Given that I have changed part of my final project to focus on lichen and moss, I searched for some inspiration in the work of other photographers. I came across a piece by Lisa Blount Photography that reminds me of a Jackson Pollock painting. See https://www.lisablountphotography.com/products/shell-canyon-lichen. This image features a flat plain covered with lichens of different colours and textures. They are rather uniform in distribution, which is what makes it appear like a Jackson Pollock painting. I went into the woods hoping to find a blend of lichens like this, but unfortunately I never came across a photogenic bunch. Instead, I took a shallow depth of field photo trying to emphasise the patches of small lichens beginning to grow on the otherwise bare rock.

Although I am not longer creating a nightfall series, I still wanted to include the lamps in the woods photo. Unfortunately, I was not able to include a lamp in the photo given how drastically brighter the lamp was than the surrounding vegetation. All of the images with the lamp included are blown out. Given how cluttered the middle of the woods looks in the day time, I did not deem it worthwhile to drag an extension cord all the way into the woods, so instead I set up the lamp in a garden on the edge of the woods. The photo below is a 15 second exposure of a coniferous shrub in front of the woods (the black silhouettes in the background). The light is coming from an incandescent indoor lamp about 3 metres to the left of the frame. The colour temperature of this photo is accurate to what the naked eye sees in this situation. Although this picture did not follow my written plan, I believe it still nonetheless satisfies my original objective of having a photo that captures the essence of being in the woods at night, perhaps at the edge of a campfire. The photo below is preliminary, I plan to crop it and touch it up in photoshop.

It has been too difficult using photography to capture the essence of the falling of night in the woods. The wide range of lighting makes it impossible to capture different times of the evening using a single camera setting (my original plan). Changing the f-stop and shutter speed to get better exposed photos defeats the purpose of making sure it is clear in the photo series that darkness is encroaching.

I have decided to replace this series of photos in my final project with a series “origins” describing the sequence of vegetation that appears when a forest first develops. This series will begin with a picture of lichen, and proceed to pictures of moss, grass, and ferns.

The series describing the vertical layers of the forest will remain in my final project.

One improvement that media (photography and video) has brought to our lives is the ability for common members of the public to record and spread information and to create art with a low barrier to entry. Before the advent of photography, the art world was a heavily gated community, and reserved for very few media like drawing and painting. The ability for anyone to take a picture in modern times has made it so everyone has the ability to make art. Although much of the artwork generated by iPhone photography and videography in the general public will be rather hastily put together, many of these works of art could nonetheless be inspirational for many people, especially if they are able to see that someone they know was able to create artwork. This inspiration has likely reached many more people with significant artistic and scientific potential than it would have if the ability to create art was reserved for those who proved themselves to the institutional art world.