Sliver-thin Layers and Double Exposures

July 30, 2013August 8, 2013 | drawandshoot

Sliver-thin layers and double exposures. From the series Surface, Submerge.

I suppose this image doesn’t seem to have much to do with the rest of this post but it is woven in with a fine thread…

In the past few months I have been very fortunate to be included in a couple of wonderful publications and I thought I would mention this as a way of perhaps introducing these magazines to anyone that might be interested.

The first is a gorgeous publication from the Netherlands called “Flow Magazine” and they included this blog(!) in an article all about nature blogs. (*Although the article is in Dutch, Flow Mag has recently started issuing international copies of their magazine in English. Also, I recommend checking out some of those other nature bloggers listed if you have the time.)

You can find a copy of that article here: Flow Magazine ‘Groene Bloggers’

I am honoured, also, to have art from my ‘Surface, Submerge’ series included in the latest print issue of Art & Science Journal along with some other very accomplished artists.

You can find that article here: Surface, Submerge
As well as print issues, Art & Science Journal has a very beautiful and interesting blog.

Many thanks to both of these publications for the recognition, and for allowing me to ‘reprint’ these articles [*copyright of these articles remains with each publication]. I hope you get a chance to check them out – click on the images below to be brought to their home pages.

It’s a Dragonfly Summer

July 26, 2013July 26, 2013 | drawandshoot

The dragonflies have been amazing this year. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many. In fact, as I sit writing this post I can see them flitting around outside my window.

They have been gathering on the sun drenched bushes and shrubs allowing me to observe them rather closely (I’d venture to say that they are willing collaborators, one of them even perched on my nose for a while …). Mostly they are a yellow-green colour but there are a few other types, too, and they are all fascinating up close.

When we were canoe camping in Killarney a couple of weeks ago I saw a several cast off larval skins from dragonflies and here is one pictured below.
Dragonflies in their larval stage live underwater and when they are ready to metamorphose into adults they climb out of the water on an available reed or water plant and go through the process of emerging from their old skin.

Near the shed skin was this poor dragonfly caught in some sticky carnivorous sundews (Drosera). Sundews are rather beautiful, I will have to head to the bog one day and see if I can find some locally.

[These above 2 photographs are lacking detail as I didn’t bring a macro lens camping (all other images were taken with a macro lens), and my canoe kept shifting around – next time I think the extra weight of the macro lens would be completely worth it!]

A whiskered closeup:
(click on images to enlarge)

sea change

July 4, 2013 | drawandshoot

Long Days and Tall Grass

June 21, 2013August 8, 2014 | drawandshoot

(Untitled. Oil, graphite and Conté on Mylar)

It’s the first day of summer here and it feels like a true summer day with gently swaying grasses in the sunshine and strange insects in the garden.

[The first image is a painting/drawing in progress (I never know whether to call my pieces paintings or drawings – I guess they are both) and the other two images are photographs made with camera movement.]

This Side of Winter

May 25, 2013May 25, 2013 | drawandshoot

These are the last of the little seedheads from my garden that I have been documenting through the seasons. Somehow a few of them survived the weight of winter relatively intact. I had left them in the garden so I could photograph them on this side of winter.

These little remnants of flowers have been through many transitions over the last few months. They have been frosted, covered in freezing rain, and buried under snow.
I have photographed them in different light where they have taken on the colours of what is around them. I haven’t edited the photographs much at all, the tones you see in each set are from the surrounding growth .

You can see the beginning of the series here, here, here, and here.

Halcyon Moments

May 11, 2013May 12, 2013 | drawandshoot

After a few halcyon, summer-like days the spring blossoms are in full splendor. When I managed to get out with my camera it was mostly grey and overcast and I came away feeling like I had not been able to work the true beauty into my camera. I often find a way to work with poor light but sometimes nothing feels quite right.

There is a spectacular tree in blossom at the arboretum at the moment and you can see its twisted form in a couple of the above photographs. I photographed it from the ‘inside’ because the entwined branches drape around you in such a way that you can’t really imagine a more perfect place.

My images don’t do it justice in any way. Often, I find it necessary to spend a long time with a subject experimenting with different ways of photographing to capture a real sense of the subject or my experience of it. Sometimes going back several times in different light and conditions. But the blossoms are so fleeting it makes it difficult to do this. It is one of the challenges I love about making images, though – finding, and working with, the ephemeral.

There are times where I merge images together, layering and adding ‘ghosts’. I do this with in-camera double exposures, and sometimes afterwards in processing (in this case images 1,3,4). It is not that I want to tell an untruth with these images; more so the opposite. It is an attempt to express the sense of an experience that I have haven’t managed to capture. Adding layers to an image the way we add layers to our memories.

Spring Belongs to the Birds

May 1, 2013 | drawandshoot

Birdsong and squinting into the sun. The earth is greening.

What Water Does

April 19, 2013 | drawandshoot

“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”
― Loren Eiseley

Above and below: Seedheads covered in ice from freezing rain – the patterns develop as the ice starts to melt away and break up into smaller pieces.

FrostFeathers Frost flowers develop when it is very cold and the air is quite moist. The ones pictured here formed on thin ice at the edge of the river near open water, on a night when the temperature dipped to -25C.

Above: A tiny branch with phantom ‘leaves’ on a cold winter morning.

Below: A small frost formation on a window.

The Ottawa River shifting through the seasons.

I sometimes find it difficult to shift my visual thinking/creativity away from the winter landscape in the spring. For me it holds a bit of magic like no other season. The key to these transformations is water. From raindrops to snowflakes, to ice and frost, is there anything with more imagination than water?

The landscape is mostly shades of brown now with small bits of green trying to emerge through the damp earth. The river has lost its ice. Most of the photographs here have been posted on these pages before, some even from the previous winter, so I guess this is a bit of a recap (or an ice cap), but together they attempt to illustrate, and to let go of, the season that has just passed.

Also, on Monday April 22nd it will be Earth Day! In 2013 the focus is on climate change and how it is impacting people, creatures and environments the world over. You can learn more (and participate) by going to the Earth Day website. It is our collective voices and actions that make changes.

What are your plans for Earth Day?

Residuals 2

April 14, 2013 | drawandshoot

A little extra winter here the past few days but I don’t think the remainder of ice on the river can last too much longer. The coming days look to be shifting into real spring.

The footprints made by a black bear who has been walking near the river were quite distinguishable in the fresh snow. It’s not too often a bear would be wandering in this area so close to the city but there are corridors of greenspace and waterways that are well used by wildlife. It’s one of things that makes this city so interesting.

draw and shoot

Shooting photographs, drawing lines…

transitions