What were you thinking?

[h2oman]

OK, let's see if this will work. What I have in mind is creating a thread something like Ansel's Examples book. Post one of your most successful images (by whatever measure you choose) or a near-miss. Tell us some things like

*what inspired you to make the photograph? Give any "back story" you wish.

*was there any particular mood or feeling that you were trying to express?

*any special lighting/composition/etc. concerns you addressed.

*tech details only to the extent that they significantly affected the aesthetic you were trying to achieve.

*printing actions/processing used and why.

*your assessment of the result, and/or reactions of others (photographers and non-photographers).

*anything else of relevance to the image that you wish to relate.

My hope is to gain insight in how folks go about creating successful images, in the hopes of improving my own photography.

[Vaughn]

One of my favorite images from my bicycle tour in New Zealand almost 30 years ago...taken about one month into my 6 month trip. The Tolaga Bay Wharf, East Cape, North Island. Gowland 4x5 PocketView with Caltar IIN 150/5.6. TMax100, 16x20 silver gelatin print.

I had camped a couple nights by the wharf in a motor camp. Each night storms came in and I had to find big pieces of driftwood to hold down my tent. But the days were beautiful -- but in the photo, one can see the first clouds coming that will become that night's storm. This was taken after a morning hike out to Cook's Cove with the 4x5.

"Under the pier" images are a dime a dozen and I hesitated to add another to the world's supply. But it is an extremely long pier, and the roughness of the concrete, the shadow line and light drew me to it. I set up the camera and all was looking good, but the tide was quickly moving out, so I moved the camera forward a couple pilings up and quickly reset it, hurrying to keep the shadow line running under the pier from moving too far to the left. I did not get it centered down the middle, but actually prefer that I did not.

I used a red filter. My thought was that since there was so much blue light, the red filter might help to reduce the difference between the values under the pier and the rest of the image...seemed to have worked. I have lots of detail under the pier and not blown out elsewhere. The exposure was f64 (the image restricted any use of camera movements) at 10 seconds, I was looking forward to the waves smoothing out.

Printing was pretty straight forward. A little careful burning of the sky to even it out side to side. I did a little burning in the upper area (upper 1/3 of image). Still plenty of detail and texture in the shadows under the wharf, but I wanted the viewer's eyes slide down to where the shadow line meets the horizon (or up from the bottom to the same place), and not be distracted too much by the detail of the underside of the wharf.

About 2 hours of spotting required due to damage to the negative from high-humidity static discharges while the film was in the film boxes on the bicycle for months on bumpy roads in the rain.

[h2oman]

Thanks for getting this ball rolling, Vaughn. I was beginning to think I wouldn't get any takers - hopefully now that you have taken the plunge, others will too...

I really like the combination of symmetry with just a touch of asymmetry. (I had originally written a bit more, but then realized I don't want this thread to end up being a bunch of critiques by me!)

[Vaughn]

If no one jumps in, I'll do another image tonight or tomorrow. I like your idea for a thread! It is interesting that after 28 years, I can still remember and feel myself standing in the sand under the wharf...though exposure data is written down so I did not have to remember that! This image is also my first published image -- in View Camera magazine way back in the first year or two or three it was published.

[Kirk Gittings]

Up west of Espanola NM, this was an image I worked on literally for decades to get it right. I was told by a local Native American that this was where they believed the Katchinas lived. That made this dramatic landform "come alive" for me and I set out on many occasions over some 25 years trying to get the location and then the right light-finally got it a couple of years ago on the leading edge of a storm. I waited a long time and thought it wasn't going to happen and was about to give up and started to take the camera down but this perfect shaft of light opened up. Phillips 4x5 with 210 Symar S, FP4+, Orange filter, Pyrocat HD, BTZS tubes, normal dev., drum scanned by Lenny and printed from the digital file both inkjet and silver. The burning and dodging is too complex for me for a traditional enlarged print and I knew from the time I made the exposure that I would have to work up a file. Burning skies precisely without darkening an adjacent landform is tricky and un=satisfying usually to me-where as on a file I can build a mask to precisely exclude the landform on virtually a pixel level and burn right up to it without halos or bleed onto the landform.

[sanking]

My example is much less inspiring than the previous one by Kirk, but it should be very clear what I was thinking!!

Sandy

[vinny]

I grew up with pine plantations like this all around and I've always found them very interesting to explore. I get ideas in my head of perfect images in a various settings and sometimes I find them. I had been to this grove once before without a camera and new there was something worth photographing. I happened to return on a day during a sticky snowfall which completely changed the trees. It was so quiet I swear I could hear snowflakes landing. I had walked a considerable distance having a hard time finding something in the chaos of tree trunks when I came to the base of this hill. The image is quite a departure from the low contrast scene. I now have my "pine grove" shot and can move on to something else.
Home made 8x10, fp4 n+1 210mm fujinon


pines in snow by vinnywalsh.com, on Flickr

[David R Munson]

I like this idea. Here goes...


Train, Osaka by David R Munson, on Flickr

I made this image when I was in Osaka, Japan, in 2011. I was on a trip there from Taiwan with my girlfriend and it was a particularly hot, swampy Osaka summer day. We had been out most of the day already, so late afternoon she decided to take a nap and I went out with my 4x5. We were staying in a cheap business hotel, just a simple tatami room with shared bathrooms down the hall and showers on the first floor. It's in Shin-Sekai, one of the more run-down parts of Osaka, but one of my favorites. This was shot just down the street from the entrance to the Tennoji Zoo. I had been wandering for a couple of hours at that point and was on my way back to the hotel, but there was something about this place that I liked. The small road I was on made a T with another smallish road that ran next to stacked train lines and an elevated highway. I've long been interested in what I've come to think of as the spaces/places between things, and this was the sort of non-place I'm often attracted to. The intersection of so many things, but still without any sense of significance and I find that fascinating.

There wasn't anything in particular I was trying to express, and there almost never is for me. I find something, I put it on film, I move on. Any real significance tends to come after the fact. I was in a quiet mood, which I find I have to be to find these places. They're interstitial, we're trained by everyday life to ignore them, so it's easy to pass them by.

I think I made one slightly different composition, and a total of about six exposures, mostly based on train activity on the tracks. I liked this one best, in part because of the gradiation of the train from opaque to almost completely transparent. I like, too, that the more transparent end of the train basically acted like pre-exposure to boost the low values of the concrete structure and changed their relation to what would have otherwise been a continuous curve of near-black underneath the highway.

The shot was made on TXP 320 and the negatives were tray-developed back in Taiwan in HC-110 dilution G. About a year later the thing got scanned, finally, on an Epson V600 (two sections, stitched). Nothing special about anything technical for this photo aside from some of the post-processing. I wanted to bring some value back into the sky, but that meant spending entirely too many hours masking power lines to keep them from going black when bringing down the sky.

I haven't printed the image yet (part of the problem of moving country to country to country), but when I get set up again next year (finally) it'll be one of the first. I spent a lot of time working on it, have spent a lot of time looking at it since then, and it's one of the few images I actually feel satisfied with. It relates something that I've been trying to capture for a long time, and am slowly edging closer to actually understanding how to photograph. I think of it as a signpost of sorts. It's not the destination, but something that signals that I'm on the right path.

[Struan Gray]

One problem I struggle with is how to take and present landscape photographs of the Scottish Highlands without falling into the unspoilt wilderness trap. In most of upland Scotland, the conformity between what the land looks like and Romantic ideas of the uncharted wild is anything but an accident. Most often, it is the direct consequence of deliberate policies of land use and ownership, even if those policies were not explicitly concerned with aesthetics.

I am also trying to find ways to indicate the omnipresent signs of the Highland Clearances in these landscapes, but without being too didactic or strident. This is partly driven by a sense of righteousness (it adds insult to injury to photograph the places people were cleared from and pretend that they are, or ever were, wilderness), but also by the contemporary relevance of land reform in Scotland, as community ownership, conscious attempts at ecological restoration, and new forms of land use in general, take over from the old aristocratic and sporting estates.

The picture shows the back way up Ben Mor Coigach. It has become more popular as a walking route since this photograph was taken, and path is eroding fast and becoming more of a scar. The small township below this rise is now mostly holiday cottages, but it was settled by people cleared from a stunningly beautiful area further north (which is now a mainstay of the calender photographers' unspoilt nature canon). This clearance was not some historical injustice, with redcoats fighting claymores amid the mists of time, but happened recently enough that the grandchildren of those cleared were still alive when I first started visiting the area.

The old summer pastures - truly lovely sheilings in sheltered birchwoods - were denied them, so the poor grazing up in the clouds in my photograph was used. Instead of seasonal transhumance, what is now a somewhat brutal start and end to a good day out in the hills was climbed twice a day to milk and tend the cattle. In spring, after a hard winter with too little fodder to go round, some of the cows would be *carried* up that slope because they were too weak to make it themselves. They would then be tended full time until fit enough to care for themselves.

The hill is now owned by a wildlife trust, who have proved to be more open and generous towards the local community than any of the previous wealthy private owners. I find it odd that my thoughts, and my photography, have been channelled into what are essentially classic socialist or even communist patterns of thought - patterns I have never fully agreed with in my conscious political life, despite instinctive sympathy for the underdog. These patterns, and the language used to describe them, are emotive ones, and tend to induce strong reactions in viewers and readers. My problem, and it's an interesting one to grapple with, is how to force viewers to look at a photo like this without getting all misty-eyed and Romantic, and yet not let them dismiss it as just another outdated Red Polemic - I want to stop ideas becoming mere labels.

I don't expect the photo alone to carry the weight of all this intellectualising, but the background information, and feelings, are important to me in making the photograph, and in deciding to show it to others. Current plans - good intentions - are publication along with a written text, which will be more integrated than a conventional photobook essay, but without turning the photographs into mere illustrations.

[alexn]

With this, I was really wondering how much dynamic tension I could create within a single scene.

98% of my photography being the natural landscape, everything is very mellow, calm & has a sense of flow and harmony. In the urban landscape I really wanted to accentuate the exact opposite of my usual work by focusing on chaos. The architecture of this bridge really lent itself to suiting my vision with this, as none of the bridges lines, framework, support structure or even the direction that it crosses the Brisbane river is square, vertical, or parallel in any sense.

I hoped that by looking directly across the river, skewing the bridge from left to right in the shot, I would start to build that dynamic tension. Once I had the camera leveled off and applied a generous front rise I realized that if I moved as far right on the bridge as possible, and shifted slightly to the right also, I could put the tallest building into already intersecting lines within the bridge structure, making a three-way intersecton of lines, by doing so I also managed to overlay another building with not one, not two, but three of the bridges structures... With all these angles and intersections throughout the image I was really pleased with the overall composition on the ground glass.. the next thought was... What am I trying to say with this image...

In as sense, This image was simply a story of the chaotic city lifestyle. Being shot before sunrise on a sunday I had 0 chance of getting some busy foot traffic across the bridge in the shot, so I thought if I expose it light and bright, the feel of the exposure would contrast with the feel of the composition a juxtaposition that maybe only I would see, but I felt that would add another level of complexity and chaos to underlie that of the compositional tension...

I was really trying to layer many different senses of clashing using contrast, brightness, lines, intersections and asymmetry. All the while one of my golden rules stayed on strong... If you're going to shoot Large Format, your perspective needs to be as neutral as possible.. The buildings MUST remain completely vertical... I wanted the rest of the shot to look as wonky and out of this world as possible, while keeping viewers completely grounded with the sense of perspective (another mental clash in the image, very distorted sense of perspective whilst maintaining very precise perspective in the shot, and proving that with very straight verticals...

I really feel this is one of the first shots on LF that I've produced where the final output 100% matched my original plans (plans made before I even loaded the film into the holder, or drove to the location)