We know the old chestnuts. To avoid camera shake use a tripod. To make a car in a photo look like it’s moving, swing to create a blur behind it. Or just add motion blur in Photoshop.
But blur is more than a mistake or a technique.
Because motion is an expression of time, Time is equally the subject. We actually look different in different windows of time. A person in a nanosecond window is hard-edged and distilled. A person in a two-second window is feathery and blended with the environment.
By opening up this window through a photograph, I learn to see myself as less rigid, more flowing and connected to our world. I begin to perceive the four-dimensional cloud we create. I see the literal mixing of our clouds with those around us, and the democracy of space that we inhabit fleetingly.
I sometimes see people as like a series of gopher tunnels or worm holes in wood, the twisting tube of where we’ve been. Through the Spirit Photo series I’m seeing a subtler, mistier and more mysterious vision of our tunnels through time.
In my glory days I hitch-hiked about 30,000 miles throughout Canada and the US. A favourite flavour of ride was the back of a pickup. For hours I could watch the past landscape slipping away, peripheral images blasting past me into clarity then slowly receding.
The best effect was when the truck stopped. Then the landscape would seem to come rushing back toward me - even my feet seems to leap toward my face.
This is because a filter in my brain, like yours, compensates for continuous movement so that we can perceive things a little easier. Apparently, without this filter, the blur would be harder to understand.
My camera has a motion-stabilizer that can compensate for a certain amount of camera shake, but it loses its mind when I take longer exposures in lower light. What appears in the resulting images is a superb mix of blur and resolution.
I’m playing now with the relationship between movement of the subject and my own trajectory. When I move, points of light produce jagged parallel lines across my images. The pattern they produce triggers a filter in our minds that can quickly dismiss the image as simply Bad. Extreme stillness and precise focus is often a benchmark of high quality photography, such as the landscapes and still life images of Edward Weston and folks working in large format photography.
In rarer cases, if the mind is open, these patterns can actually send a message about the subjectivity of a photograph. The remind us that the image doesn’t exist apart from the observer, and underline that the relationship of motion is an integral part of perception. You don’t see a lot of paintings that communicate this relationship. This is one case where intentionally taking a ‘bad’ photo can tell us more about our subjective reality than the perfect one.
An atom is a fuzzy cloud of possible paths for electrons around a simmering throb of other events with smaller radii.
Someone saying it this may seem a self-inflated whir of concepts around a relatively shallow core. But it’s a way to understand ourselves, if that’s what we want.
In low light a moving person may appear as multiple ghosts moving along several planes at once. The legs swinging like pendulums criss-cross and create diamonds where they superimpose. The three way pivoting of elbow, shoulder and torso create a picture like petals of a flower.
The cloud of movements we make parallels the cloud of notions that steam around us. Our actions ghost and overlap, so that what people perceive of us is the overlaps our ideas create that differentiate us from the next atom of a person.
Bowfest is the end of summer blowout on the field by the marina in Snug Cove on Bowen Island. I’ve lived on Bowen for six years and know a lot of the people here, so there’s a lot of ‘hi, how are you?’ to do walking through the crush of people.
Knowing people is a minor excuse to take a candid photo during a festival, at least according to me. This year I took photos of friends and other characters in Snug Cove during Bowfest. It’s a simple flavour of island living on the coast of British Columbia. See the slideshow by clicking the Bowfest thumbnail on the home page.
We know that time and light are part of a continuum. If we extend a photographic exposure, the hard edges of the strobing points of reality begin to blend. End-of-day photography produces a cascade of changing light exposing our relationship to time.
I spent the summer and early fall imaging people in front of bright backgrounds, usually water or sky. I wanted to reduce the invasion of privacy that a candid photograph brings. I found that crisp-edged silhouets could say so much by taking away detail that they became and end in themselves. The people photographed rarely knew or had the opportunity to react, and the resulting images are anonymous.
As light changes colour and intensity around sunset, the edges begin to blur. The camera reveals different how the human form appears from differing perspectives of time. It also comments on the motion of the photographer and the thinking of the digital light sensor.
In bright light our awareness strobes in such as way that a crisp photo seems most real, and blurred images seem flawed or incoherent. When I encounter small animals like squirrels and insects, whose movements are so quick and lives so short, it occurs to me that the clock rate of their perception may be quite different. Other witnesses like trees and stones, if they could see, would possibly experience us as blurs rather than distinct forms. And so does the camera.
I’ve become interested in how much of the moving human form remains visible during longer exposures. In some images, only the body parts that overlap one another over successive split-seconds register, and the remaining parts blur into the background. We appear ghostly and fleeting.
Fading light creates several phases. In one phase outlines remain crisp. In another the ragged edges of figure and ground overlap. In phase three people seem to morph into otherworldly four-dimensional creatures. Finally the light becomes so weak that under low lamplight they appear as no more than faint clouds of colour.
There may come a day when we explore other worlds, or rediscover our own. We may encounter beings who look much like the entities in these photographs, and maybe we will recognize them as simply living at a different speed.
There are better cameras. The crystal clarity and impressive size of large format images grabs the attention and rewards examination of the details. Movie cameras capture and manipulate whole sequences of time. Scanning tunneling microscope turn ticks into tyrannosaurs. But my beloved brush is the 35mm single lens reflex.
The obvious attraction is it’s flexibility and weight. Once you add extra lenses, tripod, filters and other gear to a camera bag, it already has the potential to drag your shoulder out of its socket. Large format and technical cameras are basically a hassle to carry around.
The 35-mil is pretty discrete with a slightly longer lens. The smaller parallax (?) cameras are even less obvious, but they’re also a little like reading a matchbox-sized bible, and I’ve never been a fan of the offset viewfinder.
35-mil images can’t blow up as large with impressive clarity, though programs like Genuine Fractals and the fact that people generally have to stand back from an image to take it all in anyway dull the pain of this a little.
They aren’t cheap, especially if you want professional quality gear. So what ends up happening is you make sacrifices somewhere; lower lens quality, softer body, smaller prints. But you could also say how dismaying it was the Louis Armstrong couldn’t sing like Pavarotti.
I’ve had plenty of disappointments with 35-mil images, usually because I wanted them to be something they weren’t likely to become. When I embrace their immediacy, flaws and flexibility, I’m always reassured that, like the sax player who prefers baritone to alto, this is my natural instrument.
Ultimately it’s more satisfying to put up a few images and get a big reaction than to sit on a thousand unseen ones.
In the past year I’ve been exhibiting mostly concrete images of people in situations that convey some type of variable meaning.
I’ve always been attracted to pure abstraction as well, which hardly overlaps the first group of images in any way. Some are distortions of recognizable things, others are non-referential and can only be decoded as patterns of light or a Rorschach blot that can be developed in the mind.
Meanwhile, I’ve stumbled into the meeting place of these two at dusk, where people blur into abstraction.
Added to these topics are images of nature, numbers, parallel lines and other subjects, that I’ve assembled over the years. I find myself poised to depart in several directions, like bees from a hive.
I’m guessing this isn’t a good way to move forward in a coherent direction. I’d like to do more exhibitions, but take greater risks with the imagery.
How can an octopus decide which is the best foot to put forward, without disappearing in a cloud of ink?
From December 7th to 16th, the Exposure Gallery in Vancouver will present its Winter Salon show. I’ll have two images on view there. Here’s the first one.
I’m not going to tell you the name or what I think it means. Why don’t you tell me?
As this weblog is very new, I don’t expect a flood of response around the posting date - but even years from now I’d appreciate your view.
Cities in ancient civilisations featured giant statues of gods and kings in their town squares. The subliminal effect was that as people led their lives at the feet of the giants they were influenced to believe that they were politically and spiritually puny.
Statues, signs and symbols around us that we don’t even consciously ponder are absorbed into our psyche. I think these influence how we see the world and ourselves, intuitively and irrationally. What they mean for us is subjective, and the subjectivity of meaning is something that interests me.
Read the rest of this entry »
Immediately after sniping at Black and White as a medium of expression, I had visions of penguins, zebras, orcas, polar bears and Henri Cartier Breson.
There is a lot I like about BW. The main thing is the huge number of gripping images that I grew up with and that stagger me today. You can argue with the concept of a platypus until you actually meet one, and then the fact of its present beauty overcomes the abstract of its contrast with colour.
So, I repent.