Light and Water

“I am the adventurer on a voyage of discovery, ready to receive fresh impressions, eager for fresh horizons, not in the spirit of a militant conqueror to impose myself or my ideas, but identify myself in, and unify with, whatever I am able to recognize as significantly part of me: the “me” of universal rhythms.”

“Anything that excites me, for any reason, I will photograph[.]” - Edward Weston

When asked about why I love photography, I’ll sometimes reply that photography is a tool that helps me learn about and understand the world.  A tool that helps me discover the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of life’s beauty.  Now, those words may sound enlightened, but what what the hell do they really mean?  Well, our morning photographing on the Santiam River offered a great example.

I struggle with discussions of artistic “vision” or one’s “art.”  To me, rightly or wrongly, it sounds too much like the person knows what they’re creating before they create it.  I’m sure that isn’t how its intended, that buried in that notion of “vision” is a process and that the results of that creative process cannot be fully defined in advance, but I can’t quite overcome that mental block I have with the language used.  To me, that “vision” language belies the sense of discovery and exploration - the learning and sometimes understanding of the unknown - that seems at the heart of my work. (Before you say, “Hey, but don’t you . . . ?“ I’m kicking the can of Ansel’s “previsualization” and my frequent use of the term “seeing” down the road of blog posts for now.)  And I call it work, because just like hiking five miles up a three thousand foot change in elevation on a mountainside, it’s work and you never know what really lies at the end of that trek, enjoyable though the journey may be.  But the only way to know is to go and do it, and sometimes there is really something there at the end of it all.

There’s an adage in photography, “follow the light.”  When you’re at a location where the light is amazing, find where it’s most spectacular and figure out how to make an image that includes it.  Or if you’re at a beautiful place under mundane light, and the incredible light is illuminating somewhere else - your better image is probably where the best light is.   That adage works even when the light isn’t spectacular, or at least when you haven’t figured out where the special light is.  Sometimes light can be brutal and so harsh you don’t want to photograph in it.  Then you’re left with the choice of calling it a day, figuring out what types of images work with brutal lighting, or looking at possibilities where the light doesn’t appear so brutal.  Sometimes that’s immersing yourself in the shadows, away from the direct light.  Other times, that means looking at your feet and seeing what the light is doing with the water around you.

As the sun increasingly rose at the Santiam River and the shadows across the river that somewhat cushioned the impact of the sun’s rays disappeared into nothingness, I was left standing on a rock wondering what could possibly be worth photographing in such light.  And as the last paragraph suggests, the answer was all around my feet. 

As the title of this blog post suggests, the focus of my photographs became the play between light and water.  Unlike much of my other work pertaining to water, it had little to do with surface reflections and the amazing colors that can result; in fact I tried to avoid them as much as possible that morning.  Nor did it involve the interplay of surface reflections and sub-surface forms as it had recently at the Japanese Gardens.  It also wasn’t about the elegant flow of water, although flow is evident in some of the images.  No, these images explored the interaction between light, clear water and the surfaces below the water.

Once I realized I was on to something, I had to somehow structure my explorations so I wouldn’t waste such a wonderful opportunity to experiment and learn (read: play).  I recently explained to Ann how photography often engages both sides of my brain.  I see something and react to it intuitively, especially when it comes to figuring out what should generally be within the frame, but then everything shifts to the other hemisphere and into a problem solving mode involving apertures, shutter speeds, composition and eliminating intruding elements.  Each a problem to be solved so that I can make an image that resembles what I’m feeling on the other side of that gray mass.

In this case, my structuring was easy - acknowledge the fundamental principles I’ve embraced in my photogrpaphy.  I’ve made the conscious effort to be faithful to my subjects even when I’m making my compositions, so that if someone else examines the image, no matter how abstract, they can figure out what it is a photograph of.  Sometimes it takes a bit more work than others, but there’s always that hook to reality in my images.  I realized that I might be pushing that boundary a bit while I was making some of these images, but having that in mind kept me from wandering off into total abstraction (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and gave me some parameters that would allow me to compare the different images I was making from at least one common principle.

Then it became a problem solving exercise within the technical constraints of photography.  I quickly realized that the play of light on the river bed changed so rapidly and distinctly that I had little control over those aspects of the image.  What I could control was the general tonal masses of the image, and that was an issue of framing.  Where exactly to point the camera?   And given the randomness of the details within the image, framing became an intuitive exercise, as often a “What would it look like if I framed it like this?” as a, “Oh, that would be nice!” process.

Exposure time became a critical element here and I wound up reversing my thinking and the direction I tend to move towards when photographing water.  Instead of working towards longer exposures (which I tried), I realized that these images often called for shorter exposures to keep the edges of the light patterns crisp.  Finding that balance of exposure time that allowed for movement in the water to give distortions of the objects below but that kept the crisp edges of light was a constant challenge, involving the switching of filters and adjustment of the ISO for any given image to get the shutter speed I desired.

Then came the issue of where to focus.  I decided generally to focus on the river bed for the most part, so that a careful look at the image would yield rocks and sticks.  Again, keeping that hook in reality as much as possible in an abstract image.  It wasn’t always possible, so then the question became what focus point helped keep at least one foot (toe?) in reality?

As you might imagine, it was a combination of intuition, technical problem solving and luck that yielded these images.  Guesswork you might call it, but not totally.  It definitely was not a carefully controlled exercise at crafting an image.  And to be quite honest, there was quite a bit of joyful play while I was doing it.

The strange thing was, for whatever reason, the images didn’t look particularly exciting on the LCD screen on the back of the camera.  They generally looked dull and lifeless.  But every time I thought that from looking at the screen, I’d look back down at the water and told myself to trust my eye and the camera’s sensor.  There was life in the water, and the camera would capture it.  So I’d double check my technical settings, and go right back at it.

I’m glad I did, because I didn’t fully realize what I had until I was able to examine the images at home on my monitor.  There’s a lot here for me to study, learn from, and build on.

Call it experimenting, learning, playing or, as I’m apt to call it, photographing, but I loved my lesson on light and water.