I know my last post was of a Bandon Beach sea stack, but I just recently finished processing another image from that same evening and couldn’t resist showing that one as well.

The thing about these long-exposure sea stack images is that you can take a ton of them and each one is unique because the sea is moving differently each time the shutter is open. This exposure happens to be 15 seconds. That’s a lot of time during which the sea is swirling about and making different patterns.

But there are some challenges as well. After all, I wanted the sea stack itself to remain sharp, so the camera needs to be tripod mounted. This image was taken at a focal length of 400mm and so the wind can be a real challenge in terms of any movement of the camera or long lens during the exposure. The 400mm focal length magnifies any and all movement. And don’t get me started on seawater moving around the tripod legs resulting in the tripod slowly sinking into the sand as the water flows back to the sea. So another reason to make many exposures is to attempt to get a sharp capture of the stack as well as to obtain many different ocean patterns.

I have found that if there is a slight softness to the stack because of motion, Topaz Photo AI or Sharpen can restore sharpness nicely.

One of the perks of working part time on the Oregon Coast is the chance to visit Bandon Beach in all sorts of weather. On this day, it had actually snowed about two inches (unusual for the coast) and I was hoping for some snow on the beach, but no such luck. I understand that there was some snow to be seen on the sand earlier in the day, but there was work to be done at that time. By the time I got to the beach, what little there had been was already washed away since the tide was high. But that didn’t mean there weren’t still good compositions to be had at the twilight hour!

One of my favorite things to do is photograph sea stacks using a neutral density filter to catch the waves and surf with long exposures. On this evening, the tide was high and this photo was taken with my 100-500mm lens at a focal length of 400mm at f16, ISO 100, for an exposure duration of 15 seconds.

You might be surprised to know that, despite my aversion to the cold of winter, I do go out and take winter walks (I have been doing the 10,000 steps a day thing for quite some time) and that on some occasions I do take my camera along with me. One of those days happened a few weeks back, and I took the opportunity to add another image to my collection of bare trees. I have always liked images with graphic lines and shapes, and the bare tree photos fit that bill nicely.

My bare tree portfolio consists of tree silhouettes on a warm-colored background, but each time I make one I also make a ‘cool’ background version to go along with it. I also add a very slight blur to these in order to impart a slight ‘mystical’ effect.

I am pleased and honored that one of my images was chosen for gallery exhibition by the PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont, as part of their exhibition entitled Botanical. The chosen image is below and is one of my multiple-exposure flower photos.

In one of the many posts I have recently written about my deep dive into the art of photo-encaustic, some readers noted that the posted images don’t really show the three-dimensional surface of the finished pieces very well. This is related to the fact that artwork is usually photographed en-face. So I thought I would simply post some quick cell phone photos to give readers a better impression of the type of texture that is on the surface of encaustic artwork.

This first one (click here to see entire piece) has only a mild texture imparted to the surface:

This second piece has a much stronger texture meant to simulate the cinder block on which the original photographed mural was painted (click here to see the entire piece).

And a photo to show the three dimensional nature of the cradled wood panel on which the artwork is constructed.

I hope these give a little better indictaion of what the surface of the encaustic artwork looks and feels like. By the way, one can use many senses to experience encaustic. If you put your nose an inch or so away from the piece you can smell the wax, which has a very pleasant and slightly sweet fragrance. Any further than an inch or three and there is no detectable fragrance.

You know the photographic saying that goes something along the lines of ‘after you take your photo turn around and look behind you, because the best shot might be there'? Well, sometimes you also have to look up, particularly indoors.

My vision tends to be more telephoto and detail isolating, but this time what I had in mind called for an extreme wide angle lens. This image, looking up one of the columns of the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning was shot at a focal length of 15mm. Given that the the camera was mere inches from the lowest point on the column, the photo is also a focus stack. In a focus stack such as this, multiple images, each focused at a slightly different point along the column, are merged so that the entire column appears in focus. Having the entire column in focus is something not physically possible with a single exposure, even with a wide angle lens.

I recently had the opportunity to return to the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning to do some photography. At times, deciding on color vs black and white processing (with or without toning) can be a difficult decision after photographing at this location. One of the benefits of black and white is that the Gothic architecture seems to fit with a black and white presentation very well. Another factor in favor of black and white is that the main indoor lighting is provided by powerful high pressure sodium bulbs, which give a strong yellow/orange cast to the image. To make matters worse, there are other types of lighting mixed in with the sodium lights, which often gives mixed color casts that can be difficult to correct, and which don’t necessarily look good in the image. A black and white presentation removes this difficulty.

But I was able to process the color version of today’s image in a way that removed a good deal of the color cast imparted by the mixed lighting and achieved a result I like. However, when putting together an entire project one wonders whether the overall presentation would best be in color or black and white. What do you think?

In my newest encaustic piece, I wanted to experiment with varying textures. I printed the image on a thin Washi paper (Awagami Murakumo) and decided to saturate it in wax using an encaustic monotype technique. An anodized aluminum plate was heated, and molten encaustic medium was then painted onto the plate after which the image was placed print-side down onto the medium. This has a very interesting effect on the paper. It turns it translucent! And I had previously noticed that when putting the translucent paper on a white background the image tends to appear more saturated and three-dimensional.

To get it onto a white background, I took a 12x16 inch cradled wood panel and adhered a piece of white watercolor paper to it. Then, using the same Scotch Repositionable Adhesive, I adhered the waxed print to the white paper background and trimmed the edges flush with the panel. This gave the print a very nice look just as it was, with the wax having soaked into the paper and being very smooth. However, I thought it would be interesting to see what effect I could get by painting wax medium over the brown textured area of the print (it is a texture after all) using a brush. But first I applied several pigments to the print to give it some color variation. This is sort of the equivalent of hand-coloring a photo.

I then painted the encaustic medium onto the textured area and fused it to the image with a heat gun, with extra fusing so that the whiter area in the center of the image would be smoother than the textured brown and orange area around it. I then applied some more pigment to the textured wax and fused it again to produce the finished piece.

I like that the white ‘framed’ portion around the brown-orange texture is smooth, the brown-orange texture has a rough and textured three-dimensionality to it with pigments added, and then the center is smooth again. I think it really adds a sense of dimension to the piece, which only partially comes through when photographing it!

It has been apparent for some time that in today’s society many of us have put up digital barriers between ourselves and reality. Take, for example, a visit to the art museum. Haven’t we all seen visitors looking at paintings through the lens of a smartphone without actually looking at the painting itself; photographing each one as if they need proof that they were there, akin to stalking a ‘big game’ prize?

Even the Mona Lisa is often enjoyed these days through a digital representation, even though all one needs to do is put down the phone to have a look at reality.

And then there is the digital era phenomenon of using the beauty of the world as a mere backdrop for the selfie. We’ve all seen this. The moment that doesn’t exist until it has been ‘Instagrammed’ to show you’ve been there. We’ve seen the images and often rolled our eyes (at least I have) when we see it happening in person.

Thanks to Tom Dill (who I had the great pleasure of meeting in person last summer) and his blog for pointing out in a recent post this excellent opinion piece that focuses on this exact issue. It’s entitled “You’re Pointing The Camera The Wrong Way”!

One of the types of images I enjoy making are zoom abstracts. These are actually fairly easy to do. I lock my camera down on a tripod and, during the exposure, zoom the lens. There are four major variables that affect the result: 1) the length of the exposure, as the longer the shutter is open the more time there is for zooming, 2) the speed at which you zoom the lens during the exposure, 3) which focal lengths you decide to zoom through, and 4) whether you decide to zoom short to long, long to short, or both within a single exposure. Similar to intentional camera movement, one can (and likely needs to) make many different exposures changing all the variables in order to find a few shots that seem aesthetically appealing. It really is a fun process.

One thing that should be noted is that, unlike intentional camera movement, where the motion effect is applied equally to all parts of the image, the degree of the apparent zoom effect changes over the surface of the image. The greatest effect is at the periphery of the photograph, while the center of the image is not affected as much. For example, in the sunflower field zoom photo below, the flower in the center shows much less zoom effect than the flowers at the periphery of the image. The photo is a single in-camera image and not a composite.

If you haven’t tried this effect it is certainly fun to play around with and see what you get!

I feel as if the recent photo-encaustic work I have been doing has opened up many new creative avenues to explore, as there are so many techniques and ways to combine photography with the encaustic arts. One of my several New Year’s resolutions (and no crazy undoable ones this year) is to make 26 encaustic pieces…that’s one every other week. Sounds doable. They don’t have to be masterpieces and, in fact, they don’t even have to be particularly good. No matter how good or bad they are I will surely learn from the doing.

David Bayles and Ted Orland, in their book Art & Fear, relate a story that imparts a crucial message. Rather than paraphrase it, I will quote directly from the book:

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the ‘quantity’ group: fifty pounds of pots rated an A, forty pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on ‘quality’, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an A. Well came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the ‘quantity’ group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the ‘quality’ group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

Thus, the idea for my 26 pieces was born. Of course, I could have made the number higher, but I believe one of the important aspects of New Year’s resolutions is that they have to be reasonably attainable or they rapidly fall by the wayside.

I have, for many years, enjoyed making photos of very small sections of large urban wall murals that I feel can stand on their own, usually as abstract works. I decided to make one of those images into an 11x14-inch encaustic piece.

The printed photo was mounted to a cradled wood panel and coated with encaustic (beeswax + damar resin) medium and then enhanced with oil paints and encaustic pigments. Because the actual mural is painted on concrete (it is actually the length of a parking lot and this is perhaps a one or two foot swath of it), I applied the wax to mimic the texture of concrete. One of the nice things about encaustic is that you have some control over the degree and type of texture applied. The tears (which are present in the actual mural as well) were applied on top of the final wax coat using an encaustic stylus in order to give them a three-dimensional appearance.

AI. Artificial Intelligence. It’s big. Real big. And, when it comes to photography, there are two main types of AI. There is the type that analyzes your photos and then makes certain corrections based on what AI has ‘learned’ from hundreds of thousands of other photos.

For example, AI software may have learned from other photos how to define what an image’s main subject is and keep it sharp when performing noise removal. It may have learned what is important in a photo so that when you attempt to sharpen an image only the appropriate portions are sharpened.

And then there is the other type of AI. The kind where you input keywords and the software outputs an image that it constructs, based on hundreds of thousands of other images, none of which are yours. Clearly, the result is not a photograph that you took. Some might not call the output a photograph at all, but would call it digital art, as opposed to photography. And I wouldn’t argue with that in the least. There are a lot of disparate ideas about this type of AI, and, dare I say, disparate emotions as well…on both sides.

I did, however, run across this video which is admittedly one-sided that I, nonetheless, wanted to share. My personal feeling favors what Sam says, but am certainly open to hearing other opinions. The video is definitely worth a listen no matter where you stand!

If you are receiving this post via email, the video will not come along with it. The video can be viewed by clicking this link: https://youtu.be/5Viy3Cu3DLk

On my recent trip to Yachats (a great town on the Oregon Coast), it became evident that perseverance pays off. Only it wasn’t my perseverance. My photo companion Alex Morley suggested that we try to wait out the hail and frozen mix that we were being subjected to. I thought it was going to be a waste of time as it was really coming down heavily and had been for a while. We were right near the Heceta Head Lighthouse at the time, and decided to pull into the lighthouse parking lot in order to give it some time and see what happened.

Well, wouldn’t you know it! After waiting about 45 minutes, the weather suddenly cleared. Granted, the lull only lasted for about an hour or so, but during that time we were able to get to the hill overlooking the lighthouse, where I made this photo. I guess there’s a lesson in that!

And the dinner in Yachats afterward really capped off a great day.

The town of Yachats on the Oregon Coast is a really wonderful place to be, and I had the opportunity to photograph there with several friends a month or two ago. The weather, I should add, was crazy, unseasonably cold, and even hailing at times. But that didn’t stop us from going out to make photos.

I tried a bit of compositing in the above photo. I had my camera on a tripod and shot the exact same scene several different times, as the waves and water obviously change from moment to moment. I also took several shots with the same overall exposure but different shutter speeds by using a neutral density filter. Looking through the photos, I found that I liked them all but liked some parts of each image more than the rest of the image and decided to make a composite.

If anyone is interested, this is how that can be done. I processed one of the images in Lightroom and then copied all of the image’s develop settings to the other four (all had the same overall exposure when taken). That way the photos would all be interchangeable in a sense, so that if a part of one photo is placed into another the overall exposure, contrast, color, etc will be the same. They were then brought into Photoshop using the ‘Open As Layers In Photoshop’ command so that they were all exactly aligned. Then, layer by layer, I could mask in or out the regions of each photograph to be included in the composite.

Don’t be yelling ‘foul’….it’s art, not photojournalism :)

For those who want to know, I am including below the original base photo that makes up the image as it came out of Lightroom. The color, contrast, and so on looks different from the final composite as it has not gone through my Photoshop processing. As you can see, I like bringing my photos into Photoshop from Lightroom with lots of room on either side of the histogram (low contrast) to give me greater latitude for Photoshop processing without the risk of blowing out the highlights or blocking up the shadows. I am simply including it for those that might have an interest.

I am pleased that my image “Pyramid With Birds” was published in Black & White Magazine’s Single Image Contest (February 2023, Issue 158). Always nice when something like that happens.

Finally, after weeks to months of learning and practicing, I have produced a photo-encaustic piece that I like! Allow me to show it to you, and then I will talk a bit about how I made it, in case anyone is interested:

The piece started as a printed photo which I mounted to a 12x12 inch cradled wooden panel with sides that I had painted black (a cradled panel is basically a piece of smooth plywood that is mounted onto a square or rectangular wooden frame that is about an inch or so thick, thereby becoming a three-dimensional object that is flat on top). Mounting the photo can be accomplished in several different ways, but I find using Scotch (archival) positionable mounting adhesive to be the easiest method.

I then painted on two or three layers of molten encaustic medium (a combination of beeswax and damar resin), fusing with a small hand-held torch between layers, achieving a fairly smooth surface. I wanted to leave the central tree area smooth and make the wax textured in the area of texture on the original photo. I accomplished this by using the ‘dry brush’ technique, where a coarse brush that doesn’t have much wax in it is used to apply the medium, leaving organic streaks and brush marks.

The colors in the image were then enhanced by using oil pastels, oil paint, and encaustic pigment sticks on the wax surface and then fusing it with a torch once again.

I like that one ends up with a piece that is three-dimensional and unique. Of course, I could repeat the process starting with the same initial photo, but the end result would never be the same. In addition, encaustic work is displayed without glass in the frame, which I think allows a more intimate connection between the artwork and the viewer.

Framing is also easy! In this case, as seen in the photo, I used an Ampersand floater frame which was very ‘reasonably priced’ at about $45 (have you walked into a frame shop lately?). The frame is about 1 1/2 inches thick from back to front and lays flush against the wall. It is also reusable, since the cradled wooden panel is screwed into the rear of the frame and can easily be removed and replaced with a different panel at any time.

I am really enjoying this type of work and plan to continue it, along with my ‘regular’ photography.

I have completed my on-line beginners course in the art of photo-encaustic (combining photography with encaustic, or hot wax painting). I have really been bitten by the bug and love the idea of combining my photography with other modalities, which in addition to wax painting includes the use of oil paints, pigment sticks, oil pastels, dry pigments etc., to make three dimensional works while getting my hands a little dirty. I have signed up for some more advanced courses on the topic as well.

There are three main techniques (at least) in which photography can be combined with encaustic. These include the following:

• Mounting your photograph onto a board (masonite is the cheapest) or a cradled wooden panel (more expensive, but better looking and a bit easier to work with) and then coating with molten wax. The surface can be made smooth or textured. You can then enhance the photo with any type (as long as it is encaustic compatible) of pigment, much like hand coloring a photograph.

• Printing on tissue paper and then taking a multi-colored wax/pigment background that you have constructed and embedding the tissue paper into the background and coating it with clear wax. The absorption of the wax by the paper makes the white (non-printed area) visually disappear into the wax, which can then be enhanced with various pigments if you so choose.

• Preparing a multi-colored wax/pigment background and then, using any of a number of photo transfer methods, transferring the ink from the print onto the wax followed by enhancement as you so desire.

These three techniques can be combined and layered within the piece. Physically layered, not Photoshop layered :)

What you end up with is a truly unique 3-D multi-media piece, though I will be the first to say that there is a moderate learning curve both to handling the wax as well as to the painting with pigment part. But I have slowly been getting better. The final product is typically not displayed under glass, but, rather, in a floater frame, much like a canvas print. If the piece is on a cradled wood panel you need not even use a floater frame if you would prefer not to. You can simply paint the side panels and hang/display the panel itself.

I am demonstrating here a piece that was a failure per se, because I was attempting to learn the tissue paper technique. Alas, at the time, I had no tissue paper (some is on the way) so I printed on a very thin inkjet paper, but apparently not thin enough, as the paper did not become nearly invisible once embedded. So I made the best of the situation and hid the paper edges with pigments and ended up with something that is quite different than I had planned. It is quite dark and a bit creepy, not at all like most of the work I do, but I just followed where it took me.

As I delve more deeply into this and continue to improve, I will show more examples of what I am able to produce along the way. If anyone has any interest in or questions about what the process entails, I would be glad to either answer or write some more detailed posts.

Sometimes it’s difficult to come up with photographic projects, and, at other times, you aren’t doing too much of anything and they just pop into your head. This is an example of the latter.

For the last year or two, I have been on this 10,000 steps-a-day kick, which I have been following religiously, rain or shine. Sometimes I walk close to home and, at other times, I take a short ride and walk in a different neighborhood. I was recently taking a walk in Lawrenceville, PA, and wandered into a very large, historic cemetery. It’s a place that I have been to just a few times before and have even photographed once or twice.

But this time, as I was walking, I happen to notice that among the more typical headstones, those with a name and a ‘born on’ and ‘died on’ date, there were also some headstones that were extremely open-ended in a way that allowed a passer-by to almost construct a story. And it dawned upon me that this is much like a photograph in that a photo also has a limited ‘frame’ in which a story can be told; a limited space and time in which to grab and hold the viewer’s attention.

Wouldn’t that make an interesting project, headstones that seem to entice the viewer to imagine the story behind them? In order to remind myself of the project, I took a few cell phone shots since I didn’t have my ‘real’ camera with me. For example, there is a story here and it isn’t a good one.

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case."

Chuck Close

Perhaps the most important aspect of Close's advice is that it actually works! I think the best way to get out of a creative rut is to just force yourself to photograph whatever is around. Before long you may find yourself looking at things differently.

Well you sort of gotta’ love fall. I mean I do, but I don’t particularly like what it portends. You know, the ‘w’ word that I find hard to deal with.

The funny thing is that, when it comes to fall colors, Western Pennsylvania isn’t a place that people normally think of. But the fact is that it gets pretty beautiful around these parts!