On what to take pictures of: evoking isinglass

What should you take pictures of? Let your senses take you out in the world and lead you to a place that you may begin to photograph. Let the place draw you in to a certain perspective.

Perhaps it is my discipline from using film, but I rarely fire off a couple hundred photos of each composition and hope for the best. I’m drawn to a subject. Sometimes it is about an aspect of the subject or its spatial relation to the objects around it. Sometimes it’s colors in all their brilliance or subtlety. Exploring textures can lead you on just as the scene invited you in.

One May we rode down Poor Man’s Parkway. We parked along a sandy trail by the left side of the roadway. We walked on thru craggy pitch pines and came to a break with a small shallow pond to the left. The sky above was an opaque even white, and the air was still, suspended. I looked out over the pond and saw nothing remarkable yet the mood of the place held me.

A bee flew past my ear attracted to distant staggerbush flowers hung in a clump at the end of a woody branch. I took up my camera and followed the flight of the bee. I saw the bee working the bell flowers but I was getting a hash of gray lines and dark water in a haze as I focused. Intrigued, I drew the lens down, and found a luminous grainy sheen across the black water. I thought, “It’s happening again.”

A year before that one, we had driven down the Red Road. Heavy rains had flooded the dense shaded bogs just at the time that the trees released their pollen. Millions of pollen grains were floating suspended on the still surface of the water as the water levels receded. I photographed this aspect and was taken back to another time with my dad.

I was little yet. My dad was a carpenter and it was a few years after the ’62 storm that had washed so many structures to bits on Long Beach Island that was my childhood home. My dad had salvaged wood from that storm and bought some new supplies and built a detached garage for us next to the house. It was a special place filled with cigar boxes and jars of collected sea things of generations crammed on shelves next to many tools and machines and fishing poles.

I found a hard cloudy sheet in a pile. I held the material up towards the light streaming through the window and my Dad said, “It’s isinglass Ann-Marie. That’s what they used in cars before glass.” “Isinglass- neat name”, I said, and never forgot the name or visual texture of weathered old isinglass.

I was in college, a freshman at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. We had come to see the curious glass floor in the old library. I naively expected to look down on the floor below and see people walking between shelves laid out like a maze. Instead the floor was ground to an opaque surface. I swiped my foot across the floor and thought of isinglass.

Now I was back with my eye to the lens looking at the texture of the pond as the bees droned by. I was besotted by the swirling textures of the pollen and how the pond had been transformed. A breeze stirred my hair and something drifted into my line of sight in the lens. I refocused to see. It was a downy white feather borne on the breeze like a little shell boat. The surface of the water cupped it as it moved across the textured glassine surface. Another feather followed it.

Photos of drifting feathers with the hint of scuffed isinglass on dark waters were followed by a few photos of the working bee, and a species of wildflower that looked different from a specimen that I’d photographed before.

That is what to take photographs of. Life lived in the moment seen through the mind’s eye while using the camera as a tool to convey a mixture of your will and serendipity. A vision to share.

On following your feelings and the importance of negative space

When the sky lightens just before the dawn, this is an electric time of awakening and change. Subtle colors streak or frost the sky as the light comes on. Sounds carry, birds call, traffic moves in the distance. This dawn time has called to me a lot of late.

It has been hot and cold this autumn into December. Dampness clings in the morning and sometimes lingers well after sun up. Fog curls in tendrils as it creeps along the ground until the light of day burns it off.

.People ask me these questions. “When do you get the time to take pictures?”

“Where do you see these things that you take pictures of?”

My answer is if you are moved to photograph, the time is always now. If you want to take photographs, you need to take them. You need to pay attention to your feelings and how you react to what you see. If you feel a yearning, a desire, feel whimsy or awe that is the time to take a photograph. If you want to take pictures- do it.

Frost is the cheat that steals life. Frost is the touch of winter. Frost is the quick magic that leaves in the morning light.

I heeded the call to investigate Frost with my senses and my camera. I went out just as the sun broke over the tree tops. A warm golden orange light touched the blue, grey, and beige of the ice crystals, and the tree trunks, and the fallen leaves. I chose a macro lens and moved quickly. In the shadows the frost lingered. Where the sun touched, in minutes it was reduced to water droplets.

I took a macro lens only. I set the camera to single shot and opted against a flash because I wanted the effect of natural light and warm colors highlighting texture and interacting with the cool colors. I wanted the edges of fallen leaves, moss, branches. I found square crystals on the tips of mosses and on the underside of leaves along the veins. On the edges of the leaves I found long fragile crystalline tubes.

As I photographed fallen oak leaves on my hands and knees (wet knees), I was caught up in the layers, edges, stems, and intersections. I moved in closer and carefully framed the shots. I wanted to seek and identify my impressions of the moment.

Edge to edge with valleys in between. Ellipses and valleys. A stem picking up a line of stems. Veins with ice crystals at right angles that had begun falling in to melt. I varied the depth of field, and the exposure time, which was a challenge. The camera was hand held. The light was mostly low, or subtle, except where the new light threatened to turn to glare.

Edges and empty spaces are very important to a composition. They are the bones of a photograph. The pictures became a study about what wasn’t there as much as what was. Negative space is like the number 0. It is nothing, and yet it is a place holder that defines everything. As I photographed the play of depth and volume and sought to draw meaning through the interplay of light on the natural form, I realized something else.

My heart was singing. I was very happy. I felt the fullness of living in the moment. I was filled with awe at the science of the process, the changing of the seasons, and the placement of contradictions that ran through the miniature landscape like the inevitability of the racing sun.

On encountering a Luna moth at the nature/human interface

There is a point of juncture I encounter repeatedly living in a pinelands village at the edge of the preservation area in the New Jersey Pinelands. I call it the nature/human interface. I never know when it is coming. I don’t initiate it so it is always unexpected.

The experience can be tragic, funny, or delightful. It is always an intrusion on my day- inconvenient mostly, if you will, but that is the point. It shakes me out of my routine, my schedule, because I am compelled, always, to notice the natural world.

The nature/human interface occurs when the natural world makes an impression on you in the human one. In this case, a lime green Luna moth clung to the back porch railing of our cottage in the field one evening, at the edge of a light kept on to see son Greg home. He found the moth, and called to us, to come see a miracle.

An amazing sight to be sure, was the great Luna moth. The colors the moth sported were super saturated- green and carmine. The male’s antennae looked like a retro radar device or like twin yellow skeletons of tiny leaves. Body textures ranged from baby cheek smooth to a fringe of silky hair. The overall impression was alien and otherworldly.

It was also poignant. Consider that this moth had made a transformative journey to land on the corner of the house that evening. Its body had quested and rested and changed several times. Much of his life energy had been expended for this creature to have a final brief phase lived as a giant winged moth, to seek a mate, to begin the next generation of Lunas.

The ephemeral is always an incendiary muse to a sensitive person. After the presence of the moth triggered these impressions, I raced to grab the camera, a fixed lens Fuji.

I took several careful shots, and then spent an impatient length of time waiting for files to upload from the bulky memory card. As I reviewed the images I was very glad the evening had taken an unexpected turn.

The next day, off to work in the early morning, Stephen found the night visitor was still there. We were caught up in the morning rush, but looked out the window to check on the moth.

The breezes stirred off the pond. The moth’s wings lifted up and down in response. He still clung to the side of the porch and the wooden railing. I took my camera and went out during the time of day when you were supposed to shy away from using your digital camera, when the sun was higher and sparkling, a time of high contrast.

I took this picture. It was an odd image- not natural at all. You could not disguise the straight angles of the building- the human equation. I didn’t want to.  I liked the results.

I couldn’t group it with the prints I sold at fairs because it wasn’t “natural pine barrens” but it was very real and true to my senses and to the moment. I never forgot the experience or the photo and searched back to view it now and then.

In this photograph, the moth does seem poised at the edge, to become part of our world, while sunlight and depth of field transforms the railing posts and objects in the distance into a jumbled infinity point. It is both highly detailed and appropriately abstract.

Once, people pushed the hardships of the natural world away in the name of progress for a better, cleaner, safer human life. Now we crave and record the brief encounters that intrude on our busy lives. Is this human nature?

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