16-APR-2004
Canine Quartet, Balboa Park, San Diego, California, 2004
I could have easily made a cliché shot of the three cute white dogs posing for me on a park bench, and it might have been a lovely cliché at that. But I wanted to do more with this image. The incongruity of the three leashes coming together on the ground, the distracted brown dog at left who wants nothing to do with its colleagues, and the hand of the owner extending a bag of dog droppings into the frame, all combine to create a surreal scene. I held my camera over my head and shot down, leading the eye diagonally from the poop sack at left to the leashes on the sidewalk at lower right.
18-APR-2004
Mission Bay, San Diego, California, 2004
Flowers are irresistible subjects, and often make breathtaking beautiful pictures. But I look for more than just beauty in my pictures – I want my images to express ideas about what I see and where I’ve been. While taking an early morning walk around Mission Bay, I passed the tiny front yard of a beach house and spotted a kayak slung between a pair of very dirty plastic garden chairs. Behind the kayak was a striking array of sunflowers and roses. I saw an incongruity here – the ornamentation of the lovely floral display juxtaposed against the raw utility of kayak storage. Instead of making just another cliché picture of pretty flowers, I use those blossoms as incongruous context here. This picture, which I made with a small Canon Digital Elph pocket camera, tell us that this homeowner gets the most out of every inch of space yet still manages to envelope it in flowering beauty.
16-APR-2004
Plant on plant, Balboa Park, San Diego, California, 2004
Close up photography of natural subjects can reveal things we do not ordinarily see, but after awhile, my close-up images sometimes begin to all look alike. One way to move beyond the cliché macro photo is to juxtapose one form upon another to create a contrast that results in meaning. While visiting Balboa Park’s spectacular Botanical Garden I noticed a leaf of one plant overlapping a much larger leaf of another. Leaves are living things – the light and water gatherers of plant life. How different this pair of leaves appears in structure, texture, color, and form. This image makes me ponder the wonder of nature. I welcome all of those tiny flaws and scars as much as I savor the contrasts in these lush, tropical patterns.
16-APR-2004
Chase on Mission Beach, San Diego, California, 2004
You can find pictures of happy kids and beautiful sunsets in most travel albums and web pages. That’s not a bad thing – because such clichés can bring back personal memories of great value. But I try to do whatever it takes to avoid clichés if I can. I can often do so by using abstraction. Here I combine both sunset and youthful subject matter by abstracting them into a chase scene. By backlighting these people, they become silhouettes. I also abstract the sunset by stressing its effect, rather than depicting its beauty. The key to this photo is the child in the middle of the frame – he is incongruously small when compared to the adults he is chasing.
17-APR-2004
Point Loma Harbor, San Diego, California, 2004
Another way to avoid the standard sunset cliché (which we all love to take) is to shoot the effect of the sunset instead of photographing the sunset itself. In this shot, taken from Point Loma Harbor opposite downtown San Diego, the sun is at my back. It illuminates the cloud overhead, which in turn reflects on the water. Two other factors work for me here: the shaded skyline abstracts the city – it’s there, but it does not compete with the delicate golden colors in the cloud and on the water. And the gull I happened to catch has just broken free of the clouds and soars against a clear blue sky. I know – this shot comes very close to the line between cliché and non-cliché, but I’m a sucker for the gull in the sky shot. Yet this gull works because it is so small, and does not conflict with the beauty of scene. It brings an extra touch of the sea to this image, and that’s what a harbor scene is all about.
19-APR-2004
Pride, Tecate, Mexico, 2004
Travel portraits often become clichés – we can see the same happily smiling faces looking into our cameras all over the world. You can’t very well tell people not to smile, right? So you take the shot and move on. While looking for pictures in Tecate with fellow pbase artist Wendy Owens, we came upon a taco stand and struck up a conversation with the staff. We asked if we might take their pictures, and they said they would be honored. As we showed them the digital images on our viewing screens, they became more and more involved in the photographic process. At one point, I asked all three of them to gather behind the food they are preparing and pose for me. I wanted more than just smiles. I wanted context for those smiles. When the chef spontaneously grabbed his cleaver and threw back his shoulders I knew I had made an effective group portrait. The gesture and expressions are honest, not faked for the camera. The food and cleaver add context for meaning. This image is more than just a picture of three people having their picture taken. It is about the bonds that unite them as a group – pride in their work, a friendship, and perhaps even familial relationship. It is a portrait rich in human values – we care about these people because they seem to care so much about what they do, and who they are.
15-APR-2004
Old Point Loma Lighthouse, San Diego, California, 2004
I could have made a standard lighthouse travel cliché, and even framed it within a tree, but I restrained myself from doing so. Instead I went inside of this historic lighthouse and climbed to the top of the spiral staircase leading to the light itself. When I looked down, I saw this marvelous spiral form exploding into my frame like a giant snail. But to move beyond clichés, we must think about meaning, not just form for the sake of form. As I peered into the stairwell, I saw one of my photographic colleagues climbing up to join me. When she was just below me, she asked if she was intruding on my shot. I answered, “No, you just made my picture.” Her hand on the railing symbolizes a human journey that begins in light and ends in the gathering darkness at the top of the stairs, very much as in life itself. By using spot metering off the furthest and brightest part of the picture, I make the darkness rise within the image and thereby express my idea.
16-APR-2004
The Plunge, Belmont Amusement Park, San Diego, California, 2004
For some reason, photographers enjoy making pictures of words, usually in the form of signage. A sign often offers us a handy visual label of where we’ve been. Unfortunately, such pictures often become clichés. To make sign pictures that goes beyond clichés, I use signs within a context that makes them work. In this shot of an amusement park’s indoor salt-water swimming pool under renovation, I shot its sign through a series of barriers. The rusty fencing and barbed wire tell my viewers that they may stand on dangerous ground here. These barriers provide one layer of meaning. Another layer of meaning comes from the ominous shadow of the huge ornamental gate, which rises behind me. The gate offers two vast arches for entry, yet once beyond this gate, we are met with steel and wire. The sign itself becomes part of the context – it gives us the name of the facility and the date it was originally opened. It is not the words of the sign that convey meaning here. The meaning comes from the context that supports them.
17-APR-2004
Campo Santo. Old Town San Diego, California, 2004
Much of what we see when we travel is historical in nature. We dutifully point our cameras at old buildings, monuments, and cemeteries and make the past into a series of clichés. To bring the past to life, and avoid making a cliché out of it at the same time, I shot an old grave marker resting on its back in a 19th Century cemetery, as a series of shadows marched across it. The shadow, cast by a picket fence that surrounds the grave, represents more than just a nice pattern. To me, it expresses the relentless passage of time itself. The cycle of life repeats itself over and over again, as the lines of the fence and the scattered leaves and blossoms imply. I am not photographing an old gravesite here as much as I am expressing a point of view on the temporary nature of life itself.
16-APR-2004
Fountain, Balboa Park, San Diego, California, 2004
Statues, sculpture and fountains provoke additional cliché photographs. And I’ve certainly shot my share of them over the years. To break free from such cliché approaches, I try to bring meaning to such pictures by expressing the symbolic nature of the statue or sculpture. In this case, I held off shooting this sculpture until mid-day, when the high sun brings strong, high-key contrast in light, as well as deep texture to the stone face. This light would be very bad for human portraits, but it is wonderful for textured stone subjects such as this one. When I felt the light on the subject was strong enough, I moved close to the sculpture to fill the frame and confront the viewer with the intensity of both the lighting contrasts and the powerful texture. I was very careful to frame the subject within the softly focused dark archway in the background, which gives the picture a sense of depth. The result: instead of a static overall image of the statue, which sits in the middle of small fountain, I’ve made an image that demands the attention of the viewer. Its gaze seems relaxed, yet viewed at this intimate distance in such defining light, this face becomes an eternal and enigmatic symbol of survival.
18-APR-2004
Gargoyle, Villa Montezuma, San Diego, California, 2004
I also see numerous clichés involving buildings in travel photos. Most of them are shot from a distance so as to embrace the entire structure, and are descriptive, rather than expressive, in nature. When I approach a building as a subject for a photograph, I look for details that make it unique, and then try to stress those details rather than describe the entire structure. San Diego’s bizarre Villa Montezuma was built in the 19th Century as the whimsically eccentric home of musician/artist Jesse Shephard. Now owned by the San Diego Historical Society, you can see an image of the entire house on its website at:
http://www.sandiegohistory.org/mainpages/locate5.htm
Note the difference between the website’s overall view of the house and my own interpretation here. With the help of a short telephoto lens, I was able to build an image around a solitary gargoyle on one corner of the house, using the weather vane and turret as context. More than any other detail, that gargoyle captures the essence of the Victorian era. There are many other strikingly incongruous Victorian touches inside the house, but interior photography is not allowed, so this gargoyle will have to say it all.
18-APR-2004
Hidalgo Plaza, Tecate, Mexico, 2004
In the center of the small Mexican border town of Tecate, there is a well-kept Plaza surrounding a bandstand. Wrought iron benches encircle the bandstand, occupied at mid-day by Tecate residents who chat with their friends, relax in the sun, or nod off to sleep. Photographing such a place as this is really a form of “street photography,” another major source of travel picture clichés. Most street scenes are chaotic, jumbled renderings of people walking down a street. To bring fresh vision to bear on street photographs, we must find ways to simplify the structure of the picture so that the body language of the subjects is clearly defined and without distraction. When I brought my cameras to bear on Tecate’s Hidalgo Plaza, I searched for a simple background, and found it in the stone base of the bandstand and in the shadows surrounding it. This backdrop gives precedence to the bench sitters in the foreground and to the large open area in front of them. Using a 24mm wide-angle converter lens, I moved in on the fellow sitting on the bench in the foreground, and shot him for a while, using his body language as the anchor for my images. Eventually someone else wearing a western hat came by, and when he did, I photographed this scene as he and his shadow slip away from the man on the bench – leaving him alone. And that’s what this picture is about - loneliness. I would like to know what the man sitting before us might be thinking at this moment, and where the other fellow may be heading. This image is strong enough to ask such questions of its viewers, taking it out of the realm of cliché photos.