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Phil Douglis | all galleries >> Galleries >> Gallery Eight: Light and shadow shape meaning > Natural Bridge, Aruba, 2003
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15-DEC-2003

Natural Bridge, Aruba, 2003

One of the main attractions of Aruba's east coast is a 100 foot-long coral formation carved out by the pounding surf over the centuries. Rather than describe the appearance of this bridge in my photograph, I wanted to express the feeling of walking twenty-five feet in the air over the swirling waters of the Caribbean Sea on a bridge designed by nature. Using my wideangle converter lens, I backed away and used my spot meter to expose for the intense sunlight on the water itself and thereby abstract the image. Everything went black except the foaming water and a hint of blue sky. The tourists standing on the bridge itself became tiny silhouettes, defining its size through scale incongruity. It is the interplay of light and shadow that turns what would have been a literal snapshot into an expressive image.

Canon PowerShot G5
1/2000s f/8.0 at 7.2mm full exif

other sizes: small medium large original auto
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Phil Douglis31-Mar-2005 06:06
Thanks, Benchang for calling this image a "mother" image. I take it you are referring the greatest mother of them all, mother nature at work. It is indeed all about strength and power. I was tempted to open the shadows a bit to give texture to the bridge, but it would have looked more like a postcard image. I wanted the bridge to divide the puny, oblivious people from the surging waters.

As for losing EXIF data, I am not a technically oriented person, so I am not familiar with what you talking about here. I use only Mac computers, and I download all my pictures from my memory chip directly into my Powerbook laptop via PCMIA card reader. It is a little metal sleeve. The memory card goes into one end, the other end fits into a slot in the side of my laptop. An icon of a drive appears on my desktop. I activate Mac OSX's "Image Capture" software that downloads the pictures for me. I then work on my pictures in Photoshop, and save the enhanced version as a TIFF file. I burn both the original JPEG and the TIFF enhanced version onto CDs. When I get home I put the CD into my G4 Power Mac desktop computer and transfer the images. I store them in their own external hard drive, a Maxtor 800 Gigabyte drive. I make a smaller version of the TIFF file to upload onto pbase, converting it back to a jpeg. Sometimes the EXIF data appears on pbase. Sometime it does not. And sometimes it does not make any sense at all. So I no longer worry about why. The possible causes are varied and complex and beyond comprehension. It's nice to know all that tech stuff, but in the end, its the picture that matters to me, not statistics.
Benchang Tang 31-Mar-2005 01:15
Love it. This is a picture more subjective and with more of the mother in it. With the control on the exposure you simplify the content and context to bring out more strength and more feeling. The bridge is not self interpreted to the viewer and thus more symbolic and expessive,because the churnning water is well difined by the figures in dark.
To dowm load pictures from the camera in some software is not safe with the Exif, because they cab be done by the so-called "TWAIN", used mostly for scanning, so better do it by copy/move from the usb drive and paste them. Thank you for your teaching.
Phil Douglis08-Jan-2005 05:42
Good point, Northstar37. That was my intention here. Your point is also underscored by the terrible tidal wave that killed hundreds of thousands in South Asia in late December. Water is indeed more powerful than land.
northstar3708-Jan-2005 04:53
I think the water is more powerful than the land.
Phil Douglis22-Oct-2004 02:52
You are so right, Marek! I do see the beasts head now that you mention it, and that changes everything I see. It shows us that when we abstract an image down to form itself, the imagination is stimulated to see just about anything it really wants to see. And yes, limbo, heaven and hell as well. Thanks, Marek for giving me such an imaginative gift!

Phil
Guest 21-Oct-2004 23:43
I was instantly drawn to this thumbnail, and certainly not disappointed at full size. I love the graphic arrangement of shapes and the liquid iron quality of the water. Along with the tiny human figures -- at a perfect size for the reasons you describe -- this projects a primeval scene, the “Land Before Time”. There is another aspect that reinforces this, and gives it another twist for me (you're going to like this); if you view it at thumbnail size, you will see a profile of a beast's head with its mouth open drawing in the sea, and the tiny human figures standing along its head. The colour scheme and the shapes remind me of primitive art. It also has something of Jonah and the Whale about it. As an overall story, it could be about limbo, heaven and hell. A very powerful image that has imprinted itself on my mind, like your Soul Generator.
Phil Douglis29-Jan-2004 04:38
That's what I meant by scale incongruity, Carol. The small figures on the bridge makes it seem even larger than it really is, and as you say, in comparison, the sea seems so great and vast. Actually that is not even the sea in the foreground -- it is a swirling pool of seawater in a little bay. The sea itself is just beyond that tiny slit of water visible directly under the bridge. It is amazing how light and shadow can trick the eye into seeing things that are not really there.
Carol E Sandgren29-Jan-2004 03:14
The people above on the bridge are so small and insignificant in comparison to the vast greatness of the sea which gleams so far below.
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