Dreamy, Creamy; Maui, Alaska

June 01, 2017  •  Leave a Comment

The precision and technical quality of the images readily produced by modern equipment normally result in a sharply focussed depiction of exactly what the photographer saw. Sometimes that extreme precision fools viewers into thinking they understand what is going on.  Garry Winogrand recognized that his photos exactly captured things that were actually ambiguous and not necessarily understood.  

 

The posted images are different.  They are soft and dreamy, creamy even, not sharp and precise; any hard edge is unintended except, rarely, for emphasis.  A few as taken were inherently dreamy and ethereal, particularly some from Glacier Bay taken in fog or haze.  (The lead photo is from Glacier Bay.)   And I had processed the Halibut Cove warehouse image that way several years ago.  So it seemed (at least to me) an interesting collection might result from dreamy and creamy depictions of scenes that would look much sharper and hard-edged when taken or processed "normally."  Sometimes abnormal is good.  Except for a few (taken with slow shutter speeds to depict movement in trees or water), these images started out sharp and focussed.  Unlike images that are ostensibly sharp and precise (especially those of Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and other street photographers) but leave ambiguous what is really depicted, the posted photos use ambiguous and imprecise images to say -- with relative precision -- something insightful about the scene, or at least about the emotion a scene provokes. 

Halibut Cove warehouse, 2015

 

Glacier Bay, 2016

 

Ice, Glacier Bay, 2016

 

Sugar Beach, Maui, 2016


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After a lifetime of mainly expressing myself with words, my postings here will mainly rely on images.  They will speak for themselves to some extent, but I'll usually add a few comments of explanation.  I've taken photographs for decades, since the 1950's, inspired in part by my father's photographic skill.  Four years of photo assignments and quality darkroom time eventually gave way to decades of casual and family picture-taking.  I re-immersed myself when I left film and turned to digital.  

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