I'm currently wrapping up the photography for a project on ephemeral and intermittent streams in southern Ontario. These are tiny, nameless streams that flow only part of the year, typically only after a good rainfall. Most people don't know how important they are for keeping larger streams and rivers flowing. In this project, I'm trying to make people more conscious about these little streams and why they matter.
The photograph I'm talking about in this post is actually showing a "permanent" stream. It has a name -- Hanlon's Creek -- and it flows year-round. I need a few pictures like this in the final project to help viewers understand the difference between streams that flow only part of the year (ephemeral and intermittent) and permanent streams. Hanlon's Creek gets some of its water from intermittent and ephemeral streams, but it runs year-round because its bed is located below the water table. This picture will be one of approximately 40 in the finished project.
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The photographs in this project are not meant to be documentary. Rather, I'm trying to make pictures that bridge art and science. As a group, I want the photos to be science-informed. However, the art leads -- so I need the photos to be able to work as art first. I want my love of this landscape, and how I feel about these little streams, to affect the viewer on an emotional level. As an extra challenge, the pictures need to be accessible. I need them to be the entry point for conversations about the importance of these little overlooked streams. Therefore, in this project I have to tamp down my preference for more abstract images and create pictures that are easier for people to engage with and understand. They won't engage if they can't understand what they're looking at.
In the area where I made this picture, Hanlon's Creek flows through a forest dominated by eastern white cedar (
Thuja occidentalis). Living and dead, the cedars define the forest. In this frame I wanted the shape, texture and soft grey tones of the dead cedar tree against the dark water to draw the viewer into the picture. That called for a wide angle lens and a viewpoint right on top of the tree trunk. My widest lens is a Pentax 645 35mm f/3.5. It rides on a Toyo VX23D digital view camera, with a Fujifilm GFX 50R on the back.
Photographers (and painters) don't get to decide how people will look at a picture. The best we can do is sweep a path and hope the viewer will follow it. In this picture, I wanted viewers to follow the dead tree trunks to the sculpture created by their roots, and from there to explore the creek, the dense trees in the background, the creek bed, and the shoreline. To make it worth the viewer's while to roam these areas, I needed to provide depth and details -- enough to ensure there's always something else to discover by looking more carefully, but not so much detail that it's overwhelming.
- To get the depth and details, I needed everything but the moving water to be sharp and in focus. That required combining tilt, swing, a bit of shift, and a small aperture (f/16). The plane of sharpest focus therefore starts at bottom-left, runs through the tree roots and then out roughly through the middle of the forest in the background. It's not parallel to the top and bottom of the frame because I combined tilt and swing; thus, the plane of focus is tipped to the right. This approach wouldn't have worked if I needed detail in the foreground at bottom-right, but it's moving water there so softness is fine; I just needed sharp focus to start with the rocks on the shore on the right. Focus stacking would not have worked because of the moving water; I dislike the cloudy, indistinct look of moving water shot with a long shutter speed or stacked images, so this had to be one frame.
- To avoid overwhelming the viewer with details, I organized the picture into several regions: (1) the foreground fallen tree, (2) the bright bushes on the shoreline at right, (3) the dark flowing water in the creek, and (4) the background trees. Different tones (e.g., bright leaves, dark water), textures (e.g., soft flowing water, busy leafy bushes, light/dark areas in the background forest), and shapes (e.g., strong lines of trees, soft masses of leaves) helps visually separate the various regions.
Black and white photography benefits enormously from the ability to adjust how colours are mapped to tones. I take full advantage of this capability in Lightroom, where I do all the work. For example, the thing that drew me to this scene in the first place was the bright yellow-green leaves in the mass of bushes at right. I knew that in the black and white picture I could preserve their brightness using the colour channels.
Rob de Loë
www.robdeloephotography.com
