My Blue Period
Last month I talked about my use of intense colors and ‘false’ colors. Now I want to talk about simple color.
I didn’t just push Ektachrome two or three stops; I tortured it. Sometimes I developed high-speed film in C-100 color negative developer or Rodinal black and white developer. Other times I flashed it with yellow or blue lights halfway through development. That process is called the Sabbatier effect and sometimes also called solarization. Those were some of the ways I created the colors that I did. And almost every photo I ever took was backlighted.
I photographed this image which is titled Simplicity—Blue and Black in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, through a dense blue filter. The technique I used is called panning. Panning means you move your camera to follow the object in motion and expose the image at a slow shutter speed typically about 1/30 of a second. This photograph’s web page is here.
This photograph was part of the same series.
Almost 30 years ago in San Francisco at a Seals and Crofts concert I saw an amazing 13-minute film during the intermission. I never forgot it because that short film became an influence on my methods of photography. The film was called Pas de Deux. This is how the Canadian National Film Board describes it: “Norman McLaren takes a look at the choreography of ballet, with cinema effects that are all that you would expect from this master of improvisation in music and illustration. By exposing the same frames as many as ten times, the artist creates a multiple image of the ballerina and her partner (Margaret Mercier and Vincent Warren). A bare, black stage and back-lit figures, plus the remote, airy music of panpipes, produce a quiet and detachment similar to that of Lines. A film without words.”
You can find a few videos of McLaren’s films on YouTube. Enter Norman McLaren in the Search box. I also recommend the video titled Phantasy.
Here are two frames that I captured from Pas de Deux. I replaced their black backgrounds with blue and slightly sharpened the dancers.
For me, watching those videos is another form of meditation. They bestow peace, clarity, and beauty.
The simple act of stopping and looking at the beauty around us can be prayer. — Patricia R. Barrett, The Sacred Garden
The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. — Anne Frank
Simplicity without a name
Is free from all external aim.
With no desire, at rest and still,
All things go right as of their will.
Tao, Tao Te Ching (J. Legge, tr)
Related posts
Light Birds (video)
Sanctify thy heart, illumine thy soul, and sharpen thy sight, that thou mayest perceive the sweet accents of the Birds of Heaven and the melodies of the Doves of Holiness warbling in the Kingdom of eternity, and perchance apprehend the inner meaning of these utterances and their hidden mysteries.
– Bahá’u’lláh, Gems of Divine Mysteries
Those evocative words superimposed on one of my bird photographs from Golden Gate Park open my first ever video. The images are set to music with “Bird,” a track from Susan Lewis Wright’s album of the same name. I provided the photographs for the album’s first and back covers. You can find the album here.
View my four-minute video on YouTube. My purpose in making this short video was the same as my purpose in making all my photographs and digital media paintings. The Purpose is always to point to the ultimate Creative Word as revealed by a Manifestation of God. In this age that Manifestation is Bahá’u’lláh.
In the words of Joseph Campbell:
Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object.
I rejoice to hear that thou takest pains with thine art, for in this wonderful new age, art is worship. The more thou strivest to perfect it, the closer wilt thou come to God. What bestowal greater than this, that one’s art should be even as the act of worshipping the Lord? That is to say, when thy fingers grasp the paint brush, it is as if thou wert at prayer in the Temple. – ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration. — Marc Chagall
Tags: Baha'i, Birds, digital media paintings, Golden Gate Park, Joseph Campbell, Marc Chagall, Religion, Susan Lewis WrightRelated posts
There Must be Some Light in There?
I search for quotes from the Bahá’í sacred writings that I feel will complement my images. As I wrote yesterday, “Sometimes I have a specific passage or concept from the Bahá’í writings in my mind when I go out to take photographs. More frequently the assigned titles are afterthoughts.”
A few months ago I wrote about the flood damage that destroyed 15 years of my early photographic work and left only about 400 slides that were recoverable. The rest which numbered over 1500 slides were permanently destroyed under a deep layer of silt and sewage. Some of my photos suffered more than damage; they were simply poorly exposed or uninteresting like this one.
This image shows a detail section of one of my photographs after I scanned it. My dedicated film scanner has the ability to suppress most scratches and dust marks. It does that by performing an infrared scan of the film after scanning its three color layers. The scanner can then clearly detect dirt and scratch marks and interpolate data from surrounding areas to fill them in. The scanner cannot do anything about larger blemishes like the mildew spot shown in the upper left corner of this image. You can see two other damaged spots also.
This photograph was cross processed. That means that it was a roll of 35mm slide film that I developed as if it were a negative. I also used a green filter to enhance the effect. The negative or opposite of green is magenta, thus the developed color. I was able to invert it in Photoshop and carefully brush out the damaged portions. I also replaced the resulting greenish sky with blue. The scanned image had a caption that I had sandwiched onto it in a slide copier. The original uncaptioned image was not retrievable because of the flood. Unfortunately this one suffered some fading and had lost its original vibrancy.
I was not attempting to create a realistic image. As always, it is the color intensity that fascinates me. See My Perception of Color and the article that follows it, Flowers on the Sun. I don’t consider this a photograph any longer because it is still not a very interesting one. However, it makes an interesting background for one of my typographic designs which is a quote from the writings of the Baha’i Faith.
This is a scan of a damaged and very underexposed bird image. Almost all the bird photographs that I made were at the same spot in Golden Gate Park at Mallard Lake near 25th and Lincoln Avenues. The composition was uninteresting and the red detail was difficult to bring out. Nevertheless I was unwilling to discard it.
Simply increasing contrast and brightness doesn’t really work. That results in two-dimensional bright yellow birds and a dull picture. What I really wanted was a sense of motion and dramatic color.
This is closer to what I visualized when I photographed the image.
“This is the day on which the Bird of Utterance hath warbled its melody upon the branches, in the name of its Lord, the God of Mercy. Blessed is the man that hath, on the wings of longing, soared towards God, the Lord of the Judgment Day.” — Bahá’u’lláh
This image was photographed through a very dark red filter but on a brightly lit path. There was no shadow detail to recover. The slide also had some large areas of damage in different parts that the scanner could not repair. I am still working on this image.
“By Him Who is the Truth! I fear no tribulation in His path, nor any affliction in My love for Him. Verily God hath made adversity as a morning dew upon His green pasture, and a wick for His lamp which lighteth earth and heaven.”
– Bahá’u’lláh
Related posts
Blessed Is The Spot
Blessed is the spot, and the house, and the place, and the city, and the heart, and the mountain, and the refuge, and the cave, and the valley, and the land, and the sea, and the island, and the meadow where mention of God hath been made, and His praise glorified. — Baha’u'llah
Bahá’u'lláh has portrayed a fascinating spectacle in the spiritual worlds of God where the holy souls and the Concourse on High are circling around any spot on this earth where the believers are engaged in praise and glorification of God. — Adib Taherzadeh, The Revelation of Baha’u'llah
"Blessed is the spot" (words from a prayer revealed by Baha'u'llah
My second video, Land and Seascapes has been uploaded to YouTube. It celebrates a beautiful metaphor written by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. I used photographs that I made in Northern California when I lived there. Scenes include Golden Gate Park, Crystal Springs Lake in San Mateo County, Big Sur, and Carmel. Here are some of the images contained in the video. The background music is Sheep May Safely Graze by J.S. Bach. I found a page on Wikipedia where you can download public domain performances.
Tags: Adib Taherzadeh, Baha'i, Crystal Springs Lake, Golden Gate Park, Photography, Religion
