Opportunity & Transformation

My absence from this personal blog is best captured by the phrase, “Still waters run deep.” The New Year brought another bout with a cold which quickly became bronchitis which lasted until the end of March. If that was not enough, events became more dire with the worldwide pandemic of Covid-19. Luckily, I did not contract it. These several months provided an opportunity of time to reflection, re- reading many things on photography especially skill development.

Naturally, photographic style was always in the back of my mind, for I felt unsettled with what I was producing. From the previous posting in December 2019 I knew I was at the cusp of totally crafting my photos differently. During the winter I did a lot of experimenting in how I actually developed the photograph in post-processing. And, in tandem, how I printed the photographs.

The currently posted photo is a result of my transformative thinking about what I was producing. There is some of the style of John Paul Caponigro in it. The shot was taken at Conimicut Point, RI in late September awaiting the sunrise and a moon shot with a prominent foreground of Conimicut Lighthouse.

The photograph was taken using a Canon 5DS using an EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM lens @ 135mm, f/8, 1/10″, ISO 200, using a Gitzo tripod, and postprocessing with DxO PhotoLab II, ACR, Photoshop CC.

Out of My Element

Since my last post I’ve been putting together my portfolio. This activity is/was totally foreign to me and a bit disquieting, since I have always approached photography in recent years as an adventure, not knowing what kind of shots I would take. I really had no need to change this approach, but I decided to take a workshop in Maine in the autumn around the Acadia National Forest with John Paul Caponigro. One of John Paul’s suggestions to prepare for his workshop was to think of projects I wanted to do as well as put together a sampling of my photographing interests (portfolio, I presumed).

This caused a brief period of uneasiness since I really resisted in putting together a collection of my best (or what I thought were) photos. But, I decided that growth sometimes comes at a cost of uncertainty so I put together a portfolio. I was definitely out of my element and I struggled with doing this for two weeks; my wife assisted me in critiquing since I really did not trust my own judgements (at times).

Be that as it may, I finally began to see that what I liked about a lot of my photos (while valid) was not what others might see. Also, I began to see that while I liked certain photos for their composition they did not meet the precision of focus, color or tonality that I believed also drove me to capture scenes.

I have put my portfolio “to bed” for the foreseeable future. What it is, it is. I definitely am always thinking of my next photo, and still want to shoot photography that way. The portfolio exercise was good and accomplished something. There is a tendency to see a portfolio as static; however, I generally shoot photos in an on-going, dynamic fashion and have a running series in my head of the “real life portfolio” that I am involved in.

I have posted this current photo in this post although it also exists (at least currently) in my online Gallery on this site. The reason I did this was to use it as an example that what I thought was a good photo for my Gallery is not a good photo after completing the exercise of putting together my portfolio for John Paul. The current photo was taken with a Canon 5 DS, using an EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @ 100mm, f/4.5, 2″, ISO 3200, and post processed with DxO PhotoLab 2 , ACR, and Photoshop CC 2019, using a Gradient Map.