Down The Digital Orton Path

Michael Orton was a pretty ingenious guy. Experimenting with film photography, he took two shots of the same scene -- one perfectly exposed and the other overexposed (too much light) by a number of stops. Back in the old darkroom he's expose the perfectly focused, correctly lit shot to the photo paper, then expose the over-exposed (lighter) version, but shift the focus (make it blurry) on the same piece of photo paper. Basically he performed a double exposure of two versions of the same scene... now we get to do that digitally...

Click on the image to view full size (copyright Paul Garfinkel, 2010 - All Rights Reserved!)

This photo is from our outing at the Julington-Durbin Preserve last weekend, right at the creek. I took the original image, and using Photoshop Elements, digitally overexposed an exact copy of the it, then added a gaussian blur filter. The copy was virtually unrecognizable. I then placed one image over the other and blended them using the "multiply" filter, flattened the image (turned two layers into one), lightened some of the shadows and voila!

An Orton process tends to add a dreamscape effect to landscape images. More fun can be had by experimenting with the duplicate file -- desaturate the colors, remove the colors completely, shift the hue of the image, remove or add one color only, increase or decrease the amount of blur or try different blur filters (motion blur, for example)... have fun and create some art!.... simple.

Photography Site Move and Upgrade

Indulging my primary passion -- I am moving my River Road Photography website from its current home to the photo sharing site "Smug Mug". Smug provides great opportunity for customizing / personalizing the way photos are displayed, has a good system for sales, and offers technical and account assistance (essential customer service) at a superb level. So with an assist from David Wolf at Wolf Snap Photography, I am putting together a simple, yet attractive site that reflects me and my photography (I designed and produced the site banner shown above, and David has handled the rest).

Access to the site will soon be available through my riverroadphoto.net URL, but in the interim, you can get a glimpse of the work in progress HERE. Your feedback and ideas will be appreciated as we continue to build the site over time. For now, I am focusing on my themes of simplicity, and environmental preservation. So go check it out! Simple....

The Friend I Never Knew - Andrew Wyeth

I consider Andy Wyeth to be a friend. Someone you know, who knows you, and who inspires you to be better at what you do -- to see the world close up. I never met him face to face, though I had hoped to -- on one of those business trips to the Brandywine Valley when I'd jump into the rental car and head out route 52 to US 1 into Chadds Ford, then left on Creek Road past the Historical Society, miles out into rural Pennsylvania along the Brandywine Creek. Perhaps I'd catch a glimpse of this icon of American Art, painting the land of his heart, of his life, from the back of his SUV. But it never did happen. Andy died today --- after a lifetime of recording his vision on canvas until the very end.

Three or four years ago, I turned right off of US 1 into the parking lot of the Brandywine River Museum. I'd been there several times before, admiring the Wyeth exhibit on the third floor. This time, at the front desk on the first floor I was approached by a young woman with  short blonde hair, asking me if I'd like to tour the Wyeth exhibit with Andy's granddaughter. Well of course. "Hi", she said, "I'm Victoria Wyeth, let's go!". Along with a few other visitors, I was privileged to gain the personal insights into an amazing painter's creative process that only family can know. In the years since I have met Victoria 4 or 5 more times, most recently this past October, the last time Kay and I visited the museum.

Four Wyeth prints are hung in our house. Three small ones, a field detail and two of Koerner's farm in our entry, and a full size reproduction of "The Ides of March" over our fireplace. I lingered over each of them when I came home this afternoon. Kay had called me at work to deliver the news that Andy had died in his sleep. A fitting departure.

The image above is from a photo I took in winter, 2007 on the Brandywine Creek, behind the museum. It's called Andy's Creek. We never did meet -- and I shall miss the fact of that lack in my life -- but his work will always be with me (and countless others), on my walls and in the museum that I shall continue to visit when I'm in the Brandywine Valley. So long, Andy -- see you later...

Taking Pictures and Creating Art

Once upon a
time, when I began sharing my photos on Flickr I wrote these words on my profile page:

I believe that art is a magnet for emotion. The greater the emotional response to a work or art - be it music, sculpture, video and cinema, still photography, painting, drawing, or any other media, or the natural or artificial spacial environment - the purer the art. The purer the art, the closer it gets to truth.

Since the crash of my backup drive last week and the loss of some 2,000 images forever I've found myself contemplating the difference between taking pictures and making art. Is what I lost (and indeed what I have), art? Adding to my philosophical dilemma is the completion of renovations to our home last week that created a significant amount of empty wall space -- space begging for the correct "filler". So given the style of the room and the mood I wanted to capture I have also been thinking about what should go up on those walls. I want it to be artful. And I want it to be born through my camera lens. But I wonder: Will it be art?

What I do believe, as I wrote a couple of years ago, is that Art is an emotional trigger. It's a way of honing in on Truth. Exposing the deepest reality. In my secular disposition, I suppose it edges on personal spirituality. To get there, I think, the artist has to do more than simply create something pleasing -- to the eye or to the ear (or to the palate for that matter). What you create has to be something you believe in -- something you are connected to. Something you love. An artist has to make the observer see through his eyes, hear through her ears, feel with his hands, love what she loves. I'm not at all sure that I'm there yet. Might never be. But it's a pretty good goal in life, don't you think?