Once In A Lifetime Light… Looking For A Photographer
I have always been drawn, photographically, to the once-in-the-lifetime image - be it a photojournalist’s piercing photos of humans fighting fires, setting records, or defending freedom, or a fine art photographer’s striking images that make one’s heart soar.
The basis for success for either imagery is to have your mind in the game, that is, always being aware of your surroundings, the source of light, the angle of the light, and grasping what is unusual or fleeting about one of those signposts. Only then will the subject appear. It will be that point of illuminated shape, line or texture that you can not turn away from nor forget.
When I turned my full attention from four decades of photojournalism to fine art, it was because I was constantly being drawn toward seeing deeper - connecting with subjects that treated light differently, noticing angles, lines, shapes and textures that appeared briefly in the corner of my eye, but had to be ignored to fulfil my other stories.
The Traveler Palm featured here is a good starting point. Luckily, I had access to it when ever I chose, and it taught me that are no tomorrows.
This image is not what it seems. The viewer is actually seeing the inside backlit surface of the leaf - and then cast shadows from other leaves above.
And here was its lesson.
As the Sun traverses across the sky, its angle of illumination striking Earth changes with the season. My subject, the leaf, was maturing each day… its stalk was lengthening, and its size was multiplying, just as with the other nearby leaves from another maturing Traveler Palm stalk.
This image, as with all my Palm Blu Collection, is based on this fleeting abstract relationship at that moment, on that day. By tomorrow, as the sun traces a different path, the growth of each leaf will displace shadows enough that this momentary abstract alignment can never occur again.
It’s a once in a lifetime image.
You’ll find this creative relationship repeated with all of my infrared Heat Collection as well as some in my Whispers Collection.
Please accept my cordial invitation to visit to my blog regularly as I explain the back stories of my work and why I will continue to create these kinds of images for the rest of my life.
Richard
