Through a Scanner Brightly – Part 4
The Writings of the Baha’i faith say: “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. –Bahá’u'lláh
One of the images I scanned during the past four weeks was processed in a special way. I took the photograph through a deep magenta filter. Although it was 35 mm slide film I developed the film as if it were a negative. The photographer’s term for that is cross processing. Insofar as visible light is concerned magenta and green are opposites. This is a detail of the image as it looked in the preview scan.
Similar to most of my other older images, this slide also had considerable damage in addition to fading and color degradation. The hexagons are an effect of lens flare which comes from pointing toward the light source without using a lens shade to reduce flare (it was deliberate). I configured the Silverfast scanning program to restore fading and colors. The end result revealed colors that I had only imagined but didn’t really exist in the original photograph. This shows the first glimmerings of sunrise near Crystal Springs Lake 15 miles south of San Francisco.
Say: O friends! Drink your fill from this crystal stream that floweth through the heavenly grace of Him Who is the Lord of Names.
Bahá’u'lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u'lláh
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
This detailed section shows what looks very similar to a painter’s brush strokes. It is, in fact, an unchanged and unretouched part of the original photograph. I developed a technique for doing this in the camera, the darkroom, and sometimes with the aid of an optical slide copier that I built out of spare parts. It was in the mid-1970’s when digital image processing did not even exist.
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
O thou dear one! Impoverish thyself, that thou mayest enter the high court of riches; and humble thy body, that thou mayest drink from the river of glory, and attain to the full meaning of the poems whereof thou hadst asked.
Thus it hath been made clear that these stages depend on the vision of the wayfarer. In every city he will behold a world, in every Valley reach a spring, in every meadow hear a song. But the falcon of the mystic heaven hath many a wondrous carol of the spirit in His breast, and the Persian bird keepeth in His soul many a sweet Arab melody; yet these are hidden, and hidden shall remain.
Bahá’u'lláh, The Seven Valleys
This image felt dull to me so I had almost discarded it. Its title is Angels on a Ladder of Light.
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
I rescanned it last week to restore its original colors. It still needs a little work but now it’s a little closer to what I wanted to convey.
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
By pure serendipity I often come home with photographs that have exactly nine things in them, birds, flowers, trees or people. It’s actually just a fortuitous accident when it happens. Here is a recent photograph I took of nine birds.
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
Say: Through the ascendancy of God, the All-Knowing, the Incomparable, the Luminary of divine understanding hath, in this day, risen from behind the veil of the spirit, and the birds of every meadow are intoxicated with the wine of knowledge and exhilarated with the remembrance of the Friend. Well is it with them that discover and hasten unto Him!
Bahá’u'lláh, Tabernacle of Unity
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My Perception of Color
Except for most of the portraits, the pictures of Akka and other specifically Bahá’í-themed images almost all the images on my website are ‘false color.’ In all but half a dozen cases I created those images in camera using conventional film emulsions. To a limited degree and in a sufficiently detached or partially dissociated state, those were the colors that I really saw. I used multiple optical filters and push-processing to force film to show what I saw in strongly trans-illuminated scenes of nature. My slide copier consisted of an old Nikon F2 body, a Nikon tilt-shift bellows and a 55mm Macro lens. A dichroic color enlarger head provided a very flexible and adjustable light source. I had little need to use any other filters. Nowadays it’s very difficult and expensive to obtain slide duplicating film and even more difficult to process it yourself. You have to buy enormous quantities of film and chemicals which isn’t practical unless you’re running a film lab.
Once I began to do digital film scanning and use Photoshop I was able to re-imagine colors more easily. A consequence was that I totally lost some ability to ever see nature that way again in reality. You could say that technology gave me something wonderful but it also took away something even more wonderful. Last week on an email list someone speculated that it’s possible I’ll grow in perception and will integrate technology and free form analog photography into something harmonious. I feel that will become absolutely necessary because consumer film is essentially obsolete. In my effort for integration I’ve spent a lot of time the past few months re-imagining some of my older images. I upgraded to better image processing tools and learned how to eliminate digital noise, scanning artifacts, and grain from my film scans. By doing that I was able to make color gradations smoother and was more satisfied that the images conveyed what I really saw. It’s more accurate to say I conveyed the colors that I felt.
Everything in my Web galleries is scanned directly from film at very high resolutions which creates files up to 350 MB in size. . The sad part is –as an artist, I mean– is that I have to reduce them by a factor greater than 10,000:1 for display on the Web. Compared to the real image, it’s like showing my work to people across the street …behind a window …in the rain!
This is an example of a throwaway image that I recreated in the slide copier. The original shot had little point of interest and the composition was haphazard because it contained distracting elements.
By manipulating the image and exposing it three times I created this image.
This is an example of a heavily filtered image that I made in camera. I wasn’t pleased with the image’s colors – yet.
I reprocessed it in Photoshop with Kodak’s Restoration of Color (ROC) plug-in. The ROC plug-in can’t reconstruct real life colors from a false color heavily filtered photograph. After the first pass I used a pen tablet and digital brushes to create the final image. I call it Near the Edge of the Kingdom.
The final example is a “real image” which again was uninteresting but had potential.
This is one of three variants that I made of the image. It has what I call emotional color. The other variants have similar colors but more subtle contrast. Images are often more interesting when the light source is near the upper left so this one was rotated horizontally.
I cropped and used the central portion of this image including the prismatic burst rotated 30 degrees on the birth announcement for one of my children with this quote: “Every bestowal emanates from Thee; every benediction is Thine. Thou art mighty. Thou art powerful. Thou art the Giver, and Thou art the Ever-Bounteous.” — ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (Baha’i Prayers)
The proper artistic response to digital technology is to embrace it as a new window on everything that’s eternally human, and to use it with passion, wisdom, fearlessness and joy. – Ralph Lombreglia, in Atlantic Unbound Tags: Artist, Baha'i, bird photography, digital technology, image processing, image processing tools, Kodak, Nikon
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Through a Scanner Brightly – Part 3
The Baha’i Writings say of this day:
“By the righteousness of Mine own Self! Great, immeasurably great is this Cause! Mighty, inconceivably mighty is this Day! Blessed indeed is the man that hath forsaken all things, and fastened his eyes upon Him Whose face hath shed illumination upon all who are in the heavens and all who are on the earth.”
– Baha’u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u'llah
Someone wrote me just yesterday: “The use of light in your pictures of birds makes me feel that I have stepped into the Abha Kingdom.”
The translation of the word Abha is The Most Glorious, or more simply the metaphysical world, the world of the soul, what many people refer to conventionally as “heaven.”
I was deeply moved and grateful for their reaction to my photographs. The entire purpose of my bird images is precisely what they stated, namely a feeling, however inadequate, of holiness that words cannot convey. The photography process itself is a meditative act for me. I often achieve a semi-detached mental state when I’m using Photoshop. The process is very abstracted because much of the time I’m only looking at a tiny portion of an image. Thus all I see at that moment are a microcosm of subtle shades and tones that are essentially formless. It’s a contemplative process that paradoxically requires both concentration and a release of concentration to whatever flows naturally and easily. That is the meditative aspect of image processing for me. Because I use a pressure sensitive cordless pen instead of a conventional mouse, my movements and actions are very natural and easy.
As an example I might be looking at something like this:
Here’s the entire image (greatly reduced):
Although conventional wisdom tells us to have the sun over our shoulders when we take pictures I do just the opposite of that. I let sunlight pour through the birds and aim right for the light source. Technically that’s called transillumination or more prosaically just backlighting.
It’s the song that is really important here much more than any of the images. Beauty comes from the music written and sung by Susan Lewis Wright.
Of course, my signature line sums my purpose up very succinctly. It sums up the purpose every Baha’i has when they create music, images, poetry or other writing, and arts or crafts:
“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.”
– Joseph Campbell
“Blessed are those who have fixed their gaze on the realm of glory and have followed the commandments of the Lord of Names. Blessed is he who in the days of God will engage in handicrafts. This is a bounty from God, for in this Most Great Dispensation it is acceptable in the sight of God for man to occupy himself in a trade which relieveth him of depending upon charity. The craft of every craftsman is regarded as worship.”
– Bahá’u'lláh, from a Tablet – translated from the Persian
“O thou servant of the One true God! In this universal dispensation man’s wondrous craftsmanship is reckoned as worship of the Resplendent Beauty. Consider what a bounty and blessing it is that craftsmanship is regarded as worship. In former times, it was believed that such skills were tantamount to ignorance, if not a misfortune, hindering man from drawing nigh unto God. Now consider how His infinite bestowals and abundant favours have changed hell-fire into blissful paradise, and a heap of dark dust into a luminous garden.
“It behoveth the craftsmen of the world at each moment to offer a thousand tokens of gratitude at the Sacred Threshold, and to exert their highest endeavour and diligently pursue their professions so that their efforts may produce that which will manifest the greatest beauty and perfection before the eyes of all men.”
“Selections from the Writings of `Abdu’l-Bahá”
This is part three of a series of four articles. Click to read Part 1 or Part 2.
Tags: Baha'i, bird photography, image processing, Joseph Campbell, Photography, Religion, Susan Lewis Wright
