Blast from the Past

First Selfy, 1/1976

Folks, this is me 37 years ago!

Last year my son gave me a good quality negative and slide scanner for Christmas, and I so enjoy finding a little time to scan some of my old negatives and slides. This is from a roll of film I shot in response to one of my first assignments in my first photography class, begun in January 1976. The assignment was to shoot a roll of self-portraits.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this is that I am holding (and using, of course) a Nikonos II underwater camera. That is the first 35mm professional quality camera I owned, the reason being it was actually scuba diving that pointed me toward journalism and photography.

I had learned to scuba dive and made my first trip to the Caribbean, and I wanted to be able to show my family and friends who would never see it first hand what a coral reef was like. That is the quintessential journalistic problem: How to show/reveal/communicate a reality/issue/event to people who cannot experience it firsthand.

That's how I got into photography and story telling, and, as the saying goes, the rest is history.

And BTW, the Nikonos II underwater camera was the only professional 35mm camera I owned for some time. It is a viewfinder camera with no built in light meter. In other words, it had none of the aids to focusing and choosing aperture and shutter settings that even analog SLR cameras provided, much less today's electronic cameras. In retrospect, I'm pretty proud of the quality photographs I was able to make with this camera.

I still have it! And I'll use it again if I can ever find a strobe for it....

    

Photographer's Journal

                                  
                                     
Reflections & Silhouettes

                                                                                 
Moving around the cat tail pond to the north, I came to a bit of open water. Clouds, the blue of the sky, and details of the trees surrounding the pond form an upside down world on the still, dark mirror surface.

This part of the pond gets less sunlight because of shading from trees. It's also where deer come to drink, leaving deep tracks in the soggy shoreline.

A few feet out, the algae bloom resumes but is thinner and patchy, blurring the reflections but not obscuring them. Only in the top left corner do you get a glimpse of that part of the pond completely covered with a thick layer of algae.

This cat tail pond is just inside the main entrance gate to the Charles Allen Biological Station near Columbia.
          
         

Photographer's Journal

                                       
                                            
Silhouettes & Shadows

                                                
                                        
ULM's Charles Allen Biological Station contains a small cat tail pond. As I pproached from the east, the declining sun reflecting off the surface looked for all the world like a covering of ice!

Of course, it wasn't. When I got closer, I saw that the pond surface was mostly covered with a major algae bloom. Looking straight down, I could see two distinct kinds of algae, one green in color and the other reddish in color.

I walked past the pond, then back to it from another angle as the sun continued to decline, and was treated to a kaleidoscope of light and color patterns depending on the changing perspectives of me and the sun. I'll post more of those images over the next few days.

Photographer's Journal

                                
                              
Translucence

                                 
                            
Once again, a botanical I can't identify. I intend to remedy that through my new relationship with the ULM Biology Department and documenting the Charles Allen Biological Station near Copenhagen. I've long had a secret life as a wannabee biologist!

This photograph has garnered quite a bit of favorable reaction from other photographers on Google+. Back lighting can be a challenge to work with. On top of that, vines are quite unruly, so isolating a few leaves in a pleasing composition is also challenging.

This image required a bit of what we photographers call "post processing." The image actually contains four leaves--if you look carefully. Four of anything rarely makes as good a composition as three, and in this case, the fourth leaf was truly unruly. It insisted on pointing straight at the camera, rather than turning its back and allowing the light to pass through.

So, I darkened it in my digital darkroom. You can still see it in the upper right corner of the image, but it is hardly noticeable, and that makes a huge difference visually. To put it in artistic terms, I neutralized a non-supporting actor in the story I was trying to tell.

I think my favorite thing about this image is the little rust spots and yellowing edges that show these to be old, winter leaves rather than spring leaves. I identify!
                         
                                    

Photographer's Journal

                          
                               
Separation

                             
This is third in a series of photographs from my first day spent hiking ULM's Charles Allen Biological Station near Copenhagen, La., and looking for ways light interacts with the environment to satisfy an assignment for my online photography mentorship.

Again, I'm not sure what plant is featured here. Perhaps one of the goldenrods? I know we have a lot of it in northern Louisiana, and that by late December it has turned into this lovely seed head that sometimes catches the sunlight just so, separating it from the background. It almost looks dusted with snow!
        
          

Photographer's Journal

             

                        

Outlining

 

In my online photography mentoring program, our current assignment is to "play with light." Two days ago, I made my first trip to ULM's Charles Allen Biological Station south of Columbia in/near the Copenhagen Hills. I went focused on looking for the many ways "available light," in this case the sun, interacts with a diverse natural environment.

This photos illustrates how light will outline an opaque object, like these dried seed pods. It helps, of course, when the opaque object has a halo of fine hairs to be set on fire by the sun! I especially enjoy how the sun also makes visible the cobwebs that I almost never see with the naked eye.

Can anyone identify these seed pods?

Photographer's Journal

                    
                             
The Way Is through Light & Shadow (Always)

                               
What could be more fun for a photographer than playing with light? Playing with it in a wonderful new place!

I'm currently enrolled in an online photography mentoring program, and this week's assignment is to "play with light." 

Near the end of the fall semester, I was contacted by a graduate student in ULM's biology department about helping map and document their field biology lab. This “lab” is approximately 90 acres of natural beauty along the Ouachita River, right next to the Copenhagen Hills Nature Conservancy land. It includes low lands, ridges, bluffs overlooking the river, and a great diversity of plant and animal life.

So I made my first trek to my new playground yesterday. I spent almost 5 hours exploring, but truly have only scratched the surface of what it has to offer. And having this delicious assignment to “play with light,” I focused on photographing how light plays with nature in a place like this.