Landscape

It never occurred to me

Black And White Photography, Photography, Steven

No Swimming © Steven Willard

Even on a hot summer day this place isn’t all that inviting.

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Svalbard

Black And White Photography, David, Photography

20190816-untitled shoot-Edit

I was lucky enough to spend 5 days on Svalbard recently and that kind of polished my poor landscape genre a little. This I took on my last day there. It had already started to snow and the local mountains already had a good coating of the white stuff.

Nikon D800
Nikon 24-70 f/2.8 AFS
PP in Silver Efex Pro II

Roadside Memorials

Black And White Photography, Photography, Steven

Roadside Memorial © Steven Willard

I have no idea how many roadside memorials I’ve passed in my travels. I’m seventy-two years old, and I’ve driven all over America, and some foreign countries too, so the number must be pretty high. Some were probably too small to notice while traveling at highway speeds, others such as this one, certainly caught my eye. Some clearly mark scenes where accidents took place, dangerous curves or poorly marked intersections. Others are placed on perfectly straight highways, begging the question of how someone managed to run off the road. I rarely stop, they appear too suddenly unless it is on a section of road I travel frequently. I don’t think the mourners expect us to, it’s something more personal than that, or perhaps more desperate. A cry for people to notice that a friend, or child, has been take away from them. It’s something for us to think about, at least for a few miles.

 

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Inversion Therapy

Black And White Photography, Photography, Steven

Inverted, © Steven Willard

We have a tendency to look at things from the bottom up. Generally we scan buildings from the ground up, and landscapes from near to far, which usually means bottom to top. Of course there are exceptions; dramatic images of clouds or mountains for instance, or portraits where we usually are drawn to the eyes first regardless of where the eyes are in the frame.

As an exercise, I’ve been trying to make photographs that turn things upside down, that draw the eyes first to the top of the frame, then work their way to the bottom. It produces a tension we aren’t used to in seeing in images. Finding these images is not as easy as it sounds, and I offer it as a challenge.

These bare branches hanging down from a clump of pine needles reminded me of roots working their way deeper and deeper into the earth; the textured wall in the background serving the visual equivalent of earth. While this image was photographed as presented, it works almost as well when inverted. Try looking at it that way.

Olympus OMD EM5 file processed in Snapseed and Stackables on my iPad Air.