My day in Yellowstone last month was a long and varied one (see previous posts one, two, three). As I was leaving the park along the Madison river (almost the longest in the U.S.), I stopped occasionally to photograph the line of mountains on the opposite side of the valley.

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As I was doing this, I had in mind the images from the month before of the landscape by Tepee Creek (post here). I was hoping to catch some of the rhythm, perhaps even musicality, that I found in both places. I’ve nurtured such a poetic and mostly unrealized hope since I read about photographer Michael Smith’s epiphany with sonograms, like the one below of a hermit thrush. Smith was inspired by the beauty of such sonograms in creating some of his wide landscapes. (Though it’s worth pointing out that Smith’s wife, Paula Chamlee, in her own way, succeeded as well or better.)

That wide panoramic format is not only reminiscent of a musical score or narrative progression, but also fit well with the actual manner in which the line of mountains scrolled past me as I travelled. So I tried cropping a few of my images to half their original height, which makes them three times wider than they are tall. It was fun trying to decide what slice to take; sometimes more than one seemed to work.

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For comparison, below are the non-panoramic versions. I’m not sure I like these less, but there is a different feeling with them. The viewer wanders around more in the landscape, rather than taking a journey along a designated path.

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The same approach seems to work as well for a vertical orientation.

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As usual, I like to see how other artists have dealt with similar issues or used similar approaches. Lately, l’ve been looking at Bruce Marsh‘s landscape paintings, which are frequently in a panoramic format. Here are just a few from his Recent and Utah galleries (click to see larger versions):

Calf Creek II

Waterpocket Fold I

Mira Bay Hill

The experience of viewing a panoramic depends on size and viewing distance. If it’s large enough that you need to physically walk along it, that tends to enforce a linear trajectory, like reading a Chinese scroll. On the other hand, at that size there is also plenty to see via local roving about of the eye. Wandering with a drift.

One thing I noticed is that my panoramics here seem to be more about repeated patterns and major division lines, like the skyline. Especially images 2-4. Bruce’s paintings have more of a shape, a development or story to them, which I find very satisfying. Waterpocket Fold I and Mira Bay Hill even have evident chapters. My vertical does have more of a storyline, though I can’t decide whether it runs up or down.

Which direction seems more natural to you? In the case of the horizontal panoramics, do you read left-to-right, right-to-left, or start at some eye-catching point in the middle and work both ways? How about the vertical?

I just visited the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where I saw, among other things, a couple of Rothko paintings and a Barnett Newman. Maybe that’s why this installment of the continuing Yellowstone day is more colorful than previous ones (see parts one and two).

I stopped at a favorite spot along the upper Gibbon river, where it’s really just a creek. The snowbanks through which it meandered, diminishing daily with warming temperatures, appear to be only a meter deep. But to reach them from the road would have entailed passing across much deeper snow–a serious obstacle in spring when it is too soft to support me on either snowshoes or skis. Fortunately, there were a few gaps in the trees that afforded adequate views.

The images are similar to the natural abstracts I photographed elsewhere last year. Partly for that reason, I decided to do something different. With Messrs. Rothko and Newman in mind, I converted the black-to-white scale of values to a red-to-dark-blue scale.

Below are the black and white versions of the last two.

I am guilty, perhaps, of over-compensating, of going from too weak to too strong. But what’s a little exaggeration among friends? Don’t you ever over-do it on purpose, either for effect or experiment?

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The image above gives an idea of the view across from my lookout. But the scene really came alive for me after I narrowed the field of view to just a patch of the wall. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, I slipped into a mode where I was fascinated by the scene that could be viewed as both an allover abstract texture and a wealth of realistic detail of rocks, trees, avalanche tracks, etc.

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That may be too many examples, but they have variety in the proportions of different tones. The general composition of the scene, with its line of trees at the rim, reminded me of a Larry Poons drip painting entitled Old Dominion:

However, I find the drip texture in the lower half of the painting rather predictable and boring, whereas the canyonside pattern never loses its interesting mix of structure and randomness. The texture of Poons’ recent work (e.g. the 2007 painting Duetto shown below) makes a better match.

But just now, as I write, what I am really reminded of are the patterns generated by cellular automata, mathematical algorithms that can create both repetitive and unpredictable patterns, depending on the rules chosen to govern them.

These patterns evolve according to their rules in a downwards direction. No doubt analogies could be found to the evolution of the canyon wall, driven by the algorithms of erosion. To do so might, for some, detract from the natural beauty of the place. To me, it can only add to its mysteriously compelling power. It illuminates, in yet another way, how past time is present in what we see today.

The first is of Roaring Mountain. It doesn’t truly live up to its name from the nearby road, whence these images were made, but it can be pretty loud if you’re up quite close (as I happen to know from previous experience). The image below is just a detail view with a longer lens of an area contained in the image above. Because the sun was not too high, and I was facing east, the mountain appears very dark, though the sun brightens the steam rising from the many vents. If your vision of Hell is dark, perhaps this will serve.

Next stop down the road was the Norris geyser basin, which does not have any sizable and regular geysers. It was odd going ’round on the trails. Where there was boardwalk above the warm ground, it was covered in three feet of packed snow, unmelted by virtue of being held in the colder air. But most of the ground was not only clear of snow, but looked achingly hot in the sun, now higher and falling on flatter, wetter ground. Steam was around you as well as the subject, making the blasted trees all the more mysterious.

I was interested to notice that these two desolated regions, deprived of most visible life by the heat and the chemistry, came out near opposites in terms of tonality: too dark and too bright. Which is closer to your idea of devastation?

In contrast, waterfall results did not live up to last year’s at this season. In fact, I scarcely wanted to take photographs of the falls at all. But I did find another subject there…to appear in a future post.

I’m wondering: what makes you ready for a subject or not?

The thoughts were on Japanese aesthetics, and the abandoned series was a rather minimalistic one, captured in all of 15 minutes near the start of a Yellowstone outing during which I later busted my aging ski gear, cutting the trip short (I managed to limp out with frequent falls, discovering in the process that it’s not easy getting up from soft, deep snow when your skis are higher than you are).

I’ve long been attracted to Japanese aesthetic concepts, and I think I even grew up with the same book mentioned by Elatia Harris in her delightful essay (the cover looks very familiar and at least resembles one that was in the house). I think my own work is influenced by these concepts, in ways I’m slowly working out. What struck me most in the Harris essay was the idea of empty places in a composition, and I wanted to see if I could apply that in my current project Along Sourdough Trail.

But more on that in a future post. The images in the branch and shadow series shown here do not, in my mind, exemplify that compositional device, despite the large areas of nearly textureless snow. Rather, the train of thought was as follows: Starting from the thought of composition and considering some Japanese ink drawings in a book, I realized that empty space is much easier to achieve in that medium, where one can simply choose to put in only the desired elements. That’s much harder in photography (if one eschews image manipulation of that sort). I couldn’t find much blank space in my Sourdough Trail images, so I started scanning my entire photographic production, such as it is. I happened on the series here, and it immediately reminded me of the gnarled pines that often figure in Oriental pictures.

So I looked and fussed a bit, and realized I’d been doing it wrong before. I believe I was trying for darker shadows, which had the effect of giving too strong a texture to the sunlit snow, and was also hard to reconcile with branches that were more than black silhouettes. I decided to accept the lighter shadows, and found, this time, that I liked them like that. That was the key that opened the way.

At the end, I return to my hopes of explicitly trying out the compositional device of empty spaces. Have you ever been so taken with an idea or technique you just had to try it for yourself? Did it work out well? Did it evolve to become part of your personal style?

While reworking and sequencing my Winter Water project, I realized that, for a photographer as well as a physicist, snow, ice, and liquid are very distinct states of water, with distinct texture, tone, and shape. Perhaps because those photographs had no sky, I managed to completely forget about the vaporous state. Last Monday, however, I was vividly reminded of that glorious phase while biking through Yellowstone. Roads were clear but cars not yet allowed, so I had it almost to myself: only a half dozen other bikers all day, and a few service vehicles per hour. Fortunately I had a late start, so by the time I reached the Lower Falls it was well on in the afternoon. The westerly light left the falling water in shade while illuminating the mist.

The constantly changing shapes were mesmerizing and kept me occupied as long as I dared stay. There’s clearly a reason for the overused description wraithlike. It was unusually dynamic because it was very windy; in fact, I finally lost my hat (a baseball-style cap like June’s) down the canyon, and was in no way tempted to go after it.

Besides the mist, there were some intriguing crevasses that had opened up in the snow pack. The sharp tears in the smooth surface made a nice contrast with the hovering mist.

On the way back I stopped for a more peaceful image at a thawing lake. There seemed to be something a mystical about the neatly sliced mound of snow. I suspect I could be happy photographing nothing but the infinite forms of water.

Which leads me to think about the benefits of narrowing one’s focus, one’s effort. The nature of a project is such a focusing, but I frequently wonder if I don’t have too many projects in hand. They often conflict; I can’t do more than one thing at a time, and the time is so limited. Do you also feel pulled in too many directions artistically? Or, on the contrary, do you want to broaden your scope?

Posts from Sunil and from Jay have described their use of Photoshop manipulations. So I thought I’d show a bit of what happens — or could happen — to one of my images when I process it. To keep it simple, I’ll discuss a single photograph taken last weekend, a close view of a portion of frozen Lost Creek Falls in Yellowstone. Above is the “straight” version, i.e. how it looks when the simplest possible treatment with “no” adjustments is applied. The lighting from the partly blue sky gives it the bluish cast. My usual conversion to black and white, with contrast and brightness adjustment (“curves”) yields the result below. By “usual” I mean usual approach; the actual adjustments are different for each image.

I like the above for its abstract qualities, the interaction of dark and light tones. But, at the same time, it remains quite representational, clearly a picture of ice and snow. If I were to greatly increase the contrast, I would get a much more abstract composition of black and white, with only a little gray:

This immediately reminded me of Sunil’s recent drawing, especially if I rotate it:

On the other hand, lesser contrast gives an intermediate level of abstraction. Playing around with such versions may lead me to see an image in a new way.

But for now, I’ll go back to my usual and experiment with a bit of tinting, in this case reddish in the dark areas and bluish in the midtones. The version below is exaggerated in color saturation; I usually prefer a level of toning that you might not be aware of at all, but that would probably have an impact on your response to the image.

Traditional photographic “abstracts” are typically of quite small areas. The image above can be cropped in many ways; here’s one that emphasizes mostly the midtones and the shapes and texture of the ice.

Aside from the removal of the slight natural coloration or the slight tinting, the adjustments made are only in the choice of how dark or light to make different levels of brightness in the original scene. Nothing peculiar such as solarization (reversing part of the grayscale) was done. Of interest to me in this exercise is the possibility of controlling the level of abstraction in a simple way. This example may not have been the best, it’s simply one I was looking at very recently that seemed appropriate to experiment with. Do you have a preference for any particular version? Or ideas of other treatments that might appeal to you?