young gingko tree, having shed most of its leaves, did not look as impressive as some big mature gingko trees I’ve seen elsewhere. That day I was shooting with my brand-new Nikon Coolpix1000 camera, but instead of using its pre-set mode - i.e., point and shoot - I was trying to use its manual mode setting like as if it was my DSLR Z9 or D850. Looking at the pictures from that day I realized that the pre-set mode was perfect for a walk in the woods and talking with friends rather than making ‘serious’ award-winning pictures. Well did I regret ignoring the small young gingko tree. (This tree in the foreground in this picture is not a gingko tree.) To console myself I painted an abstract of gingko branch and leaves in acrylic on canvas.

I began learning to use the Aperture, Speed and Manual modes with higher end Nikon camera in 2007. Going into it from the point and shoot camera took years of constantly shooting and learning from mistakes. A break now and then during the learning years isn’t such a bad thing as one comes back and do a little revision and there it is, quite user friendly after all. Perhaps that’s how one learns to fly a plane…or a rocket. Just saying. Each year the upgraded cameras are equipped with upgraded features as brands compete for better business medals. Who’s not to benefit by their best effort at selling their cameras? By the time I was comfortable using the manual mode to shoot birds at flight a few years ago, I had forgotten about the convenience of the point and shoot. Crossing back to life-simplifying convenience was not as easy as I thought, especially when I failed to read about the new camera before the walk. I thought I’d already absorbed all I could learn about how cameras work. In truth I should’ve just parked my manual-setting brain at home when using the convenient mode. Technology has sped away in the last ten years so that most people are using their iPhone camera to good effects. No thinking needed, no fumbling for buttons and juxtaposing exposure, white balance and brightness, all the fanciful buttons that camera diehards like to press. I agree with friends who say that the iPhone is all one needs for a camera, an all-in-one; but I still took this light-weight Coolpix1000 besides my iPhone on a writing workshop trip to Scotland in November 2023. What a good decision. This camera is not just a point and shoot camera but a point and shoot of consummate performance. iPhone camera is perfect for instant capture and send. But when I want to shoot some sheep grazing in a distant hill slope the Coolpix1000 zooms in to do a better job. Some people said they’d shot great pictures of the moon with it. I haven’t tried that yet. As for bird at flight photo trip I will have to bring something else from my arsenal: the heavy-duty heavy weight Nikon Z9 with the 200-500mm long lens.

Venice on Laundry Day

Venice on laundry Day

In a 2014 group photography trip in Venice, one of our boat tours took us on a two-hour ride around the lagoons and canals for the water sceneries. Safety regulations dictated that each boat could only take four passengers. Most of the 8 or 9 of us favoured the cooler morning hours with better lighting. Being a novice, I had much else to grasp in photography so the afternoon light was fine for me.

The learning curve in photography is not too sharp if one’s enthusiasm is of a great magnitude and if one has formed a good habit of talking and teaching oneself about juxtaposing the picture and the camera’s settings, and capturing everything calmly, unencumbered by rules. My mentor Richard Martin often heard me complain about my tripod slowing me. I had so far been teaching myself to capture birds at flight and tripod was indeed cumbersome. In a photography trip to Namibia in 2013 I learned to incorporate quick reaction to match the speed of wildlife. Not always accomplishable, but one tries, and one gets reasonable results. (Perhaps a career in teaching ballet in my youth is a plus in journalistic photography.)

Tripods are made with heavy duty material for heavy-duty looking (National Geographic) camera crew with heavy-duty backpacks or for tall ladies with stronger muscles to haul duffle bags up into the plane’s overhead compartment. I have tried my best to find the lightest camera bag and suitcases that would give me the feeling of Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being.

The tripod diehard people also shot with handheld cameras in the boat. As the boatman moored the boat at a street waterfront for a brief quiet moment I looked up and saw the laundry in an alley. The light of the setting sun on the yellow walls facing the water gave a dark cool shade to the alley between the blocks of apartment buildings. Someone said the morning light would’ve been better. Now you’d need to use flash or a tripod and be on solid ground instead of the bobbing boat. Warnings galore: the pictures would be blurry, “blur” being the worst enemy of landscape and still-life photography. But think fast: the picture was neither landscape nor still-life. The boatman was moving to sail to another canal. I need not show anyone my blurry pictures, just delete them.

Digital cameras are equipped with the No Vibration button. Trust that and let all hard rules slide into the water. I had no blur in the 8 frames I shot on the bobbing boat. They were not tack sharp, just colourful. We all love having clean laundry!

This photo won many peer and panel awards on my photography platform on Viewbug.com, and I wrote a feature sharing the experience of capturing such a picture as requested by Viewbug.

Storming Havana

Storming Havana

This photo is typical of the captures that I mentioned in my last post that I would not transform into an art-like picture with my photoshop filter. First of all, the image is in the landscape category that I don’t always enjoy capturing, but who can resist the challenge when presented with a storm raging over Havana city and you have a high end camera in your hand? Secondly, I submitted this photo to Viewbug.com, an international photo contests site that I subscribe and maintain a platform for my photographs. Storming Havana is one of several photos that have won numerous awards from peer photographers and panels. Thus and then, this image has a Felix culpa, that is, an unhappy moment with a happy turnout, or as Shakespeare wrote, All’s Well That Ends Well.

The wind had been howling that Sunday morning, and by mid-day was pushing the waves to pound and break on the city’s embankments. By two o’clock the sun was conveniently situated opposite the dark clouds that formed a moody backdrop, lighting up the lighthouse promenade. Even now I am awed at how theatrical Mother Nature could get. I was heading towards a restaurant in the neighbourhood of the run-down apartment that was our alternative accommodation for the week. My friends had departed early that Sunday morning for Trinidad town 3 hours away; I stayed overnight in order to sign for my travel document at the Canadian embassy on Monday morning before joining the group by taxi. My photography mentor’s agency managed to book us this so-so accommodation in Havana since any hotel that existed were fully booked. Americans were, before the fateful election of November 2016, allowed to visit Cuba, and many did quickly visit the forbidden ground before any reversion happened, and yes, indeed, the post Obama government slammed down the iron curtain again. I came home to Canada to a very sympathetic passport office that told me I was not the first nor will I be the last to be robbed in that country.  

This picture will forever remind me to tell the story of how some people have to live and scrape by in that island nation. I have no grudge at whoever took my handbag. I only wished at that very moment, that the American dollars they found was much needed towards a bit of food or medication the family might be in need of. That was another picture in my mind as I watched and shot Storming Havana. The wind had been howling that Sunday morning, and by mid-day was pushing the waves to pound and break on the city’s embankments. By two o’clock the sun was conveniently situated opposite the dark clouds that formed a moody backdrop, lighting up the lighthouse promenade. Even now I am awed at how theatrical Mother Nature could get. I was heading towards a restaurant in the neighbourhood of the run-down apartment that was our alternative accommodation for the week. My friends had departed early that Sunday morning for Trinidad town 3 hours away; I stayed overnight in order to sign for my travel document at the Canadian embassy on Monday morning before joining the group by taxi. My photography mentor’s agency managed to book us this so-so accommodation in Havana since any hotel that existed were fully booked. Americans were, before the fateful election of November 2016, allowed to visit Cuba, and many did quickly visit the forbidden ground before any reversion happened, and yes, indeed, the post Obama government slammed down the iron curtain again. I came home to Canada to a very sympathetic passport office that told me I was not the first nor will I be the last to be robbed in that country.

This picture will forever remind me to tell the story of how some people have to live and scrape by in that island nation. I have no grudge at whoever took my handbag. I only wished at that very moment, that the American dollars they found was much needed towards a bit of food or medication the family might be in need of. That was another picture in my mind as I watched and shot Storming Havana.

The Sleeping Swans

On my photography trip in Prague, I went off the beaten path of fellow photographers to capture my own obsession, the swans. That resulted in a total capture of 2,090 pictures of swans from over the bridge, under the bridge, up close and personal at feeding spots on the riverbanks where residents and tourists attracted the birds by the thousands. One afternoon after a long and interesting session of shooting with the group, I strayed off and happened upon this little idyllic scene of my favourite subject at rest.

This picture is neither landscape nor animal nor floral, but a category of its own I call dream. I have a need, a kind of itch, to make it dreamier with extra photoshop massaging till it turns soft as if melting, as they do in dreams, and as they do in Salvador Dali’s paintings where clocks and things melt... However, Monet and Van Gogh the Romantics inspire me when I am transforming the photographs into painting, while Dali triggers my imagination when I am creating fiction.

Albeit not every photograph can or should be made into a painterly picture. It all depends on the subject captured, the purpose or spontaneity of capturing it, and on the perspectives of its viewers or admirers. Certain pictures that are perfectly fine as they are should be kept away from my playful digital painterly brushes and filters. I can show examples of such photographs in my next post.

Stay tuned.

Benjamin Not Peter

Benjamin is a habitué in my garden when the sedums are blooming. I believe there must be burrows underneath the bushes and gazebo where he and his family hibernate. That’s why I name him Benjamin Not Peter because I have seen and shot pictures of Peter, and he is a much older guy. They are not easily distinguishable from one another, but I believe I have mastered that little skill.

This picture is another photo I shot in 2021 that I altered its look with a filter software to make a plain rabbit into one that you can almost feel its silky soft fur! However, I cannot remember which filter in Photoshop I’d used to get this effect. Photoshop has changed so many elements over the years of regular updates that I cannot repeat some of my favourite art photos I made from the past 5 years. And when they overhaul the whole system you lose not only your modus operandi but your sanity with it. Already navigating the system itself is like getting lost in the burrows because you are not a software technician nor even a student but a peripatetic user.

The Cat's Portrait

Here’s a ‘mixed media’ portrait of my daughter’s black and white cat, most probably a Norwegian long hair that she named Wombat. I woke up one morning to find her comfortably seated on the end of my bed. I reached out to get my sketchbook while she remained still, perhaps curious what this human was trying to do. When revisiting my collection of sketches and journals last year I opened up to Wombat looking out of the page. I scanned the sketch with high resolution to bring up some contrast, then in photoshop added a layer of canvas paper for background, and an overlay of flypaper (filter) with texts. I like pencil sketches, but have not been sketching much ever since photography and painting with acrylic on canvas have taken up much of my time in my art endeavour. Yes, I have been making digital modifications to my photographs, and it is exhilarating how many versions of the same picture can turn up when I put in the time consuming effort. The craft itself lassos me into a momentum so that at times I’d forget to eat lunch…mmhmm.

in these pages i shall journal on the photographs and paintings that i have modified into my own brand of digital mixed media. a picture may be worth a thousand words, but i like to share my thousand thoughts about it. 

Inspired in Many Ways

Like a water colour painting…was I inspired by Turner’s sunset?

I captured this view with my Nikon D810 from my former house backyard that faced a conservative wood. The sunset gave the closed atmosphere a latent glow of red and orange that the camera’s exposure setting (my skill was still new) did not capture. That lack in intensity caused me to photoshop it with layers of blurring filters that produced a variety of possibilities. Voila! the sky deepened its blue, the fall leafless trees showed up in skeletal beauty, the bushes thrust themselves into a deep shadow, and thus a landscape emerged obeying the rules of foreground, mid-ground, and background that was hidden in the original photograph.

Landscape photography is not my forte, but the years of tackling the learning curve by doing it and shooting every subject I find, have given me bounteous fodder for making art with the other subjects that I have more interest in, such as people, street photos, and birds at flight. I always feel a sense of satisfaction at furthering some of the many perspectives that a picture seems to want you to see. I believe the perspectives are in the thousands, so I stopped fiddling when the picture itself declared that’s how it should look, enough cosmetics already!