The Passage of Time

This week's images portray the passage of time through a couple of "before and after" timescapes, plus one photo pair that shows two separate points on the time continuum in the same physical location.

Playing a game of chess with my daughter.  She always wins. This shows the beginning (first move) and endpoint (checkmate) of the game.

Cake for my afternoon tea. The cakes from Champagne Bakery are always the best.  Just added a few strawberries.  Yes, I ate it all!

Sunset through sundown in Irvine, on the walking trail.

Busy or Calm

The challenge this week: Take photographs that exemplify either busy/chaos or still/calm, then create three side-by-side diptyches which contrast the busy and the calm. I wanted to try to have each of the dyptiches represent a single location. So I grabbed my camera and headed out to some of the places I like to go walking.

This first set of photos was taken in Irvine, at the IRWD San Joaquin Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary, located at Campus and Riperian Way. The two photos in this diptych were taken at the same location, but one focuses on the lush green marsh, the other focuses on the skyline just above the marsh. You can see the same wall in each of the photos.

On the left is "busy" - the construction behind the marsh. On the right is "calm" - the marshy area where the birds forage for bugs and crawfish.

The photos below were taken at different locations.  The one on the left was taken at Bommer Canyon Trailhead in Irvine.  The one on the right was taken at the LDS Newport Beach Temple. They are similar, but so different.

The photo on the left is the "busy" one - it seems so chaotic with lines going every which direction. The one on the right also has lines, but they seem more ordered - not crossing over each other so much. It has a "calm" feeling to me, and looks like somewhere I'd like to hide out and read a book.

The final diptych photos were taken at Bommer Canyon Trailhead in Irvine:

On the left is a road that leads to old corrals (used when there were still cattle roaming these hills) and walking paths up through the hills. The composition seems "busy" to me - it hints at the activity of people coming and going. On the right is the "calm" side, a 60 degree turn to the left from the first photo.  It is a serene view over the open area in front of the Saddleback Mountains.

Outtakes and Bonus Material!

There were lots of pictures leftover from this assignment - pictures of busy or still that didn't fit into a diptych, but that I really liked. 

Here are some of the extras, beginning with the San Joaquin Marsh:

White-faced Ibis catching a crawfish

Black-necked Stilt

Tree Swallow, claiming a nesting box
with his mate peeking out from inside.

Various ducks: Male and Female Blue Winged Teal, Cinnamon Teal plus a Coot

Great Egret with a few Black-necked Stilts.

A view towards Newport Beach from San Joaquin Marsh

Back Bay, Newport Beach, CA

The angel Moroni: atop the LDS Newport Beach Temple, Bonita Canyon Road, Newport Beach, CA

Opuntia Blossom: Bommer Canyon Trailhead

Security System: Bommer Canyon Trailhead

Jeffrey Road Open Space Trail in Irvine, CA

Altering History or Enhancing Reality?

I grew up in a time when we believed that “the camera doesn’t lie.” If you took a photo, then what was printed must be reality. And it has widely been assumed that Photoshop is the demon which has given rise to the practice of altering reality. In fact, neither of those ideas is entirely true because as long as there have been cameras, paper, scissors, glue and paint, there has been photo altering. It’s just easier now.

When I first started in photography using film cameras, what I saw when I was taking the photos often did not match what I saw when I received my prints back from the developer. I experienced a lot of disappointment! Then I learned that a skilled photo processor could make all the difference. He or she could boost the saturation of the photos, or push/pull the exposure, or dodge and burn the shadows and highlights. These were important to me not so that I could alter reality, but so that I could make my photos match what my eyes saw in person. I also discovered that a good airbrush artist could remove a few wrinkles here and there on the finished print, or take out an errant tree, then re-coat the print so no one could tell it had ever been touched.  When I used an airbrush artist I was altering the photo for effect or for perfection, but not really for deception.

Those techniques are minor compared to what some photographers did even as far back as Lincoln’s day, as shown in the 1860 before and after photos below:

Here we have Lincoln’s head pasted onto the body of John Calhoun, a southern politician. It was said that “no sufficiently heroic portrait of Lincoln had yet been taken,” so apparently one needed to be created. Presumably Lincoln’s head was cut from one photograph, carefully pasted onto another one, then the whole thing re-photographed to produce a new negative. To me, this goes beyond perfecting the image. It's more towards the deception end of the scale. More about this photo and other early examples can be found here: DailyMail.com.

Fast forward to February 19, 1990: Adobe Photoshop is released into the world. I do not know what the original intent for Photoshop was, but when I began using it (somewhere around 1998), my intent was to enhance my photos in the same way I had asked my photo processor to do. Instead of having to try to explain what I wanted to someone else and maybe getting that, I now had full control over the finished image. It may have taken a lot of trial and error, and a lot of failure, and a lot of scanning of negatives, but often I got what I wanted. I was a purist at the time so no altering of the subject matter for me!

Yet a mere two years later, I was altering on a grand scale.  I was putting wings on babies, or putting them in teacups, or floating them in clouds. In my defense, I was a new mom and babies were of interest to me. Plus, Anne Geddes was the photographer du jour. And the photos were so patently altered that no one could mistake them for reality!

But altering photos can be a slippery slope, as is striving for perfection. So eventually, since I had the tools anyway, I found myself taking people out of photos who didn't belong there, or putting them in. No worries since these were just family photos and not for publication.  Well, except for the yearbook photos where someone forgot to show up for the photo shoot and I had to add them in later! So no harm, no foul, right? Below is one such example. (And also an example of some not-so-perfect Photoshopping.)

But what about photojournalists?  Do we hold them to a higher standard? I think generally the answer is yes. We trust them to show us reality "as shot," not an interpretation thereof. So it is surprising when we see a photo in a reputable publication and later find out that it has been altered. Some photojournalists have been fired for altering their photos, even just to give a better sense of what the reality was. You can read about one such instance here: "Ease of Alteration Creates Woes for Picture Editors." Yet others have not been punished for even greater infractions.

In this photo, it was the publication itself that requested the change for religious reasons:

In this iconic photo of the President Obama national security team watching the raid that killed Osama bin Laden from the White House Situation Room, the Hasidic newspaper Der Tziung removed the images of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and counterterrorism directory Audrey Tomason from the photo because of their policy of never printing photos of women in its pages. The newspaper later apologized, sort of. More about this photo here: TheGuardian.com.

For me, the example below definitely crosses the line, especially since the publication defended it's choice to Photoshop someone out. And it's even on the cover of the magazine! It seems deceptive to me and it changes the essence of this photo of President Obama surveying the BP oil spill along the Louisiana coast.  Here are the after and before:

The Economist deputy editor Emma Duncan said, "I asked for Ms. Randolph to be removed because I wanted readers to focus on Mr. Obama, not because I wanted to make him look isolated." Source: The Huffington Post. And yet, that's exactly what she did.