Make Great Photographs: Do Your Research

In August I head north up Route 66 in Illinois to Moraine View State Park and found a wind farm outside the park. It was one of those fist-pumping YES! moments when I realized that no matter how we extract energy from the landscape we are going to alter it, for good or for ill.

Wind Farm on the Bloomington Moraine

On a foggy morning in September I headed east to New Athens, Illinois and the local strip mine/wildlife refuge and began making photographs. Long narrow lakes lace the Peabody-River King Wildlife Management Area and I responded to them as the wetlands they are.

Beaver Lake, Peabody-River King WMA

The refuge was the River King Pit #3 strip mine and is located on the floodplain of the Kaskaskia River. When the mine played out, Peabody Energy donated the mine to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources for a wildlife refuge, where the long skinny lakes are popular with bass anglers.

Soybean Field on the Floodplain of the Kaskaskia River and Overburden from the River King Mine

I began cruising the web to learn more about the strip mine and the wildlife refuge it had become. My most critical visit was to terraserver.com where I could look on U.S. Geological Survey maps, and more important, aerials of the refuge, where I realized a machine created this landscape.

Aerial of the Peabody-River King Wildlife Management Area

I was surprised to find the lakes on the western half ran perpendicular to a corrugated landscape. This is the half of the refuge mined before Congress passed the 1977 Strip Mine Reclamation Act. The eastern half, the smoother area was mined after 1977.

I asked John Bowman, the manager of the refuge, why? He speculated that the Peabody stripping shovel stripped the lakes first and then worked the corrugated areas.

Think of the shovel as a really, really big Tonka Toy, a huge steam shovel, a stripping shovel actually, all levers and pulleys and 22-stories tall and designed to remove earth and rock–the overburden–from the landscape, reaching down to the underlying coal. Once there it creeps along the top of the coal seam, scooping out the earth in front of it. It scoops, it swivels, it dumps the overburden to the side, and it moves forward, creating a sausage-shaped spoil bank. When the shovel reaches the end of its first strip, it makes a parallel cut alongside it, scooping earth and rock, swiveling, and dumping the overburden into the first pit, creating a second sausage-shaped spoil bank next to the first. And so on, back and forth across the landscape it works until the mine is played out. Smaller shovels, but still big Tonka Toys, follow in its wake, digging out the coal and dumping it into haulers, more big Tonka Toys.

Once I understood the process I could go back and make photographs of the wetlands and the overburden.

Overburden on Reed Lake

The sun did not shine this October and I had a month of dramatic clouds, but no sun to define the irregular topography of the overburden. November came and the sun came out.

Overburden at Cypress Lake

The sun also dried out the road that ran along the western edge of the unreclaimed overburden, allowing me to hike to the backside of the refuge and make photographs of the ends of the spoil banks. Sometimes the troughs between two spoil banks were filled with water, and sometimes not.

Overburden: Trough between two Spoil Banks

The more I learned about how machines created this landscape, the better the images became.

Flash or No Flash in Watery Landscape Photographs

Last Friday I hiked Hickory Canyon in Ste. Genevieve County, Missouri. It is a beautiful place, a box canyon of LaMotte sandstone, the first layer of sedimentary rocks in Missouri. These rocks eroded from the igneous base rocks that form places like Taum Sauk Mountain, the highest point in Missouri, and the Silver Mines Shut-in, where the St. Francis River has worn the sedimentary rocks down to the base rocks.

I have been making photographs of Hickory Canyon for six years, hoping to get there when the intermittent waterfall is in full flow. Not yet.

Until last Friday, I made all the images I took away from Hickory Canyon on 4 x 5 film, using available light and a hand held light meter to control the shutter speed and lens opening. I used slow shutter speeds to get small lens openings and great depth of field.

Friday, rather carrying the heavy view camera down into the canyon, I carried a small, digital camera, with auto focus, auto flash, auto shutter speed, auto lens opening. Basically, it’s a no thought camera. Fun and lightweight.

Hickory Canyon, Upper Waterfall

The weather Friday was cool and overcast. The waterfall was drippy, but not in full flow. I experimented with flash and no flash.

Waterfall, No Flash, No Control, Out of Focus

 

 

Using auto everything, the flash wipes away the reflections on the surfaces of the waterfall and adjacent rocks. It’s a bit like using a polarizing filter, which also eliminates reflections. Without the reflections, color is intensified. Without the flash, the shutter speed was slow enough to make the water slide instead of drip and blurs the ripples in the plunge pool.

Hickory Canyon Waterfall, Flash, No Control, Sharp

Hickory Canyon, Moss and Stream, No Flash

Looking straight down at a small drainage, running along the canyon floor, flash flattened the image and, like the waterfall, brushed away the reflections of the sky in the water. Using the flash made for a much less interesting image.

Hickory Canyon, Moss and Stream, Flash

Many ways to look at the Confluence

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Confluence from Jones Park, Mississippi and Missouri

Many years ago, when I was starting out,  a curriculum development company hired me to make photographs of every aspect of the Bus Station for a Teacher’s Art project, to prove that beauty could be found in a conventionally grubby place.

I explored every part of the station, the seating, the food, the gift shop, the buses, the people. I learned that the camera is a wonderful tool for that kind of exploration, that I learned to see things other people miss.

So I was surprised when I ventured to the Confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers a week ago, when I found channel training dikes and sandbars I had never seen before. The river was low and the dikes and sandbars exposed.

Columbia Bottoms Sandbar and Dike

I made photographs from the Jones State Park at the point of Maple Island on the northwest side of the confluence, at the Columbia Bottoms Wildlife Management Area on the southwest side, both in Missouri, and from the Lewis and Clark Historic Site on the Illinois side of the Mississippi.

Jones State Park

At Jones State Park it is possible to stand right at the Confluence with the Missouri, rushing in from the right and  the Mississippi, sliding down from the left. The Missouri bumps into the Mississippi, roiling the waters.

Jones State Park Mud

Jones Park

There are several ways to look at the Confluence from the Columbia Bottoms Wildlife Management Area on different days in different weather.

Confluence, Columbia Bottoms Wildlife Management Area, Flood of 2009

Confluence Columbia Bottoms Wildlife Management Area

Confluence, Columbia Bottoms Sandbar

Confluence, Columbia Bottom Long Dike

Being Still

I had a rant the other day about industrial tourism, being dragged through tourist sites and told what I am seeing or what I am supposed to see.

I learned five years ago, while resting my feet in Italy, that if I sat still, I saw way more than when I was moving.

I have been writing about differences in my approach to photography with a view camera as opposed to my approach using and through the lens camera. With a view camera I select objects in a landscape that I want in my photograph. With a through the lens camera, I put my eye to the view camera and react to what I am seeing, exploring many aspects of the landscape.

Back to my rant: Last Memorial Day I toured Mount Vernon, George Washington’s house with my family, all my family. We shuffled through the house, where each room had a guide who recited the important points in the room over and over and over, like broken records.

The tour over we were free to go out on Washington’s porch overlooking the Potomac and sit. I sat and studied a tree, lifted my camera, and made a photograph. Not very interesting.

Tree at Mount Vernon

I tried cropping the top of the tree. So, so.

Cropped Tree

Then a little girl ran through the picture. Way more interesting.

Little girl running through the scene.

Exercise in Light, Color, and Graphics

Several years ago I spent three months photographing a red shed in a growing wheat field. I quit when the farmer cut the wheat. It was an exercise in color and light and graphics. First, I settled on the composition and the graphics, the simple shape of the shed and where to put the horizon line.

North Prairie: April 8

Second, there was light: the changing color of the shed in different lights, the changing color of the sky at different times of day.

North Prairie: March 22

Then, there were incorporating clouds into the composition.

North Prairie, April 23

When selecting images to use I had to consider what did and didn’t work. Deep shadows of the roof on the front of the shed didn’t work. The shadow changed the composition. It was distracting.

North Prairie, May 15

Every time I made images of the shed, I photographed the east side and then the west side. You can see the pairs at my web site, quintascott.com, where they are for sale at a very reasonable price.

Think like a View Camera; Shoot like a 35mm

When I use a view camera, I carefully select elements in the landscape that I want to put in the image. One reason is it costs about $5/shot to get the image to a contact sheet.

When I use a through-the-lens 35 mm or digital camera, I respond to what I see in the view finder and take lots of shots.

I went down to Fountain Bluff and LaRue Swamp in Southwestern Illinois yesterday to return to explore familiar landscapes in a new way.

As I worked, I said to my self, “Think like a view camera. Select what you want in the image.”

The process made me look harder at what I was shooting. The view the lens digital allowed me to explore more fully what I was shooting.

First Shot of the Big Muddy Wetland

Good. Too many horizonal lines. Too busy.

Second Shot of the Big Muddy Wetland

Better. Slipped in a bit of a diagonal, but still busy.

Third Shot of the Big Muddy Wetland

Best. Not quite so horizontal. Not so busy.

Think like a view camera; explore like a digital.

Negative Space and the Spaces between Objects

Houses and Bench

In Michigan last summer I was learning how to use this computer with a lens attached and doing a lot of walking along the beach and the walks through the community where we stayed.

I always assign myself projects. It gives my work focus. During that week I spent my time photographing the spaces between houses. And at different times of day.

Houses and Beach

My question here is: Was I photographing negative space or just the spaces between houses.

Turning My Through-the-lens digital into a View Camera

Well, that didn’t work.

Whatever made me think that the fancy computer with a lens attached could be made to function like a view camera. First, there is a mirror between me and the readout. Second, I haven’t a clue what else is between me and the readout, which flashes on only after the shutter has been released.

However, I could put my old 200mm Nikor lens on (making it into a 300mm lens)  and make a photographs of the pelicans at Riverlands, across the Mississippi from Alton, Illinois.

Pelicans and one Great Blue Heron at Riverlands

The brown pelican, flapping its wings, is an outlier. If it’s not a juvenile, it belongs down in Louisiana, not in Missouri. Actually, the white ones seem to have become permanent residents, no longer migrating to Canada in the summer and Mississippi and Louisiana in the winter.

Playing with Shapes

Pacifica Diptych

Two years ago I traveled south along the California coast south of San Jose and fell in love with the Pacific Ocean. I made photographs at every pullout.

When I got home, I began playing with the images, playing with the idea of doing diptychs with images that had similar shapes. I came up with this.

View Camera v. Through the Lens

For years I have worked with a view camera for landscape photographs. I saved my work with through the lens cameras for weddings and parties.

In the last year, however, I have worked almost exclusively with the through the lens digital camera for the landscape work. Last Saturday I photographed friends’ 50th Anniversary Party with the digital camera, and handled it very much the same way I would have handled it with a 35mm camera: bang, bang, bang, respond to what I see and capture the moment.

Boy and a Camera

It got me thinking. I approach a photograph more deliberately with the view camera. I select from a scene what I want in the image and position my camera accordingly.

Blue Swallow Motel, Tucumcari, New Mexico

In the Blue Swallow, I wanted the sign and the building and the bus (its blue side) in the image or the stone and the cross in the Katrina image.

Katrina Memorial

Some times it just there in front of me and I just have to decide what to include as in the Blue Mill in Lincoln, Illinois. Again I decided to include the bus, when I could have gone in closer and included only the building.

The Blue Mill, Lincoln, Illinois

Or the arch, the truck and the shed in Bloomington, where it would be less interesting without all three.

Arc de Triomphe, Bloomington, Illinois

It occurred to me to get out my old focusing cloth, put the digital on a  tripod, and start using it like a view camera, which is the way most people use the small digitals.