Bayou Impressions
In my previous post, I wrote a bit about my recent trip to Caddo Lake with Kevin Benedict and Josh Krasner. Here's a second of what will eventually be 4 or 5 postable shots I got from that short trip. Shooting from a moving boat, sometimes in low light conditions, with a long lens, turns out to be more challenging than I had expected. I had tried some swamp/bayou shooting in the past so I already expected it to be difficult to find compositions, but just getting a shot that was in focus enough to be usable was more difficult than I thought it would be. What was surprising to all of us was how impressionistic many of the images turned out to be, as in having the look of being painted in the impressionist style.
Images are strange things in that sometimes they trigger memories and associations for us, and those can often be hard to pin down precisely. The second I saw this photo on the larger screen I had an immediate association to Japanese or Chinese landscape art. I'm no art historian, nor do I possess an especially refined knowledge of art, but nonetheless the mental connection was strong. I started to do a little research to see if this was justified at all. I was unable to unearth any Chinese or Japanese landscape paintings that bore any real resemblance to this. However, I did discover that the Chinese landscape painters were among the earliest to focus purely on landscape as an art form rather than just a backdrop for people, and the Chinese ink on paper style influenced Japanese ukiyo-e style, which in turn was a major influence on the European impressionist painting movement. So apparently I wasn't completely unjustified in making that mental association. But if you google ukiyo-e, you'll [possibly] say to yourself "WTF is he smoking? I don't see it at all". I did find this Japanese artist, Koukei Kojima, whose beautiful work I found to bear some resemblance to the feeling of some of the photos I took in the Bayou: www.tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com/2013/02/Koukei...
Regardless of whether this connection to art is justified, I fell in love with the image, which I rarely do, not because it's an especially great image but just because of the impressionistic style that jumped out at me. Don't get me wrong, I do love this image still even after working on it for hours, but I'm fully aware that it's missing some of the elements that maybe classic landscape photographers would prefer to have in their shot. I don't care. I like what I like. I hope you do too but no offense will be taken if you don't.
ps. the mist is fake. mostly.
Bayou Impressions
In my previous post, I wrote a bit about my recent trip to Caddo Lake with Kevin Benedict and Josh Krasner. Here's a second of what will eventually be 4 or 5 postable shots I got from that short trip. Shooting from a moving boat, sometimes in low light conditions, with a long lens, turns out to be more challenging than I had expected. I had tried some swamp/bayou shooting in the past so I already expected it to be difficult to find compositions, but just getting a shot that was in focus enough to be usable was more difficult than I thought it would be. What was surprising to all of us was how impressionistic many of the images turned out to be, as in having the look of being painted in the impressionist style.
Images are strange things in that sometimes they trigger memories and associations for us, and those can often be hard to pin down precisely. The second I saw this photo on the larger screen I had an immediate association to Japanese or Chinese landscape art. I'm no art historian, nor do I possess an especially refined knowledge of art, but nonetheless the mental connection was strong. I started to do a little research to see if this was justified at all. I was unable to unearth any Chinese or Japanese landscape paintings that bore any real resemblance to this. However, I did discover that the Chinese landscape painters were among the earliest to focus purely on landscape as an art form rather than just a backdrop for people, and the Chinese ink on paper style influenced Japanese ukiyo-e style, which in turn was a major influence on the European impressionist painting movement. So apparently I wasn't completely unjustified in making that mental association. But if you google ukiyo-e, you'll [possibly] say to yourself "WTF is he smoking? I don't see it at all". I did find this Japanese artist, Koukei Kojima, whose beautiful work I found to bear some resemblance to the feeling of some of the photos I took in the Bayou: www.tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com/2013/02/Koukei...
Regardless of whether this connection to art is justified, I fell in love with the image, which I rarely do, not because it's an especially great image but just because of the impressionistic style that jumped out at me. Don't get me wrong, I do love this image still even after working on it for hours, but I'm fully aware that it's missing some of the elements that maybe classic landscape photographers would prefer to have in their shot. I don't care. I like what I like. I hope you do too but no offense will be taken if you don't.
ps. the mist is fake. mostly.