The eye of the artist

With all the great, technological improvements in cameras, we got some fabulous pictures in Alaska. Still, you realize that some pictures have the "eye of the artist" in composition, focus and lighting. They capture just the right scene or subjects, focus on the right object, zoom in or out to the optimal view. Sometimes this is a lucky coincidence, but many times it is the practiced eye.

I particularly loved the picture below because I think, taken out of context, it looks like an abstract work of art. It got me thinking about how an artist friend once explained her abstract painting class to me. The instructor had told them to hold the brush in their non-dominant hand and squint at the still life with only one eye, in order to extract the essence of the painting--the color and line and texture. 

To me this picture does exactly that--gray, blue and white tones evoke a feeling of sea and sky, but the bands of color seem mixed up--is that gray sea above sky? Where does one start and the other end?

Here is the non-zoom version of the above photo, where you can see the reference points of the mountain and trees and shoreline. It turns out there was no sky in the first picture after all, just an enlargement of the sea along a stretch of the Seward Highway known as the Turnagain Arm. It was a rainy, stormy evening when we came upon this scene and the white water was moving very rapidly compared to the stagnant mudflats by the shore and the settled water further out. It looked like an optical illusion. What is that white sparkling I see? It didn't register at first as movement.

I don't want to claim that armed with my camera and a zoom feature, I could be an Instant Artist, but I started out today on a hike up High Mountain near our house. I was responding to my son Eric's latest blog where he encouraged everyone to "go explore some place near your house that you haven't been to in a long time and let me know what you find!"  I know, I know, getting a little crazy here with promoting each other's blogs!

But, it was a beautiful day, so I looked forward to my adventure. Never mind that I started up the lower path only to discover that it was blocked off with a Private Property No Trespassing sign, just as the trail turned up the mountain. I leaned over the bright orange plastic netting and craned my neck to see if this was the path I knew and sure enough the hulk of an old car lay to the right of the trail, which had always been a "trail marker" of sorts. A new house lay beyond the makeshift barrier and the junk car. And here I thought the recession had curbed some of the overdevelopment in NJ.

I returned to the trailhead and now took the upper path, having fun along the way with my zoomed in and zoomed out photos. Take a look:

 

Still recognizable, as lichens on tree bark--I need a bigger zoom!

This is a little better:

It could be focused better, but I like the textures. It could be an aerial view of a hiking area out west or a multimedia creation in wax and cardboard with highlights of yellow and orange. Here's the picture I started from:

See how you like this one:

 

Ok, blurry, but I like how the shapes light up, as if they are bacteria under a microscope or a strobe of fireflies in motion. Did you guess they are really leaves on trees:?

I may be just hungry, but I'd swear these look like cooked shrimp on the sea floor--how can that be in North Haledon, NJ? Somebody pass me the cocktail sauce.

Oh, they were just squiggly orange seed things on the path. When I picked one up, it had the consistency of a twist of yarn and I momentarily thought some crazy knitter, frustrated with a sweater that didn't work out, had shredded it along the way, ceremoniously tossing the final remnants off the top of the mountain. Or maybe little Hansel and Gretel were dropping threads to find their way back down.

This one would make a nice picture above your modern couch:

Yup, just plain old moss on a rock:

What I thought would be the piece de resistance was a disappointment. Although a beautiful day, the skyline was hazy and I couldn't zoom in enough to lose the representational picture. New York was still New York.

view from High Mountain

the zoom in on the NYC skyline

So, my conclusion is that Instant Artist is not as easy as it sounds. You certainly need a better eye and better camera than I have. But, it was fun and I still love the idea. I'll think about it the next time I'm at MOMA or the MET's modern art section. Yeah, I'll be the one squinting at the art and mentally zooming in and out.