I don’t know where the blurriness of my left eye has led me. Did I “see” these blurry water reflections, or did I just get lucky ?
Standing by the edge of this pond in Mettawa, Illinois late in the afternoon of a long day of shooting, I felt an unwelcome wind pick up and ripple the fine reflections I anticipated shooting. Day is done, no more garden photos now.
But wait, I can still take photos. I can still play and experiment. The composition is there – shapes and colors. Try for mood. So what if it is blurry ? If the Sweet Flag dances and the water shakes, if the tree is a ghost in the cool steely blur, well then, that is the story. Isn’t that what I am really seeing? See blur, photograph blur. Easy.
Silver streaks made visible with a long shutter speed were once waves, only imagined brush strokes when I let my blurry eye wonder. Not much I really see actually. Muted color, indistinct shape; and blurs. I didn’t know what the camera would see.
I have cataract surgery on Monday. Many months of blurs may finally be corrected. For the better I presume. Actually I don’t presume, I’m counting on it. I am pretty darn tired of stumbling around.
Back to the pond; I try frame after frame as the tree disappears and returns amidst the shimmering grays, the Acoris trembling against the wind. I exposed many frames with the camera, previewed, and kept only 3, contrary to all advice – which is not to edit and delete in camera. We are advised to pick favorites at home with the safety of back-up files and hindsight. Not these images though. Have courage of your work. I wish I could have picked only one.
Kurtis Pond, Blur #3
After the next surgery, perceptions will change again. What will I see ? What will I remember of the blurs I saw ? Gauzy soft impressions will become a technique not a reality. Was I lucky to see blurs ? Was I lucky the camera could see it too ? Or is a blur just a blur no matter what reason the photographer decides to use it?
Hmmmm. I am thinking too much. I like . . . I show.
It is somehow appropriate that I add to Mental Seeds with a post about seeds themselves. Seeds hold the promise of renewal and after months of insignificant distractions and artificial deadlines I need to re-invigorate.
My left eye continues to be blurry, now with a cataract resulting from all the surgeries for the detached retina. In July we will finally know what I will see. Now I just need to push onward. Not onward with new challenges – I need to finish what I started.
From Brooks Jensen’s “Letting Go of the Camera“: “If I had to restrict myself to just one activity that would improve my photography the most, what would that be? Without a doubt, I should finish more of my work.”
The activity of finishing this series of photos resulting from the new vision requires learning to use Photoshop much more proficiently. This in itself is a reason enough to get back on track. Nothing of what I see can be rendered by the camera by itself, so I have a reason to learn some of the Photoshop techniques I should have learned years ago.
The Maple Seeds photo started like this, a trio of winged seeds poking through the mass of fall foliage in the tree in my front yard:
This is what the camera saw, but I saw it as a blur with one eye, sharp only where it was close to my face. To get the photo to render to the eye, I needed to make the photo much softer than I could achieve with the camera. I used the Selection Tool to cut out and clone the seeds, thus duplicating them, with an opacity setting of 40 so that it would be faint. Then I applied a blur filter and used the eraser tool to create a mask around the primary cluster of seeds, thus eliminating the blur from the one area I wanted to stay sharp.
I think if I do another version (or state) of this photo I might keep some sharpness in the one leaf where the seeds emerge. The seeds seem to float too much and even thought the leaves were in fact blurry to my eye, I had a sense of the seeds emerging that this photo does not capture.
Always room for improvement but one must not get lost in every different possibility. Once you get started with Photoshop changes it becomes hard to make a decisive choice. Move on.
These next three versions of a leaf photo show the dilemma of indecision when using Photoshop manipulations. For most of my commercial garden photography work I try, in my post production, to get the photo to be exactly the way the garden looked to me. This may not always be what it may look like to someone else but for me, it is a fixed moment and immutable.
The same day I photographed the maple seeds I photographed a single leaf fixed on a slender branch reaching beyond my ear.
Pretty nice as is:
Or this, with leaf redder and background enhanced with the Clarity tool:
Or this with the background much darker:
It is fun to try different moods and interpretations, all made possible by masking the leaf. Doing so, I can make changes to the two parts of the photo independently of each other in Layers of the Photoshop file. The dilemma of purposefully altering the photo in Photoshop is where to stop testing the nearly limitless choices of tweaks and permutations that are possible.
Learning the tool is not just about the technical mastery but learning the discipline to know when to stop using the tool, and let the photo be finished.
“If I had to restrict myself to just one activity that would improve my photography the most, what would that be? Without a doubt, I should finish more of my work.”
I think I will simply move on with this Mental Seeds portfolio. Finish and post. Perhaps without further explanation.
The vision in my left eye is still quite blurry. Unless I really concentrate on what I am seeing, my right eye dominates and I simply have a hazy sense of looming weirdness. And unless I stick my head up real close to something, color washes out.
So to see these Madrone berries I stuck my head right into the branches and let my blurry vision take over. If I let both eyes see, there is only a small area in focus and the rest is a double vision. To make this photo, shot in macro mode super close with my G11, I copied the image and superimposed it on itself, slightly offset.
After I sandwiched the images, I erased the effect on the berries with the best focus and added the palette knife art filter; and then erased that effect on the same berries. It is hard to see the effect of the filter in the small blog version of the photo, but I am satisfied that I can convey how only a small area of the scene is actually in sharp focus.
I used the palette knife filter on a much stronger setting for a vertical version of berries on another Madrone. It seemed to be an exceptionally good year for berries for this exceptionally wonderful California native tree, but even so, I needed to clone in a cluster of berries to fill a gap in the lower left of the original photo.
Madrone berries – cloned
If you look closely you will notice the cluster at the bottom is the same as the one above it. I had to spend some Photoshop time blending leaves and branches so it would look “natural”, but it is all for the sake of art. The camera always lies anyway, and I really wanted to get the feeling of looking through a blurry foreground to an area that is sharp focus.
In this case, I am allowing my dominant right eye to focus where ever it can, knowing my blurry left eye can focus on nothing in the distance. I didn’t let my eyes see double vision, letting the blurry left eye be an impressionist sense of color. This only works if I am really close to the subject, other wise my eye does not see much color, just muted gray blurs.
It is fun to play with these macro scenes where I can actually put the eye to creative use, but for larger landscapes it is still pretty useless. As spring comes on and I begin my real work photographing gardens, I wonder how the two eyes will work together – or not. I am using a pirate’s patch over my eye when I drive so that I can avoid some depth of field confusion of one blurry eye. I may need to use it when I work….
As I was poking around my garden last fall, adjusting to my vision and letting the new wonders reveal themselves to me, I decided to keep my big smokebush, Cotinus ‘Grace’.
It is a monster of a shrub, every year growing way beyond its allotted space in my mixed border. Until last November I had decided it must go. But as I stumbled around looking for new juxtapositions and inspirations for my photography, I stuck my head into the border to surround myself with the orange glow of its leaves. They were everywhere, tangled up in the tapestry of my border.
Garden tapestries are an ongoing theme of my work. I try to find interesting foliage compositions, and to make them work for me as photographs, every bit of the frame needs to be in focus. When one element of a potential tapestry, such as Cotinus ‘Grace’ gets too big, it is near impossible to make a tapestry, and I had made few photographs of her the garden.
But now as I look for new photographs and because my eyes could not focus together, every step in my garden generated new ideas, and I began to see ‘Grace’ in new ways. And last November was a good year for its color. She’s a keeper now but, glancing out my window, still one of those pruning chores that I have not attended to. (So, why the heck am I writing this blog when the garden chores are so neglected…)
It is a bit difficult to recreate the same impressions I had about this image when I first took it three months ago. It is a difficulty I am having with all those early images after the first surgery. The vision is changing and I do not see the way I saw then. Even if the garden had not changed I doubt I would see the same pictures.
I remember being struck by rich color of the leaves as I stuck my head into the border looking for something to register. I had to nearly put my face onto the leaves for my left eye to see while the right eye saw whirls of Melianthus and Berberis foliage.
As I try to re-create the memory, I debate with myself how much of the entire scene to reveal in the final photo. As you can see from my raw image (above) I did a bit of cloning and enhancing in PhotoShop, but I also wanted to apply a blur filter to really draw the eye to the Cotinus leaves which were what inspired my left eye.
The question I have not solved is how much of the blur filter do I want to use. If I use a lot, such as the opening photo, I lose much of the tapestry effect that my right eye included. If I use it a little less blur, like this second version below, I lose some of the graphic impact of the leaves.
Hmmm . . . Maybe there is an entirely different way to approach this. Instead of a blur filter I use the brushstroke tool to manipulate the other foliage instead of blurring it ? No time now to figure out another PhotoShop tool. I think I will go prune that shrub.
I first posted this picture to my Gardening Gone Wild post Depths of Perception 2 months ago as I began exploring my new vision after the vitrectomy. At that time, despite the worries over my eye, I was giddy with new photos. I couldn’t wait to get to work on those photos to really convey some sense of what I was seeing.
I have documented my setbacks elsewhere and will continue to update my previous post “Retinal Tears” and use it as a running web log. But the whole reason to do the Mental Seeds blog was to explore new photos. Now, back to work.
Back to work. Can you call what I get accomplished work ? It is agonizingly slow. I lose inspiration. I get frustrated beyond my ability to sit still with Photoshop. I wonder why I even think this must be done.
Then I remember art. I feel the pull of beauty. I remember the inspiring book by Brooks Jensen “Letting Go of the Camera“, that gives me permission. Distilling his advice: if you want to develop your art – do it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t say one day I will have a nice body of work. Do it. Learn. Move on.
This project fell into my lap. An excuse to do something new and unique. How often do any of us, in any part of our lives, have this opportunity? Some of the most adventuresome will put themselves in situations that allow unique insight or inspiration. Some do crazy things and go to crazy places in the push to find something truly new.
I have never taken those chances. I like the comfort of what comes easy; and recognize the blessings I have been given, the people I have stumbled upon, the graces of the universe that have allowed me to ride this river, enjoying the harmony of the middle, steering clear of shallows and snags.
As I floated down this wide river, never really wondering where it went, I watched the distant shore and sensed the wild. I admired the beauty, but was never been quite brave enough to slip out of the boat, swim in the water, and seek that shore. I drifted past tributaries that never quite compelled me to explore.
I never expected the boat to capsize.
Now I have a choice. I still have my boat. I am a good swimmer. The water is welcome refreshment. Perhaps the secret to creativity is found in the water itself, in the swimming. Whether I reach the shore is not the goal.
The water is deep and the effort to swim is work. And so is the effort to right the boat. I am not getting anywhere by just clinging to the boat so my pragmatic compromise is to stay in the water, grab the tow line, and swim toward the beauty.
Back to work. Mental seeds in are waiting to be planted in the explored lands ahead.
Photoshop is the work. I don’t understand the ramifications of every move I make but I know the feeling I want bring out. Each exploration leads to the next. I won’t get there unless I try.
These posts are as much about learning Photoshop as they are about the progress of my vision as my eye heals. The photos in this post took me two weeks to figure out. It has been frustratingly slow to someone who expects to “complete” many photos in a day. Now, these are finished. Finished for now, I need to move on. I will not permit the timid luxury of saying they will be better.
It is easy to play with Photoshop, cast oneself adrift in its infinite corridors. But to use the tools for work one must be disciplined and adept. These photos of Miscanthus junceus seen in my garden after a November rainstorm use one of my favorite Artistic Filters – Drybrush. After applying the filter I have erased and cloned various areas to allow the lines of the foliage and the raindrops on the leaves to remain as the reality of what I saw. (Before and after at the end of the post.)
My two eyes work differently now. My one good eye forces me to see everything in 2 dimensions, just the way a camera renders a scene, but my blurry left eye fuzzes the boundaries. I can’t really see that fuzziness because the good eye dominates my brain’s need for “normal” perception but I sense things are different – and it is beautiful in a new way to me.
I am struggling with how to portray this to others. My vision lives in my brain and in the pixels of my photograph. Those pixels need to be rendered in such a format that someone else can see them and begin to grasp what I am trying to say. Is that format the computer screen ? The print we can study in our hands ? Or is the ultimate goal to display on the wall to be seen from across the room ?
Detail of raindrops on Miscanthus junceus
When using filters in Photoshop, the viewing distance and medium makes all the difference in the world. Many of the filters have different settings and brush strokes. The effect of those settings change depending on the image size.
When I began working on these photos, the horizontal version at the top of the post and the detail above was prepared for a large print using my Dry Brush settings 10-0-1 (brush size-detail-texture). I realized you could hardly see the effect in a small version, as shrinking down the photo compressed the affect of the filter. For the vertical photo I changed my Dry Brush settings to 3-10-1 which look pretty bizarre if enlarged much beyond the distance between me and my computer screen.
Rain drops on Miscanthus junceus- vertical
Just click on the photo in the blog to see a larger size and begin to understand my predicament. Which size is best? Who is the audience ? What is the “finished” photo?
In general I have always resented the small format I am forced to use with publishing. Whether a book or a website, you can’t really see much in a complex photo (or garden) unless you can see it large. I have managed to work in that size these many years and realize the pragmatic limitations of publishing. I suppose part of whatever art I have achieved in those photos has been finding garden scenes that can hold up in a small size.
And with a traditional photograph, making it a large photo fit into a small space is a relatively strait-forward derivative file. To make a large special effects photo look right in a small format is part of my current work.
It is downright fun to take the photos with such promise of revealing some new perceptions. The work is learning the tools in order to show the essence to someone else. Problem not solved yet, but time to move on to more photos. It is gratifying to see progress.
