Studio On Location
I hope everybody had a nice summer! It is early October, so I guess it is time for me to get back in the saddle...
This first of the autumn blogs will mostly concern itself with photos I commonly shoot, but rarely show to other photographers. I mostly take these pictures on location for myself, and to show other friends who hike a lot and are interested in wildflowers, geology, paleontology and birding or wildlife also. They exist for identification, as opposed to a concern with design and/or concept. In rare circumstances the subject presents itself in an interesting setting like the pink asters above that opens this blogpost, but in most cases the images look somewhere between a seed packet for your garden or a Sierra Club calendar photo. Below you will see 3 examples of this kind of work.
One of the things that immediately jumps out at you when you are shooting in these circumstances is just how varied and chaotic the backgrounds can be, but also how tonal conflicts can easily arise between the primary subject and its surroundings. To some degree, working with a lower depth of field can help here but the fractal nature of the world rarely lets up. An invisible issue also hovering over these types of photos on location is both the legal framework, and the biology surrounding the situation. Generally, both on a federal and state level in parks, national monuments, seashores and wilderness areas picking wildflowers is forbidden. The general rule of thumb is natural resources are left as they are found.
However, over the last year or two, locally I have been working in black and white out at Pt. Reyes National Seashore hopefully expanding on Harry Callahan's dead weeds in snow photos. Since it does not snow much around here, I have been using a highly starched dress white shirt, either suspending it behind a plant, or laying down snapped branches or stems on it, to get the look. The tendril photo in the WHITE PORTFOLIO is from this group.
While traveling in Southern California during the desert wildflower bloom in March, I started thinking roughly about moving this idea into a color setting sometime over the summer when I went up to the Sierras, but I put it on the back burner due to summer school and some other unexpected issues. When my brother and I finally put a backpacking trip together, it fell right at the end of August and the first few days of September. Accordingly, my late summer expectations were the dried out tan ghosts of summer wildflowers on a white or black Patagonia polypropylene thermal. By the way, tan on black or white had me thinking BLACK and WHITE. However, as we ascended Bishop Creek, it quickly became apparent that there were extensive pockets of wildflowers still blooming in swampy low lying areas and along the creek itself. However, what was far more interesting to me were the flowers in transition, with their fading colors, and missing petals. As we ascended to treeline, it became apparent we were mostly going to be surrounded by massive slabs of granite with withered flowers in the spaces between the rock walls and boulders.
As I previously mentioned, when discussing the earlier work at PT. Reyes, the tendrils were mostly shot by suspending the white shirt behind the plants, and my expectation was that was going to be how I worked up in the Sabrina Basin. As it turned out though, we had very warm weather with high afternoon winds a few days, and a lot of the dying flowers were either torn out at the root or their stems had snapped in the high winds. This made for very easy shooting where we were able to place all the plants on a black thermal shirt on the ground in very soft late day shadow. Though alpine species, the visual outcome here looks like they were photographed in a highly controlled studio environment three hundred miles away in the Bay Area.
