Tag Archives: Photoshopped

Tethered

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Scene from the reenactment of the Battle of the Little Bighorn

Night was just beginning to fall. The sun was at the edge of the land casting its golden light horizontally across the prairie lighting up one side of everything in sight. In moments it will have dropped behind the low hills and darkness would take over for its share of the daily cycle. Calm was setting in and there were the final sounds of the day shutting down. A tethered horse knickered nearby. The muffled sounds of people getting their fires going in preparation for fixing supper. The constant background sound of the Little Bighorn river gently flowing past. Soon everyone will have completed their chores, checking on their stock, making certain things were buttoned up and secure. There was just enough time to wander the edges of the camp and take a few pictures. It was the end of a very good day.

The setting was the final night of the reenactment of the Battle of the Little Bighorn at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument near Crow Agency, Montana. Every year reenactors recreate the battle using people from the Crow tribe and groups like the 7th Cavalry reenactors and others to replay the battle that never changes. It is a spectacular event with Indians riding bareback amid the swirling dust, horse herds being run thru the viewing areas, the 7th cavalry drilling in formation, or fighting for their lives in the battle.

Even though the battle reoccurs each day of the event, it is an incredible display of emotion and historical accuracy, at least as much as it can be without the loss of life, on the very ground the original battle took place or as close to it as possible. The actual place where Custer and the men of the 7th fell is in the National monument itself. However the reenactment takes place literally yards from the edge of monument. Passions run high as all participants get in the spirit of the reenactment. Then at the end of day things quietly revert back to present day and the time travel is finished for the day.

Tethered is an image taken at just that perfect moment between the ending of the light of the Golden hour and the coming night. The image of course has been photoshopped and presented in its new form without apology for its reinterpretation, showing how memories can be presented as fine art and also as my personal connection and interpretation of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. After all an image is just an image regardless of how it came to be created and once created becomes art in its final form. And as always art is in the eye of the beholder.

Nature’s Calligraphy

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As you drive along the Mississippi river near Lacrosse, Wisconsin you will pass along the blue stone cliffs that line the river bank. There is barely room for the highway between the cliffs and the river’s edge. You must stop and get out of your car to see the cliffs in their full glory.

The foliage that grows on the cliff face ranges from full-grown trees to shrubs and small plants, and were carefully chosen by nature to fit harmoniously into this picture. Being Wisconsin and being Fall every single color imaginable was trotted out for your amazement. For those among you who have to say “Those colors aren’t real. He must have Photoshopped that.” You’re right I did. I didn’t add any colors but I sure as hell enhanced that red. It was more than red enough but there was something about the way it contrasted with the blue of the stone that I loved, so I kept bringing out more red and more red, and more until there you have it. Red. Like tons of it. I was younger then. And besotted with the incredible range of colors that are so different from my home in the west. I take full responsibility for it. So to those of you purists out there who feel somewhat vindicated that you called me on the red and some of the other colors too, I can only say ” Yeah, I did it, Deal with it.” If you can’t and it just makes you crazy I say “OK you’ve made your point . Move along here. There’s nothing more to see. Thanks for stopping by.”

After looking at this picture for years, it was actually taken back in 2003, it dawned on me that it looked like calligraphy. The red plants forming the Kanji that says something undecipherable. A message from Mother Nature herself. Maybe it says something like “Beauty resides here, look and be in awe” or perhaps “Red is the color of love and life and good fortune. Be at one with it.”  or possibly “Return Hotel Bicycles to rack on Red street, or Tremble and Be Ashamed.” We’ll never know as this particular phrase has never been translated. I’m going with the first one, I think, the beauty resides here, one. That works the best for me.

Breakin’ The Rules

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BreakingTheRules7545Click to Enlarge

Breaking the rules. Breaking all of them. Photographically that is. That’s what I do anyway. Break ’em, worry about them later. This image breaks almost every rule of photography there is, yet it is one of my most favorite images that I have ever taken. I say almost every rule only because I know there’s a rule somewhere I’ve forgotten but I know I broke it anyway. This was not a premeditated decision on my part. I didn’t decide to fly in the face of convention just to be a rebel it was more along the lines of, I want this picture and I’m going to get it even if it means breaking the rules.

If you Google ‘Photography Rules’ you will come up with about 105,000,000 hits for rules. That’s a lot of damn rules. Granted not all 105,000,000 hits are different but even so, Geezum Plutz that’s a lot of rules. That’s one thing we do pretty good as a species, making rules. Here are just a few examples of collections of rules.

10 Top Photography Composition Rules

5 Easy Composition Guidelines

18 Composition Rules For Photos

The 10 Rules of Photo Composition (and why they work)

9 Top Photography Composition Rules You Need To Know

And there are folks out there that will tell you “Don’t you go breaking any of those rules.” if you want to be a photographer. You can’t be in our photo show if you don’t follow these rules. “Hey Bozo, I saw your work. You need to follow the rules, man.” Seems like everyone is an expert when it comes to rules, especially the guys that make them.

There are real photographers out there looking at this image right now that are gnashing their teeth and raining curses down on my head for deliberately showing this bollixed up, rule breaking image as if I had a right to. Which I do by the way. I’m one of those artist types that believe once an image is completed it exists. It doesn’t matter how it was made, or what was done to it afterwards, or whether it was Photoshopped or not, an image is an image and it stands on its own for better or worse. You can shoot it holding the camera behind your back and jumping up and down, or put little red hearts all over it, or draw, paint or step on it with muddy boots then sign your name. It doesn’t matter, an image once it’s finalized and put on display is there and it’s up to the viewer to figure out whether they like it or not. Or even consider whether it is art or not.

Look in the back of any photography magazine on the newsstand and you will find dozens of highly trained, apparently successful photographers willing to take you on workshops and teach you how to make beautiful pictures by sticking to all the many rules in force that will make you a successful photographer too. Unfortunately I’ve always had a certain degree of difficulty in following rules. Some of them anyway, but especially those that say you need to create in a certain way. I guess it’s because that I, like Mick Jagger, don’t keep regular hours, so my outlook is different from most.

So getting back to the picture, “What’s wrong with it?” you ask. It’s an image of a wolf swimming across the Yellowstone river late in the evening in mid-may back in 2006. The sky was overcast, it had been raining just moments ago and this wolf was one of the dominant members of a pack in the Hayden valley. They had killed an elk on a small tributary called Alum creek which feeds into the Yellowstone and were gorging themselves until they could barely move. She, this was a female, was the first to leave because being the alpha she had fed first and was ready to return to the den which was located on the other side of the river. The problem and the first of many rules that were broken to get this image, was that she was way too far away for this to be any kind of decent shot. The rule says you have to be close and fill the frame with as much wolf as will fit in it to make this any kind of acceptable picture. The wolf of course didn’t know she was breaking the rule and I couldn’t get any closer before she jumped in the river and began her swim across it. I said the hell with it and took the picture anyway.

My equipment then was somewhat limited. The camera was a 6mp Nikon D70, a woefully under-powered camera by todays standards, and my lens was an inexpensive telephoto which was all I could afford at that time. There’s another rule shot to hell so to speak. Good photographers always use the best most expensive equipment available.  NO exceptions. The limits of the equipment I had, because of its measly megapixel count, meant that when it was time to print this image it wouldn’t be adequate to be enlarged so that you could see the wolf in all it’s perfectly focused clarity. They are absolutely right, those rule makers. It is kind of blurry and out of focus looking because I did stretch the limits of the image and now it has a kind of painterly pastel looking feel to it, not at all what a good photo should be, but I like it. Maybe you do too, or not.

 I remember exactly how things were the day I took this image. How cold it was, how the air smelled like damp grass, the sounds of the river flowing by and the huffing of the wolf as she swam across the widest part of the river she could have chosen to take. However there is a characteristic that rule makers leave out and that is that intangible feeling one gets when you see an image that you like regardless of whether or not it fits into the Follow the rules category. There have been an awful lot of pretty good painters that didn’t follow the rules, and people tend  to think very highly of them, myself being one of them.That’s what makes breaking the rules work for me. Had I followed them I wouldn’t have taken this picture and I wouldn’t have this image to remember the experience or to share with you, my friends. If you ask me I’m going to tell you to break the rules, break ’em all. It’s worth it.

So as far as rules go I’ll probably continue to break them, as the image is more important to me than various opinions. In case you’re wondering I do take technically good images where many of the rules are followed but I am never one to shy away from gathering what I see and putting it into a viewfinder regardless of what the rules say, after all art and the image are what I most care about.

Just for grins I’m posting the original image below, as it was taken straight out of the camera, to show you how and where the image above came from.

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