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.

Calling All Critics!

Post all your comments on my work here!

Trying to recreate an image I saw of a man reading a newspaper on fire for the message photograph: The wind was unpredictable, so I did not know ahead of time where the flames would be. Because of this, I could not use a tripod since setting up in one spot would force me to commit to a single angle that would likely not have worked out because of the direction of the flames. Unfortunately since the paper burns so fast, it became dangerous and difficult for the subject to hold after only about 10 seconds. I needed to take bursts of photos within 10 seconds without a tripod. I wanted a large aperture, shallow depth of field shot so that the newspaper was not in focus and only appeared as a newspaper without specific stories on it. The largest aperture I had available was only f/5.6, which did not give me significant blurriness difference between the subject and the newspaper. I decided to use autofocus to cutdown on the time it would take to snap the pictures during the 10 seconds of flame. Unfortunately, sometimes this autofocus would do the opposite of what I wanted and put the newspaper in focus and the subject in the background.

I kept running into the problem of daylight. In order to get good stopping/ freezing of rapid motion, a very fast shutter speed is required. This fast speed makes it so the sensor receives light for a very short amount of time, so in order to have a well-exposed image, there has to be a lot of light, even if the the ISO speed is at its maximum setting. My schedule kept working out so that I could take pictures either when it was cloudy or in the hours surrounding sunset, so I was always struggling to get a stop motion image. The best I have is a 1/500 second exposure of ripples on the surface of water.

I was hoping to be able to capture all of the more than 200 geese in a single images, but unfortunately, they were spread out more than they appear to the naked eye. If I captured them all in one image, they would all be incredibly small, so I used a zoom lens to capture only a few dozen of them in a series of images. This may have made the images appear more flat, but there was not an easy way to approach the geese since they were on the opposite side of the lake and likely would have fled if I did walk around.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jziOy1kkgV2EPmxTeRhAFLvRc3HGpLvS?usp=sharing

M.C. Escher (1898-1972) was a Dutch Graphic Artist who mainly worked with woodcuts and
lithographs. His work is inspired by mathematical concepts, although he did not consider
himself to have mathematical abilities. His work is world famous for playing with architecture
and so called “impossible spaces”. Many of the buildings and plants he includes in some of his
work are real world objects he observed while living in Italy between 1924 and 1935. In total,
Escher made over 400 lithographs and woodcuts and over 2,000 sketches. He also illustrated
books, banknotes, stamps, carpets, and murals.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jziOy1kkgV2EPmxTeRhAFLvRc3HGpLvS