No Camera Needed at Exit 270

Many of us think that photography is all about the camera and the lenses you have in your kit – but it is really about the creative process.  The camera is only a tool you use in this process and nothing more.  Photographs can be made without a camera using the scanner and a technique called photograms.  If I were teaching photography, I would start my students out with using the scanner to create images as a way of teaching them how to see shapes and forms before ever touching a camera.

Photograms are an imaging technique that dates back to 1800’s, the exposing of objects to the sun by placing them on a sensitive paper.  Today the digital scanner and an imaging-processing program can offer a wide range of experimentation without using a camera.  The images here are a continuation of my experiment with creating different effects using some Fall leaves, the scanner and Photoshop.  The backgrounds are textures blended into the image using layers and the opacity slider to create the double imaging effects.   

No Camera Needed at Exit270

Man Ray, the painter and photographer once said “To express what I feel I use the medium best suited to express that idea, which is also always the most economical one.” He was best known in the art world for his avant-garde photography and is noted for his work with photograms, which he called “rayographs” in reference to himself.

One of my early experiments in photography was making photograms, which is the placing of objects on photosensitive paper and exposing them to light.  After processing in the usual print processing chemicals you ended up a negative silhouette on black background with some gray.  It was something you could spend hours experimenting with.  However, today in the digital world of photography the scanner that comes with your printer and a photo processing program is all you need to explore this challenging, “No camera needed photography.”

So, following Man Ray’s advise on using the most economical medium to image some fall leaves – I chose the scanner.  The final images you see here are leaves combined with some digital created backgrounds with a bit of hue and saturation manipulation.  I placed the leaves face down on the scanner and covered them with either a black or white sheet of paper –and then brought them into Photoshop for the final imaging.  The backgrounds can be either downloaded free off various Internet sites or created by shooting different patterns you find while out on your photo walks.

Faces of Copper Country

Copper Country is a place where the past resides in the many items that have long ago been cast aside for newer.  It is a 32,000 square foot time machine.  The many small canyons of stalls that makeup this trip into the past are inhabited with items piled upon shelves beckoning the explorer to examine and hopefully find them new homes.  But as you proceed through this menagerie from the past – faces of various dolls, statues and mannequins peer out at you from various corners.  And, these are the many faces of Copper Country that beckons you to continue your adventure into the past.   

The key to capturing these faces is to use a shallow depth of field by shooting at a wide-open aperture in-order to isolate these faces from the cluttered background and foregrounds that surround them.  The camera was set for an ISO of 800 and a super wide-angle lens was used on some of the subjects to create a distored effect.

Photo Geometry

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see. ” ― Henry David Thoreau

Sometimes when I am reviewing images I shot on one of my photo walks –I start to see the possibilities of combing the images to form a single image.  I don’t mean superimposing but blending images side-by-side or top and bottom.  I especially find this happening when I am reviewing architectural images.  I no longer see the buildings –but the black and white geometric forms that seem to blend together from fame to frame.   

The below set of images taken at the University of Arizona where I experiment with choosing various architectural forms and aligning their shapes so that they meet to create a new image that encompasses their symmetrical elements.  Shooting with a super wide-angle lens helps to distort their shapes originally,  and seems to encourage this blending or combining of images because of their intersecting lines.